Nordic humor and satire from Hallgrímur Helgason

I've run into deadpan Danes, wisecracking Swedes, jovial Icelanders, and Norwegian authors who enjoyed a good joke, and the one Finn I've met was a gregarious hotel clerk who radiated benevolence and good fellowship. In short, if dour, gloomy Nordics exist, they cheer up when they see me coming.

So I was not shocked by the following in Hallgrímur Helgason's The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning:

"I understand the smoking ban is on its way up here [to Iceland], in a sunny sailboat named the Al Gore. ... Only when you've had some fifty warless years do you start worrying about things like air quality in bars."

and

"Getting Friendly off my back was like dumping a loud girlfriend with a Texan accent and a cell-phone addiction."

and

"She smells like a New Jersey Devils' banner that's been hanging on the dim corner of a seedy Newark lounge for the past twenty years."

and

"I don't know. I just hate it when people discriminate against me, only because I kill people."

Along the way, Hallgrímur's satirical targets include sanctimonious public apologies and spurious declarations of corporate duty to the customer. And I have to think that his decision to make the protagonist a Croat is a bit of sly fun at the expense all the crime novelists who have found it expedient in recent years to people Europe with Balkan characters, usually one per book, generally dark and forbidding, all the better a background against which we are asked to contemplate big subjects like human depravity and the vicissitudes of history. (I can't be sure, but I think those characters have tended to be Croats rather than Serbs, possibly because Serbs were the bad guys in the recent Balkan wars, as opposed to World War II, when Croats filled that role.)

The Icelandic author's decision to make his protagonist/narrator a foreigner also affords him the opportunity to observe the oddities of his own country: its silence, its high prices, its cleanliness, its difficult language, its beautiful women. And the briefer glimpses of the protagonist's native Split tally with my recollections of that marvelously situated city.

I'm not sure how well a middle section works in which the multi-named protagonist has an emotional crisis and undergoes a kind of exorcism. The section is melodramatic, and Hallgrímur has more fun when the soul-savers turn out to engage in some of the same crimes as the protagonist does.  But even there Hallgrímur works in a few good observations and jokes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

4x4: The meme

My fellow award-winning blogger J. Kingston Pierce has tagged me with a meme tailor-made for Detectives Beyond Borders. The meme is built around questions involving the number four, and I especially liked the ones that involved travel and places where one has lived.

Since Jeff expanded the list of questions from eight to ten, I don't feel too badly about making my own adjustments. And you can do the same.


Four places I'd like to go or things I'd like to do:

1) Visit the Angkor temple complex in Cambodia

2) Visit the Ajanta caves in India

3) Hike the length of Hadrian's Wall

4) Complete a short walk I began a few years ago, along the West Kennet Avenue from Avebury to the Sanctuary


Four places I've lived:

1) Montreal

2) Rome

3) Philadelphia

4) The Boston area, which leads to my own category of ...


Four places I've lived in the Boston area:

1) Waltham

2) Brookline, whose no-overnight-parking regulations seemed intended to keep out the folks from ...

3) Brighton

4) Somerville


Four places I've been on vacation:

1) Split, Croatia. By the shimmering blue Adriatic Sea, in a hotel within the precincts of Diocletian's Palace. One of the places that has inspired me with a desire to live there.

2) 桂林 (Guilin, China.) Sweaty, hot, amid spotty air-conditioning and other trappings of a section of China making the uncertain transition to Western-style consumer capitalism. Also home of the near-hallucinogenic beauty of the sandstone natural spires, and the only place I have seen anyone playing a guitar while passenger on a bicycle.

3) Israel/Palestinian territories. Alas, it's not as easy as it once was to visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs to see blind old Muslim sage-like men praying at a site so fundamental to our sense of our own culture.

4) Istanbul, in particular Hagia Sophia, quite possibly the most influential building in the history of the world, and certainly one of the most beautiful. One can see the gallery mosaics up close, and there is something special about seeing and touching the rough, unfinished stone that lines the spiral stairways to the upper levels.


Four foods or drinks I have liked:

1) A nice, medium-rare steak

2) A good Brunello da Montalcino

3) Fresh raspberries

4) Deviled eggs


Four (with ties) books or movies I could read or watch again:

1) Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility

2) Roughing It

3) Any of books 7 through 16 of Bill James' Harpur and Iles novels

4) Seven Samurai, Stray Dog and, appropriately for repeated viewing, Rashomon


Four works of art before which I have stood (or sat) either in deep relaxation, as close as I get to a meditative state, or with a profound sense of receptiveness:

1) Piero della Francesca's Resurrection and Montefeltro Altarpiece (Scan by Mark Harden)

2) Velázquez's Las Meninas

3) Rembrandt's Bathsheba at Her Bath

4) Trajan's Column


Four literary, scientific, artistic or political figures from the past whom I'd like to watch at work or meet for dinner and drinks:

1) Giotto

2) Jane Austen

3) Mark Twain

3a) Charles Darwin

4) Jawaharlal Nehru. Anyone who can write a book of world history from memory and addressed as a series of letters to his daughter is a man to be reckoned with. Anyone who can write a book about his own country and call it The Discovery of India has a passionate intellect that's worth anyone's interest. And the man had a few practical accomplishments as well, I think.


Answers have begun to arrive from four people I think might take it upon themselves to answer these questions:

1) Sucharita Sarkar (yet another evocative post from one of my favorite writers in blogland.)

2) Seana Graham (good reading!)

3) Adrian McKinty (good reading about bridges and food!)

4) Maxine Clarke

and

5) Kerrie, who stepped in graciously for Maxine and talks about her journey from Paradise to Hell and back. Thanks!

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Inside-out in Split

By popular demand, a photo from Split, Croatia, showing some of the odd views that result when a city grows up inside the precincts of a palace, that of the Roman emperor Diocletian. The man did things in a big way.


The popular demander said he'd recommend Split highly. So would I. It's one of the two or three places I've visited where I was overcome with the spontaneous thought of how pleasant it would be to live there, even if I didn't live within the old palace walls.

The clear sea air and the blue Adriatic waters inspired in me an unprecedented desire to get up early in the morning and go for walks before breakfast.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

One city, three scripts

This has nothing to do with crime fiction, but it is pretty cool, I think.

All three of these samples are from monuments in Split, Croatia, and they reflect something of that clement and gorgeously situated city's diverse heritage.

Above, read some Latin; at right, try some Hebrew; and below, Croatian (the old Glagolitic script, I think.)


© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Small world

The three Croatian crime writers whose names I have recently discovered (Goran Tribuson, Pavao Pavlicic and Jurica Pavicic) have done much writing of other kinds: science fiction, journalism, film criticism and, if I remember correctly, non-crime novels. I guessed that this was one by-product of their membership in a small group. Since they write in a language not widely read, perhaps these men have to be versatile if they want to make a living writing.

Then I received another charming piece of evidence that Croatian writers are part of a tightly knit community. The owner of the Internet parlor that I made the Dalmatian Coast headquarters of Detectives Beyond Borders not only was acquainted with Pavicic's work, he knew Pavicic himself. God forbid I should spend more than, say, forty-five minutes a day blogging while on vacation, but that place left me with a good feeling about Split. The owner and staff played good music -- Jimi Hendrix, just enough Grateful Dead to avoid making me sick, and, best of all, Brazil's Caetano Veloso.

I asked the owner if Veloso had ever played in Split. No, he said, "This is the end of the world."

I hope he gets the opportunity to see Veloso one day and also to achieve his real dream: to see Neil Young. For now, though, Split is just fine as the smallish, lively, gorgeously situated, historically rich city that it is.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Goran Tribuson
Pavao Pavličić
Jurica Pavičić

Crime zone Croatia

Lars at Krimi-Couch adds the name of Jurica Pavicic to the list of Croatian crime writers. A quick and dirty search turns up this on Pavicic:

On December 7th 1991 home of Mihajlo Zec, well-to-do Zagreb butcher and ethnic Serb, was visited by a group of reserve policeman. In those days such visits usually ended with people being taken away only to be found executed. Zec apparently tried to escape and was killed. His wife Marija and 12-year old daughter Aleksandra were taken in a police vehicle and later executed. The perpetrators were relatively quickly arrested and admitted the killings during interrogation. But due to procedural screw-up their confessions were invalid and whole criminal case was dropped. Instead of receiving prison sentences, the killers later received military decorations and pensions. The killings later served as inspiration for Ovce od gipsa, novel by Jurica Pavicic, later adapted into controversial movie Svjedoci.

This has overtones of Dario Fo's play Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and it suggests once again that I was too hasty to assume that no Croatian crime writers had written about life in their own war zone of the 1990s.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Jurica Pavičić

Please disregard the previous post

It turns out that at least one Croatian author has written crime novels that take advantage of the country's recent political changes in ways that make me wish his work were available in English. Goran Tribuson's novels about the private investigator Nikola Banic give "a historical panorama of the Croatian society, from the beginning of the fall of socialism to the ups and downs of the transitional period. Tribuson has not only given literary legitimacy to the crime genre in Croatian literature, he also bases novels of this genre on the everyday reality of the local community."

Banic, a "Croatian version of Phil Marlowe, is a slightly unconventional detective type because he is a jazz fan, a beer drinker, a dedicated smoker and a man burdened with many family problems." Because of this, according to the article from which this information is taken, "he has become very popular among the readers."

On the one hand, this may seem an overly familiar description. On the other, interesting things can happen when sensitive authors adapt the traditional American hard-boiled form to the situations of their own countries. Perhaps Tribuson is similar to Yasmina Khadra in this respect. If so, he's well worth reading.

In one respect, both Goran Tribuson and Pavao Pavlicic, another Croatian writer, are similar to to such American crime writers as Frederic Brown, Donald Westlake and the early Elmore Leonard, in that all have written in more than one popular genre. Leonard wrote westerns; the others have all written science fiction in addition to their crime stories.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007
Technorati tags:
Goran Tribuson
Pavao Pavličić

No-crime zone, Part II (Croatia)

Here in Split on the Dalmatian coast, residents love their city and country and are fond of sailing, staying out late, and reading lots of books. The latter does not include not much crime fiction other than the occasional Agatha Christie, though, according to a native informant. Though Split missed the heaviest fighting during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, enough activity spilled over into Split and the waters of the Adriatic to have generated some war-zone crime writing a la Philp Kerr or Don Fesperman.

Of course, neither of those two novelists is a native of the war and post-war zones about which he wrote. Perhaps people who have recently lived through war have other things to do than write detective stories about it. Maybe Croatia needs a few more years as peaceful, "normal" country (May it happen speedily and soon!) before its authors begin to discover possibilities in crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007