- Paperback: 464 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; Export ed edition (4 Sep 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099502763
- ISBN-13: 978-0099502760
- Product Dimensions: 17.6 x 11 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 511,559 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Kennedy's Brain
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Product Description
Maxim Jakubowski, The Bookseller
'Fast-paced thriller ... a timely, tightly knit plot.'
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Financial Times
'Less penetrating (than Le Carre's The Constant Gardener) but more meditative, and leaves room for a hard-nosed sequel.'
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
44 of 48 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
When archaeologist Louise Cantor's son, Henrik, is found dead in his bed in Stockholm, she refuses to accept the police's verdict of suicide. Of course, this is a mystery novel, so the reader, based on previous experience of such affairs, feels wise to side with her. Louise gives up her commitments to a dig in Greece, and embarks upon a messy, mother's-grief-fuelled quest to find out the truth. It's a quest that will lead her back to Henrik's enigmatic, almost hermetic father, to Spain, and then to the AIDs-riddled communities of Mozambique, where a mysterious benefactor is funding help efforts. On the way there, she must contend with the puzzle thrown up by Henrik's extensive clippings and investigations into the conspiracy concerning president Kennedy's missing brain.
Kennedy's Brain is a very odd chestnut. Louise's somewhat messy but nobly-motivated questing proves a good metaphor for the whole book, in fact: motivated by righteous anger but executed with a bit of a muddle.
Mankell has always had an eccentric style, and with the Wallander stories and his occasional standalones, he has always plotted so superbly and created such engaging characters that that eccentricity works well with those strengths. Here, though, something's off. The plotting is in fact a bit of a muddle, and the atmosphere doesn't quite work. Louise's intense grief is supposed to arouse, one supposes, empathy and drive, but instead it bogs things down. The constant protestations of grief get tiresome, and rather than create urgency they almost overwhelm to the point of catalepsy. The plot kicks along in starts, somewhat perfunctorily at times, not feeling particularly fleshed out in terms of what has actually happened. Yes, he perfectly creates the sense of some kind of malevolence, and eventually we find out what that is more specifically, but there's little detail. Especially concerning a character's disappearance which seems odd from the very page it happens: thrown in just to give Louise something more to puzzle over but which increasingly seems to go nowhere.
At one point, one character says of another: "he could sometimes be a bit high-flown, but he really meant it", and that also sums up this book very well. Occasionally the prose is high-flown (Mankell is a great one for planting melodramatic thoughts and scripting high-flown dialogue), some of the plotting is a little odd, and overall bits of it feel underdeveloped (while others are crafted in great detail), but when the pen is laid down, you know this was motivated by strong feeling, and has noble motives. Mankell really means this, and is really impassioned when he is able to hit upon the AIDs topic. The scenes at the hospice are among the best in the book. You know - if you didn't already - this is a topic close to Mankell's heart, but that it is so close means that bits of the book feel forced out so he can plot a novel round the issue.
The book has it's strengths: Louise is fascinating, when removed from her sadness, and Mankell's crusading is powerful, as is his evocation of place and atmosphere. But the mystery elements are sketched scantily, and overall it doesn't come together too well as a thriller. It's a noble but flawed book (and the title, which reflects an obsession of Henrik's, is irritatingly irrelevant, and that obsession, annoyingly, only symbolic) though I would say it is worth reading for its strengths, and the fact that it's Mankell.
Kennedy's Brain is a very odd chestnut. Louise's somewhat messy but nobly-motivated questing proves a good metaphor for the whole book, in fact: motivated by righteous anger but executed with a bit of a muddle.
Mankell has always had an eccentric style, and with the Wallander stories and his occasional standalones, he has always plotted so superbly and created such engaging characters that that eccentricity works well with those strengths. Here, though, something's off. The plotting is in fact a bit of a muddle, and the atmosphere doesn't quite work. Louise's intense grief is supposed to arouse, one supposes, empathy and drive, but instead it bogs things down. The constant protestations of grief get tiresome, and rather than create urgency they almost overwhelm to the point of catalepsy. The plot kicks along in starts, somewhat perfunctorily at times, not feeling particularly fleshed out in terms of what has actually happened. Yes, he perfectly creates the sense of some kind of malevolence, and eventually we find out what that is more specifically, but there's little detail. Especially concerning a character's disappearance which seems odd from the very page it happens: thrown in just to give Louise something more to puzzle over but which increasingly seems to go nowhere.
At one point, one character says of another: "he could sometimes be a bit high-flown, but he really meant it", and that also sums up this book very well. Occasionally the prose is high-flown (Mankell is a great one for planting melodramatic thoughts and scripting high-flown dialogue), some of the plotting is a little odd, and overall bits of it feel underdeveloped (while others are crafted in great detail), but when the pen is laid down, you know this was motivated by strong feeling, and has noble motives. Mankell really means this, and is really impassioned when he is able to hit upon the AIDs topic. The scenes at the hospice are among the best in the book. You know - if you didn't already - this is a topic close to Mankell's heart, but that it is so close means that bits of the book feel forced out so he can plot a novel round the issue.
The book has it's strengths: Louise is fascinating, when removed from her sadness, and Mankell's crusading is powerful, as is his evocation of place and atmosphere. But the mystery elements are sketched scantily, and overall it doesn't come together too well as a thriller. It's a noble but flawed book (and the title, which reflects an obsession of Henrik's, is irritatingly irrelevant, and that obsession, annoyingly, only symbolic) though I would say it is worth reading for its strengths, and the fact that it's Mankell.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition
I love Mankell's Wallander series. Even if the case of a Wallander mystery isn't all that great, the writing and the description of the characters are so good that it's always a great read.
Not so with "Kennedy's Brain". The heroine is set on a wild goose chase around the world, characters are being killed and in the end nothing gets resolved.
Surely, the topic of this book, which is grave, could have been dealt with in a different fashion. In the framework of a thriller it doesn't work at all, the characters that fill this novel all have an 'invented' feeling about them, the dialogues are constructed, as is the whole plot.
Not a good read. Sorry.
Not so with "Kennedy's Brain". The heroine is set on a wild goose chase around the world, characters are being killed and in the end nothing gets resolved.
Surely, the topic of this book, which is grave, could have been dealt with in a different fashion. In the framework of a thriller it doesn't work at all, the characters that fill this novel all have an 'invented' feeling about them, the dialogues are constructed, as is the whole plot.
Not a good read. Sorry.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
So, this is a novel about a Swedish archaeologist called Louise Cantor, and her quest to find out why her (adult) son has died. It's apparently suicide, but of course Louise doesn't believe it and sets off on a quest to find out the truth that takes her from Greece to Sweden to Spain to Australia to Mozambique and a few other places besides. Louise's plane-hopping doesn't do much for her state of mind (or her carbon footprint, let's be honest) but it makes for a gripping tale, and one that's a bit ambitious in its scope.
The globetrotting makes the novel seem quite exotic, especially the African sections. Mankell works with a theatre group in Mozambique, so I guess he's qualified to write about the place. He makes it seem dark and dangerous, full of mystery and suspense. But then he does that with the sleepy little town of Ystad in the Wallander novels.
I enjoyed reading this very much, and it's certainly a great page turner. The main character of Louise is pretty well drawn (better done than Linda Wallander in `Before the Frost') as a distraught mother on a mission, so perhaps Mankell is learning how to portray women. Having said that, I found the character of Lucinda, the woman she meets in Mozambique, quite hard to believe. I always have issues with Mankell's dialogue and this novel is no exception - there are some dreadful bits of dialogue. Maybe it's the translator.
The novel as a whole is rather melodramatic too, which could put some readers off. It reminded me of `King Solomon's Mines' sometimes, and `The Island' at other times. If you made a movie of this book, it would probably be quite corny, and I wasn't too sure I bought the stuff about human experiments on Aids sufferers.
Even so, it's a good read, full of atmosphere, with a good, if not entirely believable, story that will keep you turning the pages.
The globetrotting makes the novel seem quite exotic, especially the African sections. Mankell works with a theatre group in Mozambique, so I guess he's qualified to write about the place. He makes it seem dark and dangerous, full of mystery and suspense. But then he does that with the sleepy little town of Ystad in the Wallander novels.
I enjoyed reading this very much, and it's certainly a great page turner. The main character of Louise is pretty well drawn (better done than Linda Wallander in `Before the Frost') as a distraught mother on a mission, so perhaps Mankell is learning how to portray women. Having said that, I found the character of Lucinda, the woman she meets in Mozambique, quite hard to believe. I always have issues with Mankell's dialogue and this novel is no exception - there are some dreadful bits of dialogue. Maybe it's the translator.
The novel as a whole is rather melodramatic too, which could put some readers off. It reminded me of `King Solomon's Mines' sometimes, and `The Island' at other times. If you made a movie of this book, it would probably be quite corny, and I wasn't too sure I bought the stuff about human experiments on Aids sufferers.
Even so, it's a good read, full of atmosphere, with a good, if not entirely believable, story that will keep you turning the pages.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Unlikeable characters and stupid plotlines with no resolution
This is not really a novel, its a rant about AIDS and the lack of empathy of the West, disguised as a novel. Read more
Published 15 days ago by Heligany
Dull stereotypes in a throroughly unoriginal plot.
This is an extremely poor book. The story is littered with little asides that seem to serve no purpose other than to allow the author to express his own prejudices (he seems to... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Yoness inc.
What an oddly inconclusive novel
When I picked this book up to read, it was with some measure of excitement and anticipation. A couple of days later, reaching the last page, I felt a bit puzzled -what an oddly... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Alison McVey
Inspector Wallander?
I haven't read this yet but I do have one concern: The picture of the book shows the words "An Inspector Wallander Mystery", yet not one of the 14 reviewers even mentions him. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Mrs. A. M. Kenward
Very disappointing
I have read a lot of Mankell's 'Wallander' novels and a few of his stand-alone novels and would unhesitatingly give each one five stars, but I thought this novel was dreadful. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Mahogany Gaspipes
Mamkell's "Kennedy's Brain"
Delivered in time and in excellent order; I have yet to read this book but it looks as though it will be as good as his other books.
Published 13 months ago by Pierre Lebec
Implausible woman's book
This book is more for women than for men. A mother investigates the death by suicide or murder of her only child. Read more
Published 17 months ago by P. A. Doornbos
NOt Wallender, but.....
For once he has a female focus that leads us to a part of Africa few if any of us might visit. Unlike his Wallenders, the heroin solves the crime but goes home and is clearly set... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Camillo
Mankell's fire running on low coal
I'm a huge fan of the Wallander series, so picked this up from my local library hoping for several hours of pleasure in the company of the exceptional and renowned Swedish author. Read more
Published 21 months ago by Alice Cribbins
Strong moral tale with some plotting weaknesses
Middle-aged Swedish archaeologist discovers her son dead in bed. Evidence points to an overdose but she beieves he has been murdered. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Adrenalin Streams
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