Skip to main content

The Nightmare / Lars Kepler

By

It seems more than a bit incongruous that Sweden, a neutral peace-loving nation, would be one of the world’s top weapons producers and exporters. The weapons industry is the context for this latest thriller from the Swedish couple writing under the pseudonym Lars Kepler. It’s a chase from start to finish when a contract killer is hired to hunt down peace activist Penelope Fernandez when she inadvertently finds herself in an intrigue involving government officials and illegal weapons exports to Sudan. At first she and her boyfriend are relentlessly hunted on a remote island in the Stockholm archipelago (with a very strange stop at the summer house of a faded TV personality who tries to involve them in sex games… hunh?), then the chase switches to Stockholm (with an exciting shoot-out at Östermalms market hall and the German embassy near Gärdet).

The translation is a little spotty-- there were some odd lexical choices. A main theme which comes up again and again is to “reap your nightmare”. Okay, I understand it, it’s probably a direct translation from Swedish, but would it maybe have been better to say in English “realize your worst nightmare” or “live your worst nightmare?” Here’s an example of another unwieldy translation—“She had fashioned an elaborate arrangement of her hair on the back of her neck, even sprayed it heavily to keep it in place, but now it looks just right.” (okay, so maybe the authors and editors are partially responsible for that mess, and I shouldn’t blame the translator entirely, but...). Translations always present challenges, but I have read some excellent translations from Swedish-- Marlaine Delargy’s translation of Harbor by John Ajvide Lindqvist, for example, comes to mind. For some reason the translator of The Nightmare was changed from previous Lars Kepler title The Hypnotist, which I think was to the detriment of this new title.

The Nightmare reads more like a Robert Ludlum thriller rather than a Thomas Harris type novel like Silence of the Lambs or Red Dragon which The Hypnotist seemed to resemble a bit more. And Joona Linna just didn’t seem to play as integral a role in this one. Yes, he was always darting about and barking orders in his funny Finland-Swedish accent, but I still didn’t think his character was as central in this book, which was unfortunate. I enjoyed The Hypnotist, and while The Nightmare was a diversion, it definitely wasn’t as well-crafted.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

By
The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation.  Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Here we are / Graham Swift

By
This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.
Post a Comment
Read more

Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys

By
The mysterious figure of Bertha Mason provides much of the tension in Jane Eyre , but what does the reader really know about her?  Rochester provides some details of her past, but is his account reliable?  Caribbean author Jean Rhys attempted to tell the story of Rochester's insane (and perhaps misunderstood) wife in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea .  It's a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre .  I'm afraid Rochester doesn't come out looking good, though we always knew he had a bit of a wild side with his continental dalliances.  Anyway, there's a lot of interesting backstory about Bertha's origins in Jamaica, her real name, the tragic circumstances of her upbringing, and how she was established at Thornfield Hall.  Gosh, if Jane had only known all these details about Rochester, she might have taken St. John up on his offer of marriage.  All in all, Wide Sargasso Sea is pretty credible, but I missed Charlotte Bronte's flowery language, and of course th...
Post a Comment
Read more