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Product Description
About the Author
Kerstin Ekman is one of Sweden's most prominent novelists. She was born in 1933 in Risinge, a small village in the middle of Sweden. She has written seventeen novels which have been widely published in other Scandinavian languages, German, Finnish, Dutch and French, and have won numerous prizes and awards. She became a member of the Swedish Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978, but resigned in 1989 when the Academy did not make a statement that she could approve of about the Rushdie case. She lives in Valsjöbyn, a small village in the north of Sweden.
Blackwater has been awarded the Swedish Crime Academy's Award for the best crime novel, the August Prize, and the Nordic Council's Literary Prize.
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Customer Reviews
'Blackwater' begins from the point of view a woman called Annie who, awoken by her daughter Mia, who is in her early twenties, returning home in the middle of the night, convinces herself the man with her daughter is the same man she saw eighteen years previously and whom she has always believed to be guilty of the brutal stabbing of two tourists sleeping in a tent. Annie herself had been the first person to discover the bodies of the tourists, on Midsummer Evening, when arriving with Mia, then a little girl, to pitch in her lot with a commune in the desolate north of Scandinavia.
The novel then slowly recreates the disturbing circumstances of the murder through a long and very complex combination of flashbacks seen from different points of view, before returning, at the opening of Part II, to its starting-point and the subsquent revival of interest in a double murder whose motives had never originally been explained (and a murderer who had never been caught).
The plot itself is watertight, but the postmodernist narrative techniques deployed are complex, and sometimes deliberately misleading: information is crucially withheld in order to develop and slowly increase an atmosphere of suspense which gradually becomes overwhelming.
Yet there is much more than suspense and unsolved mystery here. The characters are complex, and all of them have something to hide, or at the very least shady areas of their pasts which they are unwilling to contemplate. The commune itself is something of a failure, and the projected relationship there between Annie and Dan, the boyfriend who, ominously, fails to meet here on her arrival, is the fruit of one of many
misunderstandings in the story. And the wilderness itself functions like a late twentieth-century equivalent of those ominous hostile landscapes in the novels of Thomas Hardy.
Yes, I can sympathise with certain reviewers' frustration: it is a novel which the reader is at certain points tempted to give up. But this is because Kerstin Ekman cleverly allows the reader to be affected by the futility and monotony which characterise many of the characters' lives. But take my word for it: although the first part is (deliberately) slow-moving and ponderous, this is because it is like a spring being slowly wound up in preparation for the revelations in store in the second part.
And the translation, by the late Joan Tate, is of impeccable quality and, presumably, a quite monumental labour of love. This is one of those very rare novels where mystery and narrative mastery meet, and as such is very highly recommended to all those who end up feeling slightly unsatisfied when they get to the end of all those more run-of-the-mill whodunnits.
The story is set in the far northern forests of Sweden and centres on a brutal murder, in the late 1960s, of two foreign tourists. Around this crime, Ekman weaves a tale involving the brutalities of rural life, the commune-based radicalism that was so fashionable in Scandinavia at that time, environmental destruction and - most interestingly - a disturbing racism that seems to lurk within Swedish society.
Kerstin Ekman has clearly spent a long time honing the skills of plotting,but the book delivers much more: powerful ideas about education, memory and politics, and a profound, passionate evocation of nature.
Kerstin Ekman is one of the few contemporary Swedish writers to have become known internationally. I came to Blackwater having read The Forest of Hours, a magnificent historical novel that others have reviewed for Amazon. And I came to that book by chance. She is, for me, a wonderful discovery. We need more of her books in English.
This is not the easiest book to read, and I found the Swedish charcters and place names very hard to get to grips with. The plot is complex and interwoven, jumping from character to character and across time.
The novel is also very dark and shows a different side to Swedish life, reminiscent more of an American backwoods lifestyle. The main characters are also fascinating especially one who you think could be a double murderer but ends up in a way as a sort of hero !
Ekman brings different threads and themes together superbly, from the despair of the village doctor, the awkward shyness and moodiness of a teenage boy, the darker thoughts of a teacher turned hippy and the even darker mind of a backwoods loner.
All in all this is a fantastic book. So stick with it, it is well worth it.
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