Finished reading Eva's Eye this evening, Karin Fossum's first Inspector Sejer Novel. At first I felt distracted and occasionally bored, feeling that Fossum hadn't yet found the right pitch and angle, and she hadn't yet discovered the staple of the following novels, the Sejer/Skarre relationship. But then, suddenly and without much warning, the book bowled me over; in fact, it's no exaggeration to claim the reader becomes almost disoriented as the book suddenly careens in a number of disturbing directions amidst the mundane quietude of a small town/city in Norway. It is pretty obvious from the beginning that the neurotic and struggling artist Eva has some connection to the death of a prostitute (her former best) and the murder of a man named Enarsson, whose body is found floating in the river that divides the town--discovered by Eva and her young daughter,who refuses to report the discovery to the police and later lies about it. But initially we struggle to understand what this connection might be;Eva seems as far removed from a murderess as possible, and Fossum remains tantalizingly vague about the nature of the connection until the prostitute explodes into in the middle of the novel, She is confident, intelligent, and utterly unapologetic about her profession which she sees no more scandalous than other vocations, and delivers some wonderfully caustic observations of art being a far greater prostitution than the selling of one's body--a selling, as she puts it, of soul and emotion. She is such a fresh, unorthodox and unexpected presence, that Fossum wisely presents a long sustained flashbook of the relationship of the two women, relegating the traditional, yet empathetic, Sejer to the margins of the novel until the closing chapters. The book is hardly a procedural novel at all. In, fact Fossum has indicated she was halfway into the writing of the novel before she decided to turn it into a mystery. Rather it is its best as a meditation (Fossum was originally a poet and a social worker) on primal emotions and passions lurking in the most prosaic and conventional of environments, providing some interesting observations on female sexuality, repression, and prostitution. In short, in a brief period of time eva comes close to becoming a part-time prostitute, only to witness her friend's brutal murder, and flees, but only after grabbing much of the money hidden about the apartment, and engages in the beginning of a full blown vendetta against the man she mistakenly believes to be the killer. Her killing of this man, in the book's greatest irony, is the most brutal act in the novel--or at the very least, matches the brutality of the original murder. In a Jungian sense, she and the "whore-killer are shadows of each other.
At one point Eva undertakes an odyssey northward, to a cabin owned by her friend, in hopes of locating several million kroner hidden there. In a book of eerie psychological transferences, Eva has become her prostitute-friend, or at least sees it her right to appropriate what her friend achieved in power and promised freedom, after years of denying herself and her daughter, pursuing an art that pushes her to the fringes of the town's society. In return, as stated earlier, she will kill her friend's killer. As she travels well into the Norwegian forest we rather how far these events have carried her, deep within the very darknessof her soul. Darkness, not as a designation of evil, but an unknown, othering, beyond and prior to words and reason. As cinema itself does.
At one point, she barely escapes discovery by the enraged husband of her friend, in search of the same money. She hides from him, in what is possibly one of the most stunning images in nordic noir, by sinking down, her entire body, into the collected waste beneath an outdoor toilet. A primeval death and rebirth scene if there ever was one, plunging to the most elemental depths of human existence.
To be sure the intense melodrama that resides at the center of the novel is hardly Fossum's most sophisticated writing, but there is an unrelenting power in this sustained flashback, although it documents a radical shift in self-identity that at times stretches credibility, that communicates stunning levels of psychological insight and power. The very rawness of the book provide Fossum a space into which to entertain so many vivid reflections on female sexuality and psychology. And these two women, with all their vulnerabilities, are possibly her two most authentic female characters.
There are certain resonances to the book that reflect poignantly on noir tradition both in general terms as well as within the particular parameters of nordic noir, particularly in its emphasis on primal arcs of descent.
In addition to this and imagery of unmasking, the peculiar art form practiced by Eva, to an extent emblematic of the entire noir enterprise. She creates a canvas of total and absolute blackness, and then scrapes away layers of paint, uncovering assorted shapes, angled designs and glimmer of light.
A few interesting points. Eva's sense that people don't deliberatelystep over ethical and moral boundaries, but stumble over them, and once there cannot turn back.
Also, the notion that the cause of aggression is always fear.
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