I wonder if this is true from The Financial Times:” Somehow these gloomy, bitter books speak to something that we also living in comfortable societies want–a risk-free tour of misery violence and disillusion, strung together in a powerful narrative.” WTF. Imagine this thousand-dollar-a-suit guy (or am I skimping here) in the midst of corporate takeovers, trade treaties, hedge funds and stockmarket sorcery, crawling free of the straightjacket just long enough to contemplate noiriish gloom before screwing himself back into the financial-time-space-continuum. God the original big-bucks-banger. He does turn a nice phrase, I”ll give him that, that lovely semantic inversion–“we also living in comfortable societies want.” And I should point out he is specifically referencing scandi-noir. Intriguing he sees it as risk-free (unheard of financially I would think), but is noir really that safe, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it provides momentary release from out suffocating safety…net. Reminds me of that moment in one of Karim Fossum’s superb noir novels when Inspector Sejer explains that regular citizens are drawn to scenes of murderas a way of escaping self-loathing, resulting from the decent, boring spectacles of their daily lives.Finally a little from Philip K. Dick (though I’m still working on my first slice) his brilliant novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep where mechanical animals are the rage and people have mood enhancing devices (mood synthesizers if you like) and one women likes to set it to the depression level for being so absolutely undepressed all the time.
Slice #2. It sometimes is observed that nordic noir is film noir minus shadows. Certainly true of the novels which rarely use night settings. They do have tons of bad weather, and one essential component, a landscape that is essentially mysterious, and unknowable, a nature, that however loved or cherished, unearths that part of us for which there no words, only images.. A brief point from Wallander’s
White Lioness captures this with a delicious precision: Skane [rural south Sweden] is a lovely place.Yet secretive as well. What seemed at first to be so flat could unexpectedly change and reveal deep hollows, like isolated islands with houses and and farms. She never ceased to be amazed by the changing nature of the landscape. A relatively bland observation perhaps when viewed minus the context that she is a few monents from the end of her life within one of those islands populated by an-ex-KGB operative and a black assassIn training to kill Mendala.
