Jacqui Munoz Munoz itibaren Bostancık Köyü, 44800 Bostancık Köyü/Arapgir/Malatya, ตุรกี itibaren Bostancık Köyü, 44800 Bostancık Köyü/Arapgir/Malatya, ตุรกี

Part of what continues to fascinate me about Scandinavian crime fiction is the routine respect with which the authors approach their genre--the real quality of the prose and complexity not only of the plots themselves, but of the milieus--the characters and settings peripheral to the events that these books are 'about.' Ekman's Blackwater is currently my favorite example of this--an eliptical rendering of a brutal, unsolved crime in a mountain village in Northern Sweden. For although this crime effectively changes the lives of all of the characters in the novel (three of whom narrate), it isn't truly the point, per se. As in real life, horrible, arbitrary and unexplained things happen and the consequences often resonate for years to come. But even when one has been directly involved with such an event, the mundane, quotidian dramas--the (failed) romances, the family dysfunction, the fights with neighbors, the gossip, the trouble at work, the community struggles with the political, the racial, the progressive--these things are the real fabric of one's daily life. (If the book missteps, it is simply in an overzealous exploration of this environment—occasionally, her affection for the intervening lives of her characters pulls the narrative off course, although I confess enjoying such tangents for their sheer thoroughness and imagination.) And so Ekman--coincidentally one of Sweden's foremost novelists (not only in the genre of crime fiction) and an ex-member of the Swedish Academy of Letters (she resigned in protest over what she deemed to be the society's underwhelming response to the 'Rushdie Affair')—allows her crime to precipitate the action of the novel, without defining it. We meet Blackwater’s ostensible narrator twenty years after the crime was committed, when a mysterious man reappears in the village. This leads to a prolonged flashback of the crime itself and all the events surrounding it at the time. We then return to the present, where the crime is eventually solved. However, such a protracted search for ‘The Truth,’ for an explanation of what Really Happened, is relatively useless. It doesn’t resolve anything or give the events more meaning. It merely is, leaving the characters to make their peace with such arbitrary violence as best as they are able.

I listened to this book and that is part of the reason that I can't rate this any higher than 2 stars. The book was narrated by the author, which I didn't realize for most of the time that I was listening to it. From the first words, I felt that the narrator's voice was too young for a 50 year old. It turns out that Genova is in her mid 40s, but between the voice and affectless voice, I was very disappointed. The story was stilted and seemed too clinical. There were moments which stood out displaying moments of Alice's floundering mental capacity. Perhaps if I read the book instead...