Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
INCISIVE BOOK, EXCELLENTLY TRANSLATED..., 8 Dec 2007
This is the first Indridason book which I have read and I found it excellent.
The action moves back and forth from the finding of a skeleton in a draining lake to the lives of the detectives and then to the lives of the students in communist East Germany. By the time that the lake begins to fill again, many old tragedies have been exhumed and explored....
The characters are alive and the concerns and interests of the young students are explored in detail and we come to care about the experiences of Lothar, Emil, Hannes, Tomas and particularly Ilona whose story is the connecting thread which holds them all together (or splits them apart).
The detectives, Erlendur, Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli,are real people and friends:
"What's the book called?" Erlendur asked.
"'More than Just Desserts'" Elinborg said. "It's a pun. Justice - get it - and desserts, and it's not just desserts..."
"Very droll" Erlendur said, casting a look of astonishment at Sigurdur Oli, who was trying to smother his laughter.
They have their moments of fun and laughter but also their personal tragedies:
"Erlunder lay staring up into the darkness...He thought about his brother, for whom he had been searching in vain all these years. His bones were lying somewhere.
Perhaps deep in a fissure, or higher up in the mountains than he could ever imagine....
'Don't you ever get tired of all this?'
Tired of this endless search."
Of course, the search is a metaphor for Erlendur's search for meaning and also for his profession which entails a constant search.
In this case, to find the identity of the body with the hole in its skull and also for some reason for its death.
It is only at the end that it all becomes apparent and yet another case has been solved. But many other questions have been answered and relationships have been explored.
The late, much lamented Bernard Scudder has translated this book with a sensitive touch, maintaining the tone and essence of the story and conveying to us the effect of the cold, icy environment on young and old alike.
Do buy it, it's well worth reading...
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14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good - but not his best, 1 Sep 2007
I first discovered this author when he won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger a couple of years ago. Since then I've read all his books that have been translated into English and this is my least favourite. The action swings between modern Iceland and 1950s Leipzig where students from Iceland and the Eastern Bloc countries who have shown sufficient zeal for the party line (or may simply be useful to it in the future)are given sponsored university places. Once there, however, some of them realise that Eastern Germany is not the socialist paradise they've been led to believe. In the meantime, in modern day Iceland a body has been discovered in a draining lake. This isn't a bad book - the police personnel are as interesting as ever - but once you've gone past the student-who-knows-all-the-answers-to-the-world's-problems stage yourself, it's hard to care about such characters. I just didn't like any of the students in Leipzig enough to care what happened to them.
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10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Arnaldur Indridason - The Draining Lake, 12 Sep 2007
Brilliant, this. Indridason's style here is simply amazing, blending supremember intelligece with sensitivity and subtlety. His prose is so clear, but so balanced, poetic in that unflashy way that the very best poetry has, only very occasionally sparking with a lyrical sentence or an unexpected piercing insight. It is a joy to just read the prose, let alone follow the story, and that is excellent as well. It feels more "important" than Voices, but is just as gripping and mysterious. As in novels before, Indridason's unveils things gradually, allowing the reader a sense that they know what is going on, but in the end they don't fully, and that is where the power comes from. It reminds me of how Rendell writing as Barbara Vine goes about things, hinting and allowing educated guesses but always holding something vital back, and comparison to Rendell is possibly the highest complement I can accord. The Draining Lake is Indridason's best achievement so far, a gripping novel that's easy and inspiring to read, the kind of novel which makes the business of writing look easy while concealing how much sweat, graft, and craft went into the whole process. Excellent insights harking back to the cold war sensibilities, a revising of that kind of novel, the whole thing is excellent from beginning to end. This is the kind of novel which shows why translated novels won the Gold Dagger in 3 out of 4 years: when other countries produce novels like this, unless they raise their game most British crime novelists don't stand a chance.
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