Kerstin Ekman

I love it when someone calls a book "moody." It's even better when I agree with them.
There are tensions in an isolated village near the Lapland border where everyone knows your name, wants your secrets, and suffers together through a winter that is "5,064 hours long" (p 4). Even Police Constable Torsson has an attitude when he learns he has to travel 25 miles over the ice and snow to investigate the death of a young teacher. When a man is found frozen to death in a snowbank and the entire show more community won't talk about the details, for all appearances it looks like an accident. This much is true - after getting into a fight after a mah-jongg game Matti Olsen collapsed and died of exposure. Case closed. Or is it? A friend of Matti's arrives the next summer and convinces Torsson it isn't really over; the case deserves a second look. Is it connected to a woman with a piece of bloody rope in a backpack?
For most of the story it bounces from perspective to perspective as different characters share what they want you to know. Most effectively, Ekman reserves the first person narrative for the murderer's detailed confession. show less

Annie Raft, is woken at 4 am by a car pulling up outside her home. She looks out of the window to see her 23-year-old daughter Mia getting out of the car and embracing a man who she doesn't know but whom she believes brutally murdered two campers some 18 years previously. She telephones her friend and lover, local doctor Birger Torbjornsson to tell him what she has seen and later discovers that the man she saw is Johan Brandberg, the youngest son of a local family.

Through Annie Raft, Birger show more Torbjornsson and Johan Brandberg the reader is transported back to Midsummer's Eve 1974, when Annie and her daughter, then 6 years old, arrived by bus in remote Blackwater where they are to move into a commune with Annie's lover, Dan Ulander. When Dan fails to meet the bus, Annie and Mia set off on foot to walk the four kilometres to the commune. En route they spot a young man coming in the opposite direction but he does not see them. Dan has given them a rudimentary map of the area but they are soon lost . When Annie spots a tent she decides to go and ask for assistance only to find the bodies of a young man and woman brutally stabbed to death. The identity of the young woman is soon established, but nobody can figure out why she was killed, who did it or who her murdered companion was. The mystery lasts for almost 18 years.

The unsolved murders makes the small community of Blackwater infamous, bringing it a lot of outside interest but has negative affects on its residents. So when Annie and Mia later decide to settle in Blackwater all their lives are haunted by the incident.

This book is portrayed as a thriller but it is told at a somewhat sedate, methodical pace with the author resisting the temptation to add to the body count. Instead Ekman concentrates on the effect the murders have on the community and the rich eerily bleak countryside thereabouts. In fact she creates a landscape that as equally as important to the plot as its human cast. Clear-cutting of the forests is a fairly central issue but this not a political bandwagon. Rather the plot purrs along at a slow steady pace threading its way through the seasons and the complicated lives of the people present.

When Dan fails to meet the bus Annie and Mia are forced to take a path that leads not only to the dead bodies but one that will also have unforeseen consequences, mirroring the way that decisions that we all make when we are young can shape our futures. This is no doubt particularly true for people live in small villages where everyone knows and are likely to be in some way related to each other. In fact it is Mia who eventually reveals the identity of the murdered young man despite only being a child at the time of his death.

The novel is not without some imperfections. In particular Johan is never properly investigated by the police despite the fact that he left home on the night of the murders and never returned to the village. Come to think of it, the whole police investigation seems to have been pretty haphazard. Similarly Johan's sex sessions with the woman who helped him to get away seem to be a little out of keeping with the rest of the novel. However, that all said and done, the author has created a gloriously rich and thoughtful page-turner that deserves to be read. show less

It was a scrawny little troll, unknowing and guileless, and not much given to thinking at all. There was little more than fluttering, like the wings of jays, going on under that tussock of hair.

Skord is a creature of the forest – not a troll as I thought of trolls, and not very fantastic except that he has the gift, shaman-wise, of sending his consciousness into other beings (which he does by habit just for the trip), and he lives for the five hundred years of the novel. There are giants show more in the forest too: these are slow-lived and eon-slow of thought. Like Skord, they are more likely to be victims of humans, as humans develop from medieval to the industrial age. The forest is that of Sweden’s wild Skule, and as much a presence in the book as the sea in Moby Dick – both the real-as-real depiction and getting metaphysical about it too.

Skord, who cannot help but mimic what he hears and sees, learns from humans, interacts with them and slips into their world. This is the story of his knowledge gained of that world, his corruption by it, his possible escape from it and salvation? It’s the alien eye turned on us and on our history. The book is dark and grim, with gentle gleams. Skord is more acted upon than acting; he witnesses how strange we are, without any concern to judge us – he can be disturbingly detached, at our abysmal behaviour. Yet it is his empathy with vulnerable things, often animals or children, lives he can identify with, that is his grace. I experienced this as an anti-human book. Whether it is or not I don’t know, it remains enigmatic to me. It is a creatures’ book, however.

It has been translated into drop-dead gorgeous English. The translator, Anna Paterson, must have brought such art to it herself, even if the Swedish is this lovely.

In the end it may be too dark for me or for my comfort, but after two reads now this has got to be one of my most-admired books, certainly of recent ones. The woman is a genius. I’ll have to try her crime novel, Blackwater, that is above and beyond your usual crime novel, they say. Alas with a different translator, but again, a remote forest setting. show less

Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman is a crime novel by a Swedish author, but it's much more than just another dark Scandinavian mystery. The novel centers around a double murder, following the lives of three people affected by the event; the young woman who stumbles across the bodies, a doctor whose wife is in the area at the time, and a teenage boy who runs away the night of the killings. For much of the novel, as the characters go about living their lives, the murders are almost forgotten. Ekman show more explores the themes of solitude and loneliness, how you can live with someone and still be a stranger to them, environmental destruction and the uncomfortable tension between a nostalgia for days gone by and the harsh reality of life in the middle of Sweden in the past.

The writing is beautiful with lovely descriptions of a part of Sweden between Ostersund and Norway, where nature is lush and fragile, the people hardy but closed to outsiders. The mystery is solved in the end, in a satisfying way. A book well worth reading. show less