Artis the Artist in Antwerpen

After weeks of spending hours wandering through European art museums, it would seem the works of Vermeer, Hals, Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck are highly venerated. What a surprise....

While at the Gemeente Museum in Den Haag some time ago, I watched a long procession of Japanese tourists march with silent, albeit stoic determination to Jan Vermeer's View of Delft. Lead by a short woman who spoke loudly, they stared with confused wonder at the masterpiece. They crossed their arms, they blinked and nodded. I was curious as to what they were thinking. Maybe they were frustated at not being able to take a picture. Maybe they felt they had accomplished something by seeing the painting, i.e. they could cross it off the list.  Now they could be content.

I don't know where they went next. Probably not into the rest of the museum where more modern masterpieces by Kadinsky or Monet are being shown. Or maybe they did.

Presently the Gemeente, known more for its 20th century masterpieces is showingcasing the masters typically found in the Mauritshuis. Unfortunately the latter lovely, lavish building is being renovated so everything has been relocated. 

Walking about the Gemeente, the most highly perused works were those of the 16th and 17th century. I saw several Rembrandts (his Homer and Anatomy Lesson), several chaotic works by Jan Steen and of course Vermeer's famous Girl with a Pearl Earring (which will be making a stop in Japan sometime in the next little while).

As much as I love visiting these quiet, sacral spaces, I can't help but wondering about the artists and their lives. Rembrandt, I learned lived a fairly comfortable life, only later to be besotted with debt. Vermeer had many children and thankfully married into a wealthy family. 

As for the modern Van Gogh, his story has become legend, mythologized. People perhaps visit out of curiousity. They've been told he is genius but without the ear-cutting-off-incident, would he still draw the same audience? Is his life more integral to his art or a curious side piece, a tragic story we are darkly amused with? 

When I see the crowds lining up in front of his museum, I can't help but wonder if they would be the same kind of people who would deny him in his own time. (To be honest, I wonder the same about practicing Christians, how many would be Unchristian to Christ if they lived in Jesus' time.)

Rhetorical questions and musings aside, I feel there is often a sad, strange diachotomy between the living and dead in art. Highly prolific artists have come and gone and some have been celebrities - Picasso and Warhol for instance. 

And yet, people are not adoringly drawn to their works. Not so much the modern works - most of the Gemeente showcaing the moderns was empty and the exhibition there echoing with distant footsteps. 

Not to say modern art is unloving (most of the time I feel it lacks beauty and tenderness), I just don't think most people, including art curators and critics have the brains or wherewithall to see what is great without the hype and politics surrounding the art. Human beings, for the most part are social animals (to reference Aristotle - well, to some extent) and being social there is the ailing pressure of one's peers and of course, the mob or the crowd. 

And money. 

The art I saw in the Gemeente only impressed me a little. Maybe I was missing the context. I don't know. 

I left Den Haag for Antwerpen, thinking I would visit the MAS, the new museum on the Stroom and Ruben's house. I visited the former and enjoyed myself but I was enthralled with another artist, not one found in a museum not a household name... well, not yet. 

Artis Karnisauskis, as you may well guess from the name is not a native Belgium. He hails from Latvia. He speaks in addition to his native tongue, Russian and English. And I would say, his modern art is more fascinating and moving than much of what is being produced academically. 

To get by, Artis drives to Brugge and sells his more commercial pieces, sepia scenes of the medieval town in a market square where American, Canadian and British tourist gobble up his work. In themselves, these pieces have a timeless quality, remarkably melancholy. Looking at them, the buildings and towers and the canals seem to shimmer as if the viewer were peering at the scenes in a dream. They look like at any minute the scene will shiver into a fade and we will lose them forever. 

His more abstract art is more intellectual and less romantic but still, there is something baffling, fascinting and heartfelt in them.

Take for instance the above unnamed piece. Before heading to Cologne, I had been staying with Artis and his wife Sandra through AirBnb, a site where locals can advertise rooms available for travelers. This painting hung above my bed. 

I fell in love with this piece. You feel like you are swirling in the smog of life. But on closer inspection, everything is perfectly placed.

The lone cyclist on the left possesses something old world about him. The bike handles are red; he wears a fedora and yet there is something murky and folorn about his distance to the buildings and the high wires. Also, I noticed the dark smog halo around his head. 

I thought about the famous poet Rilke's words, his comment about modern life at the beginning of the 20th century: "Automobiles run me over."

The buildings, the street, the bus to the right are etched with a grid-like pattern. In the sky, a web of wires, interconnecting and strangling. The brown hues of the painting cause almost a kind of viewing asthma, as if we have trouble seeing the painting, inundated with the dirty chaos of daiy life. And yet the orange sky has an autumnal piece, a sadness mixed with vibrancy. It is fiery and there, admidst the lines, an angelic-like figure (perhaps a bird, it is up to our imagination) is caught but not paralized by the electrified sky.

I have seen similar scenes in Amsterdam and Vancouver. 

Another piece has the same orange-red intensity.

This one is more abstract. Two bird-like figures are floating, circling in the green atmsophere. Again, they could be birds, demons or angels. The reddish portion has a star-like quality. For me, it reminds me of a time when I was ill and felt lost inside my own body. The illness was a kind of earth, a dying home inside myself. The red ground of this painting throbs with pain and reality. Upon this ground, a third creature or flower has taken shape and form. Though there is something grim and grotesque in the image, I feel a certain hope, a future in its message. 

This last piece is perhaps the most bewildering. Either we are presented with a stuffed animal or a dead one. A sheep lies upon a white surface and with its one leg, reaches or points up, connected to a kind of kite like image. Again, it is up to the viewer to decide. Either it is a childhood toy, disused, destroyed by rough playing or more likely it is an animal dead, waiting to be used for meat. The kite's image could very well be a reference to the hell of the slaughterhouse. 

While visiting the MAS in Antwerpen, I came across some interesting words outside the Master's temporary exhibit. "Art is not a luxury and never has been. Art seeks answers to life's questions."

For Artis I sense and understand these questions from his work but at times, I feel I need to keep asking and seeing. There is nothing determined here, everything is still open to interpretation. Though the art is silent, it's the viewer and the artist that create the dialgue. 

The evening before I left, Artis told me an interesting story about an another artist he know. "He would paint a painting and then stop. He wasn't happy with it. But he wouldn't paint any more. He would keep coming down to look at it in his studio. He would spend the year looking at it until he finally liked it and realized it was done. It's all attitude. How you want to see. It's all in your head. Your heart."

Interpreting Artis' work requires both head and heart. Otherwise you'll lose something in the experience.

To contact Artis and find out more about his are and commerical work follow the link below

Artis Karnisauskis

Weemoed: Melancholy in the World of Vincent Van Gogh

'As my work is, so am I." - Vincent Van Gogh

In a few short days I'll be in Amsterdam which means in a few shorts days I'll be visiting the Van Gogh Museum. This means my mind will soon be gloriously flooded with beautiful works of art, art I've only seen in copies in books or on slides during art history seminars.

As a child, I remember a print of the 'Café Terrace' hanging on the living room wall. It struck me as a sad, desolate painting and I always hesitated looking at it for it seemed to be filled with a strange, albeit baffling loneliness. I thought that if I stared long at it, I would become trapped in the painting. Not only this, the man in white, the server looked more like a skeleton than a human being.

My mother loved this painting and she was the one who first hung it up. And I wondered why she liked it so much.

Café Terrace

Today I can look at it from a remove and see its aesthetics instead of being overcome with the emotions. I look at the bright yellow contrasted with the blue sky. I see Van Gogh's use of the vanishing point and perspective. And yet I know there's something symbolically more about that scene, whether it is the blinding, bold light emanating from the café or the vast sparkle of the sky. It is still laden with a melancholy as if this place attracted only the lost souls and no one else. 

I learned about Van Gogh in high school, my mother having lent me her copy of Don Maclean's Greatest His. I listened to the song 'Vincent' and though I heard the words, understood their meaning, I still hadn't arrived at a tender appreciation of the artist. I had seen 'Starry Night' in my grade 12 art class, my teacher Miss Armstrong was very passionate in her discussion of the painting. I noted the vibrant, swirling colours, the near organic and orgasmic quality to the piece. Yes, I saw that the artist had brought the canvas to life. But in the back of my mind, I thought, big deal.

In university, when I was going through my own lonely times I began to feel some compassion for Van Gogh. Prof Knight devoted an entire class to his work, starting from the beginning. I learned that Vincent Van Gogh began his working life in his late teens as an art dealer, that he worked in The Hague, Paris and London. But while visiting the latter city, he was introduced to the terrible working conditions of the poor. Eventually, he lost interest in his position - they fired him actually - and turned to the church. In his letter to his brother Theo, he wrote long sermons and discussed the Bible. He considered becoming a theologian. He moved around, couldn't get settled, he became a vehement preacher and lived in squalor similar to St. Francis of Assisi. 

The church and the church folk too, as it turned out turned their back on him because his passion was too passionate. The Dutch and Belgium burgers with their Calvinism and Dutch Reform ways found he wasn't too conservative for their liking. Sure, they appreciated a vow of poverty but Vincent took it too far.

Neuen Cottage

This is when he began to drawn and paint. Mostly he began with studies of peasants in the fields. His canvas was dark and drab. He asked locals to sit for him so he could draw their features. Highly influenced by the painters of the Barbizon School, a group of painters in France that depicted peasant life and rural scenes, Van Gogh used Jean-Francois Millet as his mentor. 

Prof. Knight introduced the class to the 'Potato Eaters', Van Gogh's first true masterpiece. In the painting, a family of farm workers sit around their table at night, eating potatoes, a single bulb illuminating their faces. One thinks of a murky coal mine, the dismal light so bare and stark - but its really a dining room. Van Gogh wanted to show the viewer the lives of the down-trodden, to show that these people were close to the earth, that they were the ones who had picked the very potatoes they were eating. 

What is fascinating about the masterpiece, Knight pointed out to my seminar is that the sketches Van Gogh did in preparation were far more fascinating, more alive. It was the sketches that give us a hint of his genius.

Van Gogh moved to Paris and lived for a time with his brother. This was a welcome relief to his family. His relatives in the Netherlands were fed up with his uncouth and erratic ways. Van Gogh was a loner and his family made sure of this. All attempts to reach out and connect were made difficult by them. He fell in love easily enough and tried to court a cousin, Kee. Maybe it wasn't the right time. She had a child, she was a widow. One afternoon at her home, Van Gogh put his hand to a flame, demanding his uncle to let him speak with her. Kee's father blew out the candle and lead the artist away to a pub where he could get drunk. 

His relations with his father had grown strained. Van Gogh in his desire to belong, to be seen as someone important, significant had pursued a career in the church purposely to be closer to him. He was well-read in The Bible, could quote scripture. But the pastor had no love for his son. If anything, the father could see the emotional turmoil lurking in Vincent and wanted to distance himself. Though Pastor Van Gogh was a man of the church, a man of Christ he was no Christian towards his son, unwelcoming, distant and judgmental.

Before his move to Paris, it is fascinating to note Vincent's frequent use of the word, melancholy in his letters. In his 7/8 February 1877 letter, he breaks the word down. In Dutch, melancholy is weemoed so we find, thanks to Van Gogh's discernment,  wee (woe) and moed (courage). In English, melancholy is derived from the Greek. Hippocrates and ancient medical science regarded excess of bile as the cause of the sanguine sorrow, hence melas (black) and kholé (bile). 

In addition to Dutch and English, Van Gogh also knew how to speak French and German. But it is this brilliant observation on a single word in Dutch and its meaning that we understand the artist. When he wrote this letter in Dordrecht, he was still focused on a career in the church. But like the 'Potato Eaters' we glean a hint of the future great artist. 

In fact, I think the word in Dutch is better than in English. For the artists of the 19th century, weemoed was a constant. The industrial revolution turned the farmer away from his fields. Cities became the new place of pilgrimage as towns and rural communities lost workers to the promise of jobs in factories and mills. The earth, the hearth held no sway. Artists could see the broken lives of the poor, as well as the broken spirits of the emerging bourgeois. In Germany, they turned to the realm of night and dreams, poetry and philosophy, music. In France, Romantic theatre took storm along with painting, novels and polemics. Cities became busier, crime-ridden, dingier, darker. 

Whether we interpret the Dutch word as 'courage in woe', or 'woe's courage', Vincent Van Gogh was not alone in the realm of artists. He continued on, fighting his woe with art, painting and learning, learning and painting. In Paris, as I mentioned he lived with his brother and painted the windmills of Montmarte, feeling a nostalgia for the windmills of his native land. He met fellow artists, was introduced to the work of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist. His canvas became brighter, livelier. He was influenced by the pointillism of George Seurat and Paul Signac but he didn't have the patience to apply the little dots to his canvas. Instead, he made the technique his own and instead of dots, quick, flashing, slashing strokes of the brush. 

Tired of Paris, he moved to the south of France, the town of Arles on the Rhone River. Though his brother and him couldn't live together (Theo complained of Vincent's untidiness and his erratic emotions), Vincent still longed for a community of artists. He convinced Paul Gauguin to live with him. But this wasn't to last. The two artists disagreed on everything. Van Gogh was a colourist and favoured the works of Delacrois and Rubens. Gauguin favoured the use of line and placed Ingres and Raphael on a pedestal. Neither could convert the other so the 'brotherhood' disbanded. 

Van Gogh was a loner, a wanderer. In a later letter he wrote: "I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate and feeling nowhere so much a stranger as in my own family and country." His father had been dead for some time now and though he never saw his mother again, he used a photograph to paint a beatific portrait of her, one where she beamed him a forgiving smile.

Landscapes, rural scenes. The light in his paintings was the brightest in Arles, a far cry from the murky, autumn and snow scenes of the north. His 'Potato Eaters' had lead him here and he still found beauty in the human face. He continued to paint portraits. The time he spent painting the everyday people around him, was a kind of haven, an authentic moment of longing and community. He dreamed of companionship but he could get no further than the paintings he created of couples walking, resting, standing together under the stars. 

In the famous self-mutilation incident, he didn't chop off his entire ear, merely his lobe. And some scholars wonder if it wasn't someone else who did the deed. The bleeding was intense, his cry for help even more so. He decided to leave Arles for Auvers, hoping to escape the weemoed he encountered in the south, in his self. 

He found a friend in Dr. Gachet. Vincent painted his portrait, depicting the melancholy on the doctor's face. 

He again turned to the scenes of life around him and painted, but somehow he knew that no matter what he created, it would only be worth something after his death. He had found out that a painting by Millet, his hero had sold for several thousand francs after the artist's death. He saw a similar fate for his works.

There has been recent debate over his death. While many scholars believe he shot himself, others are beginning to wonder if the romantic-martyr image of the failed, starving artist isn't a bit contrived. Some wonder where he got the pistol. And being a Christian, he knew suicide was a sin. Yes, he cut off his ear lobe but are we still certain about his courage to shoot himself?

In a recent, controversial book by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, the two authors point to the possibility that he was accidentally shot by local boys. The boys had teased the artists, adding salt to his coffee in the local cafe, scaring him with a snake, even having their girlfriends try to seduce him, knowing how lonely he was. When one of the boys came in possession of a gun, it is believed the weapon either misfired or be mishandled and Van Gogh took the bullet.

Not in a wheat field, but closer to the town that he was shot. When the police asked if he shot himself, he said he thought so to which he followed up with: "Don't accuse anyone else." 

Van Gogh wanted to die and he died knowing his brother would no longer be burdened by him.

Vermeer, Van Gogh, and the Artist's Legacy

Yesterday morning, I finished reading Vermeer: A View of Delft by British author Anthony Bailey. I had always been an admirer of the Dutch artist's work since my high school art history classes. There is something both timeless and sensual in his interior depictions of women at their domestic labours. On top of this, there is an element of quiet mystery. The ladies are nameless, the letters they read and receive are equally clouded in questions and as for their duties, the lessons they receive, the men who court them, everything is secretive and hushed. 

Vermeer not only inspired artists but other writers. Proust mentions Vermeer's painting, The View of Delft in his massive novel, In Search of Lost Time where Marcel, the narrator discusses how Monsieur Swann, a family friend was continually writing an essay about the artist. Interestingly enough, the writer Bergotte in Proust's grand opus collapses shortly after seeing one of the master's paintings and dies having witnessed the grandeur of the colours and the composition.

In the twentieth century, there have been numerous historical fictions about Vermeer, the most famous being Girl With a Pearl Earring, a novel crafted by Tracy Chevalier and later made into a movie featuring Colin Firth as the artist and Scarlet Johansson as his innocent muse. 

Bailey is a sympathetic writer and though the details are few about Johannes Vermeer's life (Bailey spends a large portion of filling in the world behind the artist - i.e. talking about the history, the political and historical figures that had a direct and indirect influence on Vermeer and his family), what I was left with is the same appalling sadness I encounter when I think about the legacies of artists.

Vermeer married well but accumulated debts along the way to his death. He lived in the time of Holland's Golden Age. Spain was no longer a threat but in the last years of Vermeer's life, both the British and French made it quite difficult for the people of the Netherlands to feel peace in their profound freedom. The French especially, under Louis XIV invaded the region, then called the United Provinces in 1672. The Dutch armies being smaller than the French, resorted to unique tactics and flooded their landscape to thwart the king's men. The invasion was short-lived but the devastating economic effects rippled through the lives of everyday people. The fields  being flood, there were food shortages which meant there were deaths from starvation and higher prices for everything edible. Also, in a time of deprivation, who needs art?

Vermeer died suddenly in 1675. He collapsed after walking through his house, looking in the various rooms at his children, his wife and their maids. The collapse, some scholars have suggested may have been a result of depression and the stresses of getting his family through a hard time. A heart attack, a stroke, it is difficultt to say but many believed he suffered from melancholy, a then catch-all word to describe the sadness and desolate emotions people experienced.

In the wake of his death, his widow struggled to keep the family together. Some of their children married well which relieved the burden but by the time Catharina passed on some twelve years later, she had nothing to leave her kin. 

Today, Vermeers are worth millions of dollars. They are stolen from private homes and museums. There have been forgeries and frauds. In the twentieth century, a man considered an expert on Vermeer was fooled by a Dutch artist from The Hague. The fake Vermeer had been beautifully painted, giving the impression of being an early work of the artist. The forger used very careful and creative means to give the painting a look of being weathered by centuries - he baked the canvas in an oven, rolled it up to induce cracks and then used blank ink, rubbing it into the surface to give the impression of old dirt. 

The expert simply wanted to believe that something from the fabled artist could suddenly exist, that a bit of mystery still existed out there and that fate had conspired to bring him what had been for centuries, considered lost. 

The expert didn't see it was obviously a fraud. The figures in the painting had not been handled with the same plush sensuality or kindness. The forger couldn't quite capture the same magic and pensive stillness, the same warmth Vermeer is known for. No, the expert fell victim to his own deceit and belief, caught up in his own wistful longing to have something more from the long dead master. The story of how the painting was recovered (it had been in a rich family's home for generations), that it bore the same signature in Vermeer's painting - these were the things that helped fool him but the fooling was easy because the victim was so willing.

And this is where I have difficulty. It is one thing to fall in love with a piece of work, it is another to simply appreciate it because death has sealed off future works from the same hand. It is more the story than the thing itself that is loved.

Van Gogh, a few centuries later would die penniless, tragically by his own hand. Instead of walking through his rooms, Van Gogh wandered into a field and shot himself with a shotgun. 

Like Vermeer, however, there is a legacy that shrouds the intrinsic beauty of his work. People appreciate Van Gogh's work, not because it is beautiful and strange and discomforting, that it doesn't follow the rules of academic art, that it breaks free - no, people are attracted to the death, to the dark story behind the work.(The fact that he mutilated himself also helps bring a touch of excitement to an already somber life.)

In a sense, people are indirectly possessed with a fascination for death. 

I always think of the humorous quote by Max Beerbohm: "Death cancels all engagements." How true and sad and yet, for an artist, death cancels all commissions, all aspirations, all ideas. The viewing public, however, is more intrigued. 

And this extends to the death in the twentieth and twenty-first century of notoriously famous recording artists. We had Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison in the sixties, Elvis in 1997, John Lennon in 1980, Kurt Kobain, Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls in the nineties to most recently, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse and of course, Whitney Houston. 

The deaths of recording artists are always multi-platinum. I heard they are going to showing The Bodyguard, the famous, albeit trite Houston film in select theatres. The public cannot have Houston anymore but they can have the digital image, the replica - as if the fleeting possibility of her presence was suddenly renewed and believed in. And there is money to be made in an artist's death.

It all comes back to a banality, an unwillingness to acknowledge that death is a more fascinating aspect to an artist than the art itself. And this is the sadness I feel. Vermeer died broke, indentured, he owed people - bakers, butchers and other merchants, you name it. He owed and yet the world after him has taken and made money and profited a million-fold. It almost makes me angry. That someone with such a beautiful gift could not have ever been rescued by his future, posthumous legacy. No. People flock to see his paintings throughout the world, they revel in his work because the mystery is so pure and evocative and because he died unknown. 

They see Van Gogh but they don't really see the art. Everyone a tourist, a vicarious visitor, wandering in the wake that mortality leads, the shreds of beauty that have become an industry for many and a hobby for the wealthy few. 

The world is such a disparaging mess.    

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.)