Friday 4 April 2014

Read in 2014 - 10: Mord im Herbst

In the 1990s, I discovered (probably by recommendation from my Mum) Henning Mankell's "Wallander"-novels, and made sure to read each and every one of them, plus one or two other books by the same author. A while ago, my Mum took out one from the library that we both had not read yet (it was published in German in 2012):


"Mord im Herbst" (this would translate "Murder in Autumn" in English, but the Swedish original is "Händelse om hösten") is a short novel of only 120 pages, and was originally written for a specific purpose: Some clever people in the Netherlands declared a particular month to be "Thriller Month" and had the idea that every customer who buys a work of crime fiction or mystery during that month gets an additional book for free. They approached Mr. Mankell with the idea, and he wrote this book because he thought it a good way to win people for reading.

Many years later, the book became the basis for a BBC film in which Kenneth Branagh plays Kurt Wallander. I did not see this film, and so I did not know more about the book than what it says on the back cover. But just knowing it was part of the Wallander series was enough for me to want to read it, and I was not disappointed!

Kurt Wallander has reached a point where he just doesn't feel like he wants to go on like this for much longer - both in his personal life (long divorced, with his adult daughter sharing a flat with him) and in his career. He is a good detective, but feels more and more listless about his work, and finds it hard to cope with some of the changes he observes in modern society in general, and Sweden in particular.

When a colleague tells him about an elderly relative of his wife's who has moved into a home and wants to sell his small house in the country, Wallander thinks this could be just what he needs. He drives out to look at the house and seriously considers buying it, until he (literally) stumbles across something half-buried under the leaves in the back garden: the bones of a human hand.

Of course, all thoughts of buying the place disappear - what matters to Wallander now is to find out who the person buried in the garden was, and how (and when) he or she died.

More than once, inquiries seem to have reached a dead end, and Wallander is almost ready to give up - only to come across something else to shed light on the events of many years back.

In the end, Wallander solves the mystery. But does he also find answers to the questions he is asking himself about his own life?

I very much enjoyed this. There was no overload of gruesome detail, and no improbable pseudo-psychological explanations, but a good mixture of facts and feelings. I can not read Swedish, so I have never read any of Mankell's works in their original language, but the German translation looks good to me, as far as I can tell. There were only two or three moments in the book when I could tell this was translated more or less directly from the original, because a native German writer would never express a particular idea like this, but none of it took away from the suspense and pleasure of reading.

Something I appreciated particularly about this book is what comes after the end of the story: in an epilogue of more than 10 pages, Mankell tells the story of how it all began with him and Wallander, his most popular creation. I always like to know some background of a story, which is inseparable from some information about the author. This is particularly interesting, because the author wrote it himself, and not some journalist or literary reviewer who collected quotes and blurbs and documents about the author (which is of course inevitable if the person one writes about has long been dead).

If you have never read a "Wallander" book, I very much recommend them. If you have, I would like to know what you think of them.

20 comments:

  1. What a good idea - to write a book to draw people in to reading! wow. I have never read any of the books so willl look out for them. I think translators have to be very skilled to deal with ideas that wouldn't be expressed in the language being translated into. What (out of interest) were the concepts that didn't translate into German? Not that my German is remotely good enough to appreciate the use of language for myself, but just interested in the concepts themselves.

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    1. Hmm... I knew I should have taken notes while I was reading the book, Jenny! I'm afraid I can not repeat the exact words that made me aware of reading a translation. One had to do with one person asking another person about their impression of a place, and the answer they gave was different to the way a German would phrase it. Sorry I can not be more precise; it is no use of me going through the book again, since I can't remember how far into the story I read that.

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  2. I am a Wallander fan, too, but have not read this book. Our public TV station showed the series and that's how I discovered it a few years ago. There is also a film series done in Sweden with English subtitles which I like just as much as the British one though they are rather different. I hope my library has this book.

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    1. I have not seen any of the Wallander films or series yet; you know what it can be like when you first knew the book and then are sometimes disappointed with how it has been transferred to film. But I trust your recommendation on that and will try to find some of it to watch online.

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  3. I will need to be patient. In English the title is An Event in Autumn, but it will not be putlished until August here in the US and not until September in the UK (which surprises me because they usually have European books sooner than we do).The US edition says it will be 224 pages......There is something confusing about all of this. Also the review in the US says that he has bought the house in the country.

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    1. The total number of pages of the German book is more than 120, too, because of the epilogue, plus several pages with introductions to all the Wallander books. But 224 seems quite a lot!
      Also, Wallander definitely does NOT buy the house in the German edition, but he WANTS to buy it at first. Maybe the person who wrote the review only did a quick scan of the book and didn't read it thoroughly.

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    2. I don't know.........I've read reviews in two countries, (or three?) different ones, and they are all saying he owns the house. I wonder if it was altered at some point. But I'll know in August!

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    3. Maybe he re-wrote the story after it was televised, see my reply to your comment below.

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  4. I have to admit (being Swedish! - as you know, Meike, but perhaps not all your readers do...) I never really took to the Wallander books (or films) myself, although I know they have got quite an international reputation. I'm not sure now which of them I read or tried to read in the past. I think I found them too heavy and bleak, somehow. - The Mankell book I remember best is not a Wallander one but has another detective as main character. The title in English is The Return of the Dancing Master. The plot has to do with Neo-Nazism. But the reason I remember that one might also have something to do with the police officer in that book coming from the town where I live; while in the film version they changed that to a suburb to Stockholm. The main plot takes place elsewhere, so I guess it was just more convenient for them to film the few "home" scenes in Stockholm. But to me it made the whole story seem less original. I'll check out if can find Händelse om hösten as library audio book.

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    1. Strange. I can't find it in the library catalogue at all (not as printed book either). Nor is it listed in the bibliography on the Swedish Mankell Wiki page.

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    2. Maybe it has to do with publishing rights, Monica. According to Mankell's own epilogue, the book was first published in the Netherlands, and in 2012, in Germany.

      I have read "The Return of the Dancing Master" and remember it as very dark indeed.

      Somehow, the fact that the Wallander series is set in Sweden (with some changes of location due to Wallander travelling) has never been decisive in me liking them or not. It does make some details in the books unique, and you can tell the stories are not set in Germany or the UK or elsewhere, but that's about it.

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    4. Yes I agree, there is nothing cheerful about that book either. It just happened to be the only title by Mankell that popped to mind for me where I could actually recall some of the plot. I had a couple of more titles on my list of books read (keeping a record that goes back about ten years) but with those the title was not enough to bring back to memory what they were about!

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  5. I just read this at the Henning Mankell website - http://henningmankell.com/films/bbc/an-event-in-autumn/
    Is this another different story with a similar title? Or what?

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    1. It is a different story, Kristi. In the book, Wallander does not move from his flat in town, he does not have a girlfriend, he does not have a dog, he does not find a girl's body that has been missing 10 years, and there are no body parts washed up on the shore.
      But in the epiloge of this book, Mankell says that it became the basis for a BBC film in which Kenneth Branagh plays Kurt Wallander. So I guess that is the BBC production on the website, and the story has been altered to make it more "televisable".

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    2. Aha! Here is something from the website:
      "The third season was broadcasted by the BBC in the summer of 2012, contains the episode An Event in Autumn, based on the Wallander novel The Grave that until now has only been exclusively published in the Netherlands."

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    3. That makes sense. Thank you! Last night I found that the movie is available to me on netflix and am halfway through watching it.

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    4. I haven't had time yet to find out which ones (if any) of the movies I have easy access to here, but I am definitely going to look for them eventually.

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  6. I have never heard of the author but your review sounds accurate and honest. And thus the book appealing.

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    1. My reviews are always honest - and I hope they are always accurate, too, although sometimes several days pass between having finished a book and writng up the review. On the main details, though, I don't think I am so far off as to give wrong information.

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