Kurt Wallander book 3: My first Wallander, and not realising that this would be the start of my affection for this series despite the following one sentence review I gave this, when I read it: 'Kurt Wallander investigates the random killing of a 'perfect' wife; a killing that is which is just the start of a plot to kill a non-Swedish world leader! A good read, but very close to being over the top in regards to the targeted world leader. So initially a Two Star 5 out of 12, upgraded to 7 out of 12, Three Stars after a reread just over a year later in 2010.

2010 and 2009 readcrime-fiction nordic-noir128 s Orsodimondo [part time reader at the moment]2,287 2,159

L’UOMO INQUIETO



L’ispettore Kurt Wallander è il protagonista di questa serie di romanzi firmata da Henning Mankell, di cui questa è la terza storia.
Non so bene perché ho cominciato da questa, se girava per casa o se avevo letto che era il migliore.
Fatto sta che io e Mankell ci siamo conosciuti con questo romanzo e mai più rincontrati.

Il perché è presto detto: l’ho trovato sufficiente, diligente, non brillante, abbastanza standard, non meritevole d’approfondimento, di insistere.
Non so bene come quando e perché, ma credo che anche nella letteratura di genere thriller poliziesco sia successo quello che è successo con la settima arte: presumo sia un mix di gusto e di sviluppo tecnico che consente cose che prima erano difficili o impossibili, basta vedere come viene composta un’inquadratura da una ventina d’anni a questa parte per sentire se in un film o serie tv il tempo ha fatto danni.
Altrettanto mi pare sia successo con la letteratura poliziesca, thriller. A me verrebbe da pensare che dopo la trilogia Millennium non si può più scrivere come si faceva prima.



Ora, il romanzo di Mankell anticipa il primo scritto da Stieg Larsson di una dozzina d’anni (1993 questo, 2005 Uomini che odiano le donne). Elemento che giustificherebbe il suo essere così solidamente nel solco antico, senza scossoni.
Ma evidentemente il mio gusto è cambiato e ormai mal si adatta anche a un romanzo che non è certo un brutto poliziesco, tutt’altro. È solo, come ho detto, un po’ vecchiotto nello stile, nella struttura, nello svolgimento, nella dinamica.
Avrei dovuto leggerlo quando è uscito, lo avrei trovato attuale e interessante. Perché un aspetto centrale del caso che deve risolvere l’ispettore svedese è strettamente legato alla storia del Sudafrica, all’apartheid, alla fine del “regno” dei bianchi, all’African National Congress che sta per prendere il potere, Mandela viene rilasciato, lascia la prigione dove l’hanno tenuto per ventisette anni, e quattro anni dopo diventa il primo presidente nero del Sudafrica. E sarà l’unico a dire qualcosa di intelligente sul genocidio dei tutsi.



Dopo un prologo ambientato in Sudafrica nel 1918, si salta in Svezia al 1992, per poi tornare in Sudafrica. Wallander indaga su un omicidio: è stato ritrovato il corpo di una donna, un’agente immobiliare di confessione metodista, una donna normale, moglie e madre di famiglia, è stata uccisa e gettata nel fondo di un pozzo.
Ma c’è anche un incendio dal quale emerge un dito nero: nero non perché bruciato, ma perché appartiene a persona dalla pelle nera.
E certo non poteva mancare un ex agente del KGB, che ci sta sempre bene.



Come si conviene, il poliziotto è tormentato, in questo caso malinconico, inquieto come dice anche il titolo dell’undicesimo romanzo della serie (di dodici, per ora). È solo, ma con una figlia. L’indagine che deve risolvere si snoda in modo ‘classico’: missing person, indagini su eventuali precedenti e passato, ritrovamento, prime ipotesi…
Mankell per renderla più ghiotta abbina una situazione politica internazionale, un evento che entrerà nella storia. Solo che dalla Svezia al Sudafrica sembra esserci qualcosa di tirato per i capelli, come si suole dire. Qualcosa di un po’ artefatto.



Non ho visto il film svedese. Mi è bastato vedere il pastrocchio che hanno combinato con Millennium.
Però ho visto alcuni episodi della serie TV con Kenneth Branagh, qui al suo meglio, finalmente nel ruolo giusto, in abiti che gli vanno a pennello: bravo, giusto, la serie con bella fotografia e giusta intensità.
Ma anche questa, derivando dai romanzi di Mankell, dopo un po’ si rivela troppo classica, con casi da risolvere un po’ sciapi, senza brio.

giallo-thriller-poliziesco svezia107 s Jeffrey KeetenAuthor 6 books250k

”A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child has to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization.”


Kenneth Branagh is Wallander/

When a real estate agent turns up missing, Kurt Wallander of the Ystad Swedish police catches the case along with most of the department. They have a general idea of where she went missing, but they have few clues as to what has caused her disappearance. She and her husband are very religious, and Wallander finds himself thinking ”what it feels to believe in God.”

As we learn more about Wallander, we realize there are good reasons why he is estranged from his ex-wife, his daughter, and his father. We also start to understand the frustrations that the other cops have working with him. He is bloody brilliant most of the time between those other moments of complete befuddlement. He has a single minded purpose in tracking down a missing woman, a killer, or solving a puzzle of a crime. If I were missing, I’d want Kurt Wallander trying to find me. He devotes himself so exclusively to a case that he has little time for those around him, or eating, or sleeping. He makes these leaps in logic that baffle his fellow police officers, but what they don’t realize is that while they are...having a life...Wallander is still ticking over the aspects of the case.

Wallander makes a breakthrough in the case, and this is one of those moments when time is of the essence, and he takes the day off to be with his daughter. He is trying to do the right thing, attempting to completely divorce himself from the case to pay attention to his daughter, but it turns into a missed opportunity. I, too, was frustrated with Wallander at this point.

They find the severed finger of a black man at the scene where they believe the real estate agent went missing. This turns out to be a digit that once belonged to Victor Mabatha of South Africa. This book came out in 1993 in Sweden and 1998 in an English translation, so apartheid was still fresh in everyone’s mind. During the course of the plot, Wallander and Mabatha intersect, and Victor gives this impassioned explanation for why he is the way he is, which is the quote I chose to lead this review with.

So a missing person case becomes a nonsensical international case somehow involving a planned assassination in South Africa. Why are these people in Sweden? Henning Mankill adds some additional spice to the plot with a demented, immoral Russian named Konovalenko. He runs the sole of his boot down the face of a person he just killed to close their eyes. Somehow that made me shudder more than the actual killing of the person. Maybe because we all deserve some semblance of reverence in death.

I would be a very considerate serial killer.

I found it interesting that Mankill takes us from the mind of Wallander to the political musings of several politicians in South Africa. We start to discover the extent of the conspiracy. The question is, can Wallander put the pieces together in time to obstruct a world tragedy?


That looks the face of a man who put two and two together and got sixteen.

I hope most of you have had the chance to watch the spot on performance by Kenneth Branagh in the 12 episode BBC TV series. They scrambled the order of the books, which required some changes to the backstory, but not enough to bother me. I have a set of the Wallander books and plan to read them all. I set them aside to watch the TV series, which does break a half a dozen Keeten reading rules, but certainly seeing the TV episode of this book did not detract from my reading enjoyment. A story well told can be experienced many times with new insights with each retelling.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie , visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeetenafrica nordic-noir119 s James ThaneAuthor 9 books6,987

This, the third entry in Henning Mankell's series featuring Swedish Inspector Kurt Wallander, appeared in 1993, and is a very ambitious effort--in the end, perhaps overly so. The story starts simply enough with the murder of a real estate agent who finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it quickly spins into a major international conspiracy involving a plot by die-hard South African whites to assassinate Nelson Mandela, shortly after he was released from prison.

The plotters have recruited a black assassin to murder Mandela, hoping to spark a race war that will enable the whites to continue to control the country. They've recruited a former KGB agent to train the assassin and have concluded for some reason that the training would best be done secretly in Sweden, which is how Wallander's murder investigation becomes mixed up with the conspiracy.

The story is told from several different points of view and jumps back and forth from Sweden to South Africa. It's quite a long and complicated book with a fairly large cast of characters. In many ways it's a very intriguing story, somewhat along the lines of The Day of the Jackal. But it drags on a bit too long, and it's hard for Mankell to maintain the suspense throughout the book.

I'm rating this three stars rather than four because over the course of the story, Kurt Wallander occasionally takes actions that make no sense. The maverick cop who follows his own trail and sometimes takes shortcuts while ignoring the orders of his superiors is a staple of crime fiction, and most of us love these characters, at least as long as what they are doing seems logical. In these case though, on at least a couple of occasions, Wallander does things that seem totally illogical and which leave the reader, as well as his colleagues, wondering if he might be having some sort of mental breakdown.

Still, in all, I enjoyed the story and I'm looking forward to the next installment.crime-fiction henning-mankell kurt-wallander48 s Zain1,611 193

Thrilling!

A missing woman leads to a brutal murder, which leads to a conspiracy of murder, all the way to apartheid South Africa.

Wallander is racing the clock, as he focuses on cleaning up the crime. But he is running out of time.

Five stars. ??????????nordic read-2019 series ...more43 s Mark1,133 148

I'm only reviewing this one book, but I've read the entire detective series by Henning Mankell, and I am a huge fan. I first became aware of him after returning from a trip to Sweden in 2004, and then discovered he has a cult following in Europe and is beginning to have one in the U.S. He has written all kinds of novels, but I've focused on his mystery series featuring Swedish police officer Kurt Wallander. The Wallander stories are good mysteries in their own right, but what commends the books is Wallander's struggles to live life as a middle-aged detective whose personal life is always under strain. His wife has left him, his daughter has a spotty relationship with him, he finds another woman in his life but isn't able to commit, he constantly thinks about getting out of the police force. It's that human-ness, and what I think of as a Swedish pessimism, that makes this series so intoxicating. Also, because Mankell the author lives about half of every year in Mozambique, several of his plots also have fascinating explorations of problems in Africa. I highly recommend this series.mystery42 s Lyn1,917 16.9k

Kurt Wallander and South Africa.

One of Sweden’s most recognized fiction crime fighters gets caught up in international espionage in this 1993 post cold war thriller that has half of it’s action involving the end of Apartheid in South Africa as the reigning Boers free Nelson Mandela and all hell breaks lose.

What keeps this moving and what holds it together is author Henning Mankell’s excellent writing (and to be fair Laurie Thompson’s translation) and his ability to convey a subtle but unsettling sense of disquietude in the Swedish coast town of Ystad.

What slows this down is Mankell’s overly ambitious design. In a medium sized city (Ystad is around 30k population) an assassination attempt is uncovered following a murder. This connection to South Africa is both thrilling and stretched out – leading this reader to believe that Mankell uses his Wallander pulpit as a vehicle to talk about South Africa. Which is fine, it just spreads thin what would otherwise be a pretty good whodunit.

This reminded me of Jo Nesbo’s 2000 publication The Redbreast of his Norwegian detective Harry Hole in the international intrigue, but unfortunately also Nesbo’s 2002 follow up Nemesis in that both writer’s felt the compulsion to throw everything but the kitchen sink in to an already busy mix.

This also made me wonder about Ystad. The map shows this as extreme southernmost Sweden and of medium size. I looked up some comparable United States and Tennessee towns of the same size to give me an idea about the kind of place Mankell describes. These are some very modest places. Towns Oak Park Michegan, Lebanon Tennessee and Monterey California. What is Mankell’s inspiration for such a setting?

And what about Wallander? Hasn’t the whole dark and wounded, brooding and philosophical, sloppy outside of a razor mind kitsch been done before? Well, sure, but Mankell does it very well in the Scandinavian crime fiction.

So, not his best but still very good and worth another visit to sunny Ystad.

27 s June287 1 follower

Henning, dude, if you want to write a book about how it sucks to live in racist South Africa, I'm all for it. But I picked up this book because it was a KURT WALLANDER mystery. Wallander--the SWEDISH policeman, for christsakes...is he really going to foil a plot to assassinate Nelson Mandela? I want to read about SWEDISH police doing SWEDISH things solving murders in SKANE, drinking coffee and eating sandwiches. If I wanted to read the Ladies Detective series, I would have joined a book club...25 s Dave SchaafsmaAuthor 6 books31.8k

This is the third and by far most ambitious of Henning Mankell’s Wallander series. I’ll call it 3.75, some points in favor because of the ambition, and some points against because of the ambitihon, but on the whole I think it is very good. I haven’t read anything about what Mankell was trying to do in this series, but this is how I see it: He is trying to see if his global and social justice interests can merge with te typical tropes of the police procedural/mystery/thriller novel. Serious global issues merge with entertainment.

In the first book, Faceless Killers, we establish that Kurt Wallander is the Everyman sad sack aging detective--wife leaves him, daughter’s estranged from him, he’s drinking more, gaining weight, generally sad and grumpy to fit the isolated small town Swedish landscape where he is a middling detective. Mankell has deep commitments to social justice--immigration, racism, and so one--so he brings these issues to the small town and the small town cop, who initially seems politically disnterested. They/we must wake up to the changing nature of the world, Mankell seems to be saying.

In this third book a woman is brutally slain and this is already head-shakingly disturbing to the small town and even the cops. Who would want to do this?! What is the world coming to? Well, there are two basic threads in this novel, one that connects this seemingly random small town murder with a plot to kill a major political figure in South Africa, in 1992, as Apartheid slowly collapses, with pushback against the ANC from Afrikaaners still in power. Along the way, Wallander’s father and daughter are endangered (somewhat several of Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole novels), and the family is pulled into the intrigue. But small town cop Wallander has an opportunity to impact world events by doing the right thing. This is the up side of Mankell’s ambition in his detective fiction novel, that he injects real world global politics into a crime fiction, a whodunnit, and it basically works.

There are some much slower parts (the down side of the ambition) than we typically see in crime fiction, as we examine the injustices of Apartheid in South Africa, through quite a bit of talk, though this is not a tale of simple good vs evil, blacks--good and whites--evil; things are more complicated than that. And Wallander is roughly half of this story, as we go back and forth between Sweden and South Africa. There’s a big finish worthy of a thriller, and this works well, with justice coming satisfyingly to several characters. I didn’t really resonate with the central image of the white lioness as somehow symbolic of South Africa, but I thought the work was well done, on the whole.mystery-detective-thriller nordic-noir21 s Heba1,146 2,635 Read

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