Falling in Love with Karin Fossum

I'm not one for mysteries. There never seems to be a shortage of hard-boiled, alcoholic detectives with ex-wives and troubled children. Every time I wander into the mystery section, I feel a yawn rising in my chest. I've picked up so many books and it's the same thing for me. Either an American mystery with the same page-turning gusto of a Michael Bay movie where you have to keep reading because your reptilian brain won't forgive you if you don't or another badly translated, badly written Scandinavian novel (or trilogy of novels....hmmmm what could they be?) with boring characters who speak boring dialogue. And the narration is terrible (really can anyone explain the popularity of Steig Larsson's books? Come on....)

(Though to my mother's credit, I applaud English mysteries in her honor and hopefully, eventually, will get around to them when I get the time.)

The mystery section, in other words is the last section for me in the book store. 

But there are a few shining lights and one I must mention is Karin Fossum. 

I simply love her books. I first came across her by accident while perusing Amazon.com. I had read the Toronto's Star bi-weekly 'Whodunnit' section and came across the name of an Icelandic writer. I requested the book from the library only to find it a bit disappointing (again hard-nosed detective who drinks a little too much and has a drug-addicted daughter....and a case that 'can't' be solved...blah, blah, blah...). 

When I went back to Amazon I wanted to see if all Scandinavian mystery novelists were the same. To my eternal joy and happiness I found the name of Karin Fossum among the Amazon recommends section.(I found others but they're not worth mentioning, their books seemingly suffering from bad translation and typical plot-lines relying too much on shock and gore instead of good characters.)

I started with Se deg ikke tilbake or Don't Look Back, her first novel to be translated into English from Norwegian. And all I can say is I can't look back. The book is excellent and best of all, believable. 

The story revolves around the mystery of a girl found naked on a cold Norwegian beach. Detective Sejer is heading the investigation, an older, well-seasoned but certainly not cynical police man. Though he has a world weariness to him, he demonstrates poise and diplomacy and is tough and terse when he needs to be. There is no element of corruption in his character and though he might sound like a by-the-book gumshoe, he's more a down-to-earth realist who simply wants to get thing solved and set right. There is an Everyman quality and he isn't perfect. He has regrets, he suffers from the loss of his wife. He knows he won out by meeting and marrying her. There is an element of mourning but an equally real motivation to let the past be and move on. 

His sidekick Skarre smokes cigarettes. He is young and attractive and there's a kindness to him. Though he might appear innocent and wide-eyed, he's no rookie and works alongside Sejer. 

What I loved about the book is the simplicity, the directness of the text. A good artist paints a picture but a great one allows you to step in it. And that's how Fossum works. She relies on the reader's imagination to help her paint the scenes. Most readers have an idea of the Norwegian countryside and so she helps us in some ways, but she lets us go in others. Her descriptions are rarely elaborate and exaggerated. I would say she sets up her world with a modicum of sentences. The spareness is beautiful and often bewildering because it seems we are following just behind the main characters, getting lost with them, wondering the same things. 

Something similar could be said for all her books. We are there and the best part of being there, is the feeling, both in the moods of the characters and their emotions. We sympathize with Sejer because he in turn is sympathetic. We learn he has a daughter and the daughter has adopted a boy from Africa. Fossum sheds light on the racism in Norway where in such books as When The Devil Holds the Candle and The Indian Bride, the immigrant and the outsider are given harsh treatment. 

There is also a great deal of compassion felt for the mentally ill. Fossum herself worked in hospitals and nursing homes and was most likely no strange to the trials of the psychologically wounded. This is evident in He Who Fears the Wolf, Black Seconds and Bad Intentions. Her crazier characters are often more sane and human than her criminals which exhibit their own crazed behavior. 

And yet, I often hesitate to use the word 'criminal'. The guilty are guilty but there are too many shades of grey here in Fossum's Norwary, a nice contrast to the black and white we see in  our typical American mystery where we are safe with the good guy and threatened by the bad. With Sejer, there are often cases  he has to deal with where the criminal is an old lady or just some kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. The so-called 'bad intentions' aren't really 'intentions', just results of a situation gone wrong which makes the endings of her books feel more incomplete and of course, more real. The case might be closed or it might not be. It's all so ambiguous and complicated and all-too-human.

I've read nearly all her books and I've not been disappointed with a single one. Some I've loved more than others but as a whole, I love them the way any voracious reader would love a writer who continually delivers. I can look forward to Sejer, to his outlook, to his development. At one point he had a dog who passed on. At one point he had a girlfriend, a doctor in a mental hospital with a kinkiness to her. Like in life, people and loved ones come and go. In my latest Fossum read, Bad Intentions, the reader encounter's a moment in which Sejer faces his own fears and thoughts regarding mortality following a walk with Skarre. 

Again I don't read mystery but I wouldn't call Karin Fossum just a mystery a writer. She transcends the genre, makes it personal, making it, in short, her own. For me, it is literature with a mystery. Her books are like the best friends you want to keep in contact with. Seeing where it all goes in turn allows the reading to feel even more rewarding. She's an author who values the intelligence of the reader and over delivers with her characters, her stories and her writing.

And when someone goes above and beyond, thinks the best of us, doesn't insult our intelligence or rely upon the derivative to sell her story, what's not to love? (Fans of the Larsson, you really need to see the light...)

(A final note, I must acknowledge the astute and careful work of translators like Charlotte Barslund that have made Fossum's world so readily available in English. Without people like her, the atmosphere, mood and credibility of another world would remain alien and inaccessible. Many, many, many thanks Charlotte.)

My Life Now as a Hawaiian Shirt

Benjamin Franklin once wrote in his maxims that 'he who is an old young man will become a young old man.'

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that some men are born posthumous. Mircea Eliade, Romanian historian and professor of religious studies at the University of Chicago wrote a novella entitled Youth Without Youth that was adapted into a film. I've never read the book nor seen the movie but I can relate to the title. 

If I could rewrite the poet's famous line 'Je est un autre' ('I' is the other or someone else) it would be Jeune est un autre' (Youth is the other).

I've been an old man all my life. And it's not that I bemoan my fate, in fact I favor the Nietzschean, amor fati or love of fate. It is what it is, embrace it, nourish it, watch it, let it be. 

And so it is.

For me youth has always been equal to idiocy, immaturity and ignorance. Youth is truly wasted on the young. The old are nostalgic, eyes glistening with thoughts for the golden time while the young go about blind, not recognizing the potential in their energy, the immense future and how that energy they possess is so often wasted on pranks and other innocuous but pathetic pursuits.

This is demonstrated in numerous ways. If you've ever driven by a high school, you'll notice the young walk out into traffic, brazen with a thousand lives in their pocket. If you've ever been to any downtown club on any given weekend in any given major city, the young dance all night and drink to their hearts content, vomiting to their stomach's discontent the next morning. And if you've ever wandered the halls of a university dorm, peeked into their rooms, the young are capable of pulling off all-nighters usually as a last resort due to their procrastination. 

The young are careless because they can be. 

Even when I was young I wasn't and in some ways envied the youth around me. I felt like I was speaking to my peers as if I came from another planet or though another medium. My classmates gravitated towards certain kinds of music and movies and though I tried to emulate them by following their interests I routinely gave up and subjected myself to a kind of generational exile. 

I was always too cautious. I looked both ways, I've never really been one to party all night and I did my work on time.

And that's how it's been. I've come into this world to feel alone amongst those my own age, to be removed.

But it's strange, I always think of a scene in the film Wild Strawberries wherein the professor, Isak is looking in on the dream world of his memories. Standing to the side amidst the trees, listening to the chatter and gossip of his cousin and sister, Sara begins to describe the young Isak as a refined with sensitive soul, mature and intellectual whereas Sigfrid, the misfit brother is more "fresh and exciting." 

It is a melancholy scene because Isak is an old man, has been all his life. He lost the girl of his dreams because of his seriousness, his appreciation of art and beauty. The poets are poets because they aren't the exciting ones. An artist has to fall for the careless muse, she is unreachable and pernicious in her immaturity.

I think of this scene and relate to it, especially when I'm looking online for a companion - I find the pretty ones just want to watch hockey or go out dancing at a club, dating a guy with abs and arms. I could do without hockey and dancing and I'd work out more if I didn't have to work. 

Fresh and exciting. I've never been those things. I've been disillusioned. I've been lost. I've been found. I've been intrigued. I've been speculative and I've been confounded. 

The trouble is, I'm an anomaly, I'm too curious and too easily bored. I probably should be in a big city, go to art museums and poetry readings but those worlds are filled with hypocrites and wannabes. The art world died as soon as Picasso ruined the canvas with his misogyny and ego and Joyce stabbed literature in the heart.

Or maybe I should be in Toronto, trying to break into the music scene. People tell me I have a beautiful singing voice (Dan Hill of 'Sometimes When We Touch' at a Songwriters conference even conferred) and my songs are unique but just the idea of trying to be an entrepreneur in a high-pressure field doesn't impress me. The idea of being on Twitter disgusts me and I'm clueless and sometimes, happily so.

I don't want to be a part of those kinds of worlds. 

Instead I'm in south western Ontario, in a friendly rural community. I've been hired on for two jobs, one working as a service agent at a rental car company and the other job, a food demonstrator. 

It's almost comedic. I feel like I've retired from what ever noble task I never completed or stepped up to tackle to find myself in the Hawaiian shirt section of my life. I'm sure they'll be fun jobs. No big salary I can boast. There's nothing remotely engaging about either position. They are just joe-jobs to pay the rent. 

But what is this sadness, this sense of ho-hum hovering behind me, looking down at the bald (Or blind) spot of my life? (Ich weiss nicht, das es bedeuten soll, das ich so traurig bin?)

The jobs are part-time, flexible which will allow me ample hours to read and write and be left in peace. I like peace. I don't like crowds, the chaos is too much and the sense of anything could happen disarms.

I am an old man, right? 

There are no regrets just a longing for something more meaningful and beautiful. A helpless yearning for a kindness from the greater mystery. It seems like it's always been this way, only now I'm wearing the shirt and finding it tough to forgiven myself for being different and outside the regular circles that people find themselves. Sometimes I've managed to sit in on the circumference, just in a few steps away from the isolation, looking in long enough to feel I mattered, offering something succinct, perhaps profound and belonged for a short span only to wake up and find it was illusory. There were a few conversations I loved and there was that golden light that filtered through a moment, a eureka moment but it lasted for the duration of a timely topic and once the discussion closed its door, I somehow closed myself off as well. 

When I go out, driving past the brown, skeleton-like corn fields, out for groceries or the library, it's only to help me appreciate the coming back, the coming home. I go into town and the drive is lovely, there's no traffic to complain about, no overpasses and cement walls that make feel even more trapped. On Sundays I pick up the Toronto Star. I have my wine , my books and if I keep going, I might sound like a Simon and Garfunkel song.

I have my Hawaiian shirt, a breath of fresh air, an affordable peace for now and maybe there's someone out there who's envious of me. Someone who had all the freshness and excitement. I don't know.

Freshness expires, excitement eventually has to throw up. I guess my wardrobe is something to accept.