Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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41 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A superb novel, 16 Jan 2007
Depths is a staggering novel. It's one of those books that sneaks into the lumber-room of your consciousness and entwines itself round whatever stuff you happen to keep in there.
Depths shares some of the qualities of Mankel's detective fiction. At the start of this novel, the protagonist, Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, appears to be a character not unlike Inspector Kurt Wallender - steadfast, disciplined, professional.
It is the start of the First World War. Sweden is non-aligned but worried about getting dragged into the conflict. Lars Tobiasson-Svartman is a hydrographer who has the job of carefully checking measurements of the depth of water in straits south of Stockholm.
From these unpromising beginnings, the prose builds an understated atmosphere. If you've read and enjoyed other Mankell novels, you'll recognise the stripped-back style.
The landscape is haunting (again, like the countryside in the Kurt Wallender books). In the case of Depths, most of the action takes place near an archipelago - and, in particular, on a single rocky outcrop, surrounded either by sea or ice. This setting becomes bewitching, unsettling.
The events that unfold in the course of the story are at once ordinary and brutally shocking. This is a novel that made me gasp out loud (which hasn't happened since I read Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, which is a totally different sort of book). You'll have to read it for yourself to find out why.
To summarise, this is a disturbing but completely gripping book. It reminded me most of Camus' L'Etranger (The Outsider) and various folk stories, but Depths is its own book - distinctive and haunting.
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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An exquisite novel of depth and suspense, 14 Dec 2006
The novel opens with the harrowing scene of a woman called Kristina Tacker as she escapes from a psychiatric asylum. She vaguely remembers that her husband had the rank of Commander in the Swedish army and that he was a hydrographical survey engineer. At this moment, in 1937, Kristina Tacker is fifty-seven and it is twelve years since she has uttered her last word.
The reader is immediately drawn into the suspense created by this opening as he follows the story of the main character, Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, a man obsessed by the depths of the sea and torn between two women, Sara Frederika and his wife Kristina Tacker. We follow his destiny at the beginning of World War I as he slowly loses his grip on his surroundings and becomes entangled in a web of lies and crimes which inexorably leads to his downfall. He ends up by living in a world entirely created by lies. Indeed he becomes an impostor; an impostor lives a life but the deceit involved lives a different life. It is the tragic fate of a man whose life has always been based on lunatic ideas and who has built his existence on distances and depths instead of seeking closeness.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
'Depths' at Sea and in the Mind:, 5 Dec 2007
Henkell produces a novel of outstanding literary worth, monumental and mesmerizing. One of the best books I have read.
Translated from Swedish into English, the story could easily be one of a far Northern remote community in Orkney or on the Shetland Islands. Such is the force and magnitude of writing, the war that is going-on pales into insignificance as the 'depths' of the main characters mind (Lars) is the real fight against a life of deceit, deception and incredulity. A life of measuring distances within his inner sanctum is eventually curtailed when his secret life is exposed against all odds.
'Depths' is almost poetic as the colour of language keeps the reader transfixed. To who is Lars really running, is every word a fabrication of what he is afraid of? Henkell exposes with ease the wide difference between reality and the irrationality of a secretive mind, which comes crashing down with a bump when eventually caught-out.
Graphic, vivid and highly recommended, 'Depths' is a masterpiece in fictional writing in portraying a perturbed male mind. A novel that can almost be felt as it is being read.
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