The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas

The Chalk Circle Man is the fifth of Fred Vargas's Commissaire Adamsberg novels to be translated into English, but it's actually the first in the series. Readers like me who are already committed fans will relish the opportunity it offers to explore Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg's origins—the beginning of his career on the Paris police force, the evolution of his partnership with his favourite inspector (and mine), Adrien Danglard, and some background to his one-time relationship with the elusive Camille and its continuing effect on him. And those new to the series have the option now of beginning at the beginning and reading the books in order.

Commissaire Adamsberg is a police detective like no other. Of course there are many fictional detectives who use their intuition, but Adamsberg is all intuition. Rather than doggedly searching for answers, it's as if he simply drifts about until answers find him. You wouldn't think this would be a popular approach with the investigators who find themselves working under his supervision. But Adamsberg's reputation precedes him, and within weeks of his arrival in Paris they witness some of his successes first hand, so they soon begin to embrace the man and his methods. When the mysterious blue chalk circles that have been appearing overnight in various districts of Paris prove to be not a prank but something more sinister, as Adamsberg alone suspected, and he and his team go out to investigate, we see this gradual embrace through the eyes of the more methodical and conventional Danglard:

Adamsberg had spoken without haste. It was the first time Danglard had seen him giving orders. He did so without seeming either self-important or apologetic about doing so. It was an odd thing, but all the inspectors seemed to be becoming porous, letting Adamsberg's way of behaving seep into them. It was like being caught in the rain when your jacket can't help absorbing water. The inspectors were becoming damp and without realizing it they were imitating Adamsberg; their movements were slower, they smiled more, and were absent-minded. The one most altered was Castreau, who as a rule liked the gruff, manly responses their previous commissaire had expected of them, the military commands barked out without any superfluous commentary, the ban on looking to either side, the slamming of car doors, the fists clenched in the tunic pockets. Today, Danglard hardly recognized Castreau. He was leafing through the victim’s pocket diary, quietly reading out sentences to himself, glancing attentively at Adamsberg, apparently considering every word.

Though the other police officers provide something of a contrast to Adamsberg, he is by no means the only eccentric character in the novels. The whole of Vargas's fictional Paris is a bit off kilter, full of odd characters and esoteric detail. In The Chalk Circle Man, prime among them is Mathilde Forestier, a famous oceanographer, who lives her life according to a rather original theory of the breakdown of the days of the week, and spends a good bit of her time tailing strangers around the city taking notes on their activities. She is drawn into the plot when one of the subjects of her scrutiny turns out to be the chalk circle man of the title.

I thoroughly enjoyed all of this, but I have to concede that The Chalk Circle Man is not as strong as subsequent books in the series. It suffers a bit from the first-in-a-series tendency to fill in the background with a lot of description, and I would rather simply watch Adamsberg's unorthodox methods of detection in action than be told about how his mind works. Also, although, given those unorthodox methods, logic and believability are rarely central concerns, the plot doesn't come together as convincingly or conclude as satisfyingly as in later installments. In fact, I'd say there's a gaping hole in the resolution of the central mystery. Nevertheless, I still recommend it. Even when not at her best, Vargas is still awfully good. And wherever you enter into it, her Comissaire Adamsberg novels comprise an excellent series that is well worth reading.

Library Loot 5: A Decidedly Swedish Flavour

This summer, I'll be visiting Sweden for the first time and, as I like to make at least a preliminary acquaintance with the literature of a new destination before embarking, Swedish titles are beginning to dominate my reading list.

I'm already quite well versed in Swedish crime fiction, and on the children's literature front, Astrid Lindgren is an old friend. But I want to venture into other literary realms as well and I thought that Literature in Sweden, a slim paperback reference volume, would give me some ideas. Here's the back cover description: "What's going on in contemporary Swedish literature? Are there any clearly marked trends or tendencies? What themes interest Swedish authors? This book presents a selection of contemporary authors with the emphasis on the 1980s and 1990s. In separate sections, three writers give their view of contemporary poetry, prose and drama."

I also consulted an online survey of Swedish literature that delves further back, and the name that jumped out at me was Hjalmar Söderberg. He's described as "one of Scandinavia's most prominent modernist authors" and the back covers of his novels are peppered with such words as stark, brooding, bitter, and tragic. How could I resist? I've chosen The Serious Game ("Set against the bustling cafés, newspaper offices, parks and hotels of Sweden’s capital city at the turn of the last century, The Serious Game tells a compelling story of love and delusion, passion and despair.") and Doctor Glas ("A masterpiece of enduring power, Doctor Glas confronts a chilling moral quandary with gripping intensity.") as my entry points into Söderberg’s oeuvre.

Back in the realm of crime fiction, I also picked up Kerstin Ekman's Blackwater ("On Midsummer's Eve, 1974, Annie Raft arrives with her daughter Mia in the remote Swedish village of Blackwater to join her lover Dan on a nearby commune. On her journey through the deep forest, she stumbles upon the site of a grisly double murder—a crime that will remain unsolved for nearly twenty years, until the day Annie sees her grown daughter in the arms of one man she glimpsed in the forest that eerie midsummer night."). This was the first of Ekman's novels to be translated into English (in 1995) but by then she had already been well known and her books much lauded in Sweden for decades, and I'm curious to check out some of her earlier books as well.

And finally, another crime novel: Camilla Läckberg's The Ice Princess, and I've ordered a copy of the follow-up, The Preacher, as well. Läckberg was already on my radar, but it was Dorte H. who rocketed her books back to the top of my TBR list when she mentioned that Läckberg is another Swedish writer who has referenced an Astrid Lindgren character (Ronia this time) in a contemporary crime novel.

I've got plenty to work with for the moment, but I would be very happy to receive recommendations of other Swedish writers whose work I ought to include in my admittedly sketchy and idiosyncratic crash course in Swedish literature in the months leading up to my trip.

The Trick of It

I generally like to sort out my feelings about a book before posting on it here, but Michael Frayn's The Trick of It is due back at the library today, so this time you're getting my immediate response in all its ambivalence.

I found the premise of the novel irresistible: a young scholar meets and marries the novelist whose work is the primary focus of his academic career. This seemed to me a very clever way to explore the vexing interrelationship between fiction, biography, and literary criticism. And it was. But I'm not sure that the book ever transcended its premise to become something more than a clever idea.

Part of the problem may have been the structure of the novel. It takes the form of a series of letters from the narrator, who teaches at a university in England, to a friend and fellow literary scholar in Australia. So we are privy only to the narrator's version of events, indeed, only to the particular version of events he crafts for the benefit of a friend who he clearly seeks to impress and entertain. We never get an independent glimpse of JL, his novelist wife, or of their interaction with one another. As a consequence, neither she nor the narrator ever became fully realized characters in my mind.

But then—and here's where I begin to vacillate wildly in my assessment—perhaps that is as it should be. For if they were fully fleshed out, then the focus would be on them as individual characters and on their particular relationship rather than on the broader categories of literary scholar/critic and novelist which would surely dull the novel's satiric edge. Also, that the narrator's story of his relationship with JL is abroad in the world in the form of letters becomes important later when the spectre of biography arises.

Another facet of the book which could be regarded as a strength or a weakness is the humour. It's very funny at some points. By way of illustration let me offer up a paragraph that follows upon the initial seduction:

No, I shall certainly not post this letter. Now I know that you will never read it I can be completely frank. Because the terrible truth is this. It seemed to me, even as I broke it, that I had discovered a new taboo governing mankind, one which must have existed unknown since the dawn of time until I stumbled upon it yesterday evening — a taboo against intercourse with an author on your own reading-list. New to me, at any rate. I never heard lewd references to it in the changing-rooms at school, not even from Tony Gleat, who made obscene references to his own and other people's mothers. I have never come across it in Sophocles or the News of the World. This is worse than the love that dare not speak its name; this is the love that doesn't even have a name to speak. Somewhere in common or statute law there must be a distant parallel; illicit sexual relations with a reigning monarch, perhaps. Is it a taboo that you have ever come across? You have probably considered it no more than I ever did. Less, in fact, since your chances of sharing a glass of water late at night on a narrow guest-room bed with Goethe or Mörike down there in Melbourne are so remote. But when you think about it (as you suddenly are at this present moment, surely), when you think of your hand (yes, that hand, it doesn’t matter which — either of the hands with which you were so recently typing Goethe’s name in reverential tones) — feeling the irresistible smoothness of his knee … now sliding under his skirt … now reaching the lace trimming along the edge of his knickers ... then at once you feel (am I right?) the authentic shock of sheer moral horror.

But at other points the humour is so strongly reminiscent of such classic comic novels as Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim or David Lodge's Changing Places, that I found myself checking the publication date thinking it must be from an earlier decade. Now Frayn's characters are literary fellows of course, and a couple of times the narrator even refers to himself as "a comic novel." So perhaps these echoes are deliberate homage. Then again, perhaps they're just overly derivative.

So, I'm left undecided on the overall merit of The Trick of It. Nevertheless, I don't hesitate to recommend it. I found it very funny at some points, as I said, and surprisingly disturbing at others, but consistently thought provoking throughout.

Meeting Martin Beck

      

With their Martin Beck novels—a ten book police procedural series published between 1965 and 1975— husband and wife writing team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö have been credited as the originators of contemporary Swedish crime fiction. Of course Sjöwall and Wahlöö weren't first to this genre in Sweden. But apparently their books marked a decisive shift from the British-style puzzle mysteries then predominant to a new kind of detective story in which the characters were more complexly human, the police work more realistic, and the plots focused on, and illuminating of, current social problems.

Having just read Roseanna, the first in the series, I can already understand why Sjöwall and Wahlöö hold this exalted status. Although, as noted above, it was originally published in 1965, it feels like an altogether modern read. It's clear from the details that it's set in another time—the men wear hats, everybody smokes everywhere, transatlantic communication is slow, and a good bit of the final resolution of the case involves waiting next to a telephone. But Martin Beck, the melancholic police inspector at the centre of the action, could easily have walked out of a 21st century crime novel. Of course, that familiarity is a testament to his influence and he's no less intriguing a character for it.

Interestingly, in an introduction to the edition that I read, Henning Mankell praises Beck and the books in which he features for the same qualities that I praised Mankell's Kurt Wallander series when I first encountered it. Mankell emphasizes Martin Beck's humanness and fallibility:

I haven't counted how many times Martin Beck feels sick in Roseanna, but it happens a lot. He can't eat breakfast because he doesn't feel good. Cigarettes and train rides make him sick. His personal life also makes him ill. In Roseanna the homicide investigators emerge as ordinary human beings. There is nothing at all heroic about them. They do their job, and they get sick.

He also remarks on the innovative use of time in Roseanna:

...let me say that it's probably one of the first crime novels in which time clearly plays a major role. There are long periods during which nothing happens, when the investigation into who murdered Roseanna and threw her into the Göta Canal seems to be standing still; then it may move a few centimetres before coming to a halt again. It's quite clear that for Martin Beck and his colleagues, the passage of time is both frustrating and a necessary evil.

This facet of the book really struck me as well. It seems to me a very difficult thing to convey the intermittent, slow, sometimes plodding quality of investigative work in realistic fashion without generating a slow and plodding reading experience. Yet Sjöwall and Wahlöö have accomplished the former here in a taut, gripping novel of little more than 200 pages.

Roseanna proved an excellent read, and I can't wait to begin on the other nine books in the series. I borrowed Roseanna from the library, but I've resolved to buy myself a copy of it and of the rest of the series as well, as I'm already quite sure that these are books that I'm going to want to own. Happily they all are, or soon will be, readily available in lovely paperback reprint Vintage Crime/Black Lizard editions, complete with introductions by such luminaries as Mankell (quoted above), Val McDermid, and Jo Nesbø.

Wallander on TV

I'm stealing a moment from my end-of-term grading to pop in here and give a quick heads up to fellow North American fans of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels. The BBC television series based on the books is making its debut on this side of the Atlantic this month on PBS, with the first episode set to air this Sunday, May 10th. The series features Kenneth Branagh in the role of Wallander, something which I confess I'm rather dubious about. I admire Branagh's acting, but he's such a familiar face that I fear I won't be able to forget he's Branagh and embrace him as Wallander. Still, I've heard nothing but praise for the series since it originally aired in Britain late last year. And I gather that it was actually filmed in Ystad, Sweden, so it will be a treat to get a proper look at the landscape Mankell brings so vividly to life in the books. Check your local listings and tune in with me so that we can compare notes afterward! Click here for more information.

Library Loot 4

I stopped in at the library on my way home today and found an embarrassment of riches awaiting me on the hold shelf.

The War Against Miss Winter by Kathryn Miller Haines was a LibraryThing recommendation, prompted, I'm sure, by my recent addition of the latest Maisie Dobbs to my collection. It's the first book in a mystery series featuring Rosie Winter, an aspiring actress in WWII era New York, who takes on a part time job at a detective agency and finds herself involved in a more dramatic bit of sleuthing than she anticipated. In a cover blurb, Rhys Bowen declares: "Haines perfectly captures the feel, sights, and sounds of New York in the 1940s." It sounds promising, does it not?

When I clicked over to Amazon in search of a description of the aforementioned Miss Winter book, another recommendation in a similar vein popped up. Apparently those who purchased it sometimes also purchased Million Dollar Baby by Amy Patricia Meade. The latter is the first instalment in yet another historical mystery series featuring a spirited female sleuth, one Marjorie McClelland, a young mystery writer who begins to find her life imitating her art in 1930s Connecticut. Definitely worth a look, I thought.

Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism by George Grant is one of those books that I've heard so much about that I feel as if I've read it even though I haven't. But an excerpt from Michael Ignatieff's new book, True Patriot Love, which recently appeared in The Globe and Mail presented a view of Grant's work that diverged markedly from the impression of it that I'd gleaned from other sources. Clearly, it's high time for me to read it for myself and arrive at my own conclusions.

In my last library loot post, I mentioned my newfound appreciation for Martin Millar's work and my determination to read all of his books. Next up in that venture is Suzy, Led Zeppelin and Me, the catalogue copy description of which strikes me as very odd but entirely irresistible.

Recently, wearied by reading a couple of 500+ page novels back-to-back, I put out a call on Facebook seeking recommendations of slim, minimalist novels. My friend Susann suggested Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald. Here's a snippet of description from the jacket copy: "This marvellously witty book, while it doesn't pretend to be an accurate history of Broadcasting House, tells what it was like to work there during the spring and summer of 1940. This was the time when the Concert Hall was turned into a dormitory for both sexes, the whole building became a target for enemy bombers, and, in the BBC as elsewhere, some had to fail and some had to die." I've long been meaning to read something by Fitzgerald, and this book sounds like an excellent place to start.

And, finally, I picked up a trio of books by or about Astrid Lindgren. It won't surprise you to hear that all that musing last week about the Pippi Longstocking/Lisbeth Salander connection set me off on an Astrid Lindgren binge. I began with the Pippi Longstocking books, a number of of which I own and had read several times before. But now I'm ready to branch off into a couple I've not previously encountered. In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson made reference not just to Pippi but also to a Lindgren character who was new to me, boy detective Kalle Blomkvist. Another blogger tipped me off that in the English translations, Kalle Blomkvist became Bill Bergson, so I typed that name into the library catalogue and turned up Bill Bergson and the White Rose Rescue, a neat little volume which is packaged much like a Hardy Boys book. I ordered a copy of The Robber's Daughter as well, which I'm told is one of Lindgren's best books. And also, for a bit of context, Astrid Lindgren: A Critical Study by Vivi Edström.

It was a joy today, albeit a bit overwhelming, to find that these books had appeared on the hold shelf for me so quickly and all at once. The library is truly a miraculous place. And now, I'd better get reading.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

It's a good thing that so many people raved to me about Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; otherwise, I might not have persevered beyond the first thirty pages. In the early going, it seemed to me to be too densely detailed and, frankly, not all that interesting. Quite a bit of background was required to explain a complicated financial fraud that set the story in motion, and that sort of thing makes my eyes glaze over. But around about page thirty, Lisbeth Salander, the tattooed girl of the title, made her first appearance, and from that point on I was riveted. I had to cancel everything else I had planned for the day because I couldn't stop reading. It proved a mind-bogglingly good book in the end—yet another triumph in Scandinavian crime fiction.

I won't attempt to sum up the plot. It's too complex to be boiled down in that fashion and, in any event, I don't want to give anything away. Suffice it to say that there were several twists, and I didn't see a single one of them coming. Riveting plot(s) aside though, the greatest strength of the book for me lies in the characters, particularly the aforementioned Lisbeth Salander who strikes me as a wholly original creation. I read somewhere that one of the inspirations behind Salander was another famous figure of Swedish literature, Pippi Longstocking (and Astrid Lindgren—as well as several fine authors of crime fiction, Swedish and English—is name-checked more than once in the text). This is a bit horrifying to contemplate, as I hate to imagine Pippi living through some of the experiences Salander has had to endure. Yet it also seems perfect, as Salander certainly shares Pippi's grit, independence, and eccentricity.

Author Stieg Larsson died before the book was published, at the tragically young age of fifty. But he had already submitted two sequels to his publishers along with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. So even as we lament the loss of a great writing talent, English readers still have two more novels to which to look forward. The second in the series, The Girl Who Played With Fire is not due out in English translation in North America until July, but it was released in the UK in January. I think rather than waiting patiently for July, I'll be putting in an order for the UK edition at The Book Depository pronto.

Update:

I did a bit of digging to find the source of the Lisbeth Salander/Pippi Longstocking connection and found this quotation from an interview with Larsson cited in a newspaper article:

Salander's character [...] was inspired by the strong-willed redhead Pippi Longstocking in the children's books by the late Astrid Lindgren."What would she have been like today? What would she have been like as an adult? What would she be called? A sociopath?" Larsson told book store industry magazine Svensk Bokhandel in the only interview he did about his crime fiction. "I created her as Lisbeth Salander, 25 years old and extremely isolated. She doesn't know anyone, has no social competence."

Then I came across a marvellous post by blogger Dorte Jakobsen in which she explores the parallel in depth.

Finally, lest I've given the wrong impression with all this talk of Astrid Lindgren, I ought to make clear that The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a decidedly adult book which is at times very violent (though, even in my squeamish opinion, not gratuitously so).

Latest Library Loot

I picked this lot up yesterday at my beloved local library:

Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (translated from the Swedish by Lois Roth): Contemporary Swedish crime fiction is garnering a great deal of attention all over the world these days. But apparently it all began several decades ago with the Martin Beck series penned by husband and wife team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Roseanna, initially published in Swedish in 1965 and and in English translation in 1967, is the first in this ten-book series. I recall having trouble tracking down English translations of these books at one time, but a number of them have been re-released by Random House in the past year (with more to come), so now I get my chance. (Did I mention that I'm going to visit Sweden for the first time this summer? Expect my reading of Swedish literature to ramp up in the coming months in anticipation of that trip!)

How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater by Marc Acito: I relish a good comic novel, and my friend Melody, who has impeccable taste in books, gave this one a rave review on Goodreads recently.

Advice for Italian Boys by Anne Giardini: A post by Kerry at Pickle Me This alerted me to this one. I gather that the main character in the novel is a personal trainer and much of the action takes place in a gym, and I can't help but be curious about a literary representation of a setting that is currently so familiar to me.

The Good Fairies of New York by Martin Millar: I recently read Millar's Lonely Werewolf Girl after having my interest piqued by a post about it by Colleen at Chasing Ray. I loved every minute of that book and upon reaching the end immediately resolved to read everything else Martin Millar has written. So, next up is The Good Fairies of New York. Click through to the descriptions of each on the Soft Skull site, and tell me if you can resist them!

Clouds of Witness by Dorothy Sayers (audiobook, narrated by Ian Carmichael): I'm a fan of Dorothy Sayers and I'm always on the lookout for audiobooks to enliven my stints on the treadmill at the gym, so I took note when Litlove praised the BBC's audiobook series of Sayers novels narrated by Ian Carmichael. I put several on hold and, after many months of waiting (they must be much in demand), this is the first one to turn up.

A good haul, all in all, wouldn't you say?

Putting Discworld on the Map

I can't tell you how happy this makes me.

That Side Door into a Story

Abigail Thomas on why she gives assignments in her writing classes:

I give assignments in my writing classes because it's hard to make something up out of a clear blue sky. Two pages is all I ask, and it doesn't have to be a story. It doesn't have to be anything. It can contain a character who shows up out of breath. It can contain a lake and a bunch of swans. There can be conversation or silence. It can take place entirely in the dark. I have learned we do better when we're not trying too hard—there is nothing more deadening to creativity than the grim determination to write. At the very least, assignments can provide a writer with a nicely stocked larder, and some notion of where the mind goes when it's off its leash. And once in a while, if we're lucky, an assignment helps you find that side door into a story you've been staring too directly in the eye.

From Abigail Thomas, Thinking About Memoir (2008).