April 2017 book and film review

BOOKS

COP KILLER, by Maj Sjowell and Per Walloo.
A divorcee goes missing in Skania, southern Sweden, then is found strangled and half buried in a muddy pond. Now promoted to commander of the National Murder Squad, Martin Beck is called in from Stockholm with his assistant and old friend, Lennart Kollberg. Evidence appears to point to a recently released murderer who lives nearby, and his superiors would love him to wrap the case up in a neat little bundle, but Beck isn't convinced the man is responsible. The investigation continues, with agonizing slowness. But Martin Beck is never a man to hurry...
          I began reading the ten-book series of Martin Beck stories in 2008, and I've been taking one a year away on holiday ever since. Now I'm on number 9, and I congratulate myaself on my restraint in not devouring them more quickly.
          Sjowell and Wahloo's books have been immensely influential since they came out in the 60s and 70s, with Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankel and innumerable other crime writers around the world acknowledging their debt to their calm, if sometimes horrific, procedural-based crime thrillers. Their brand of world-weary socialism is not quite as fashionable as it was, but more's the pity for that. The co-writers deconstruct the brave new world of modern Swedish society and its militarised, centralised and inefficient police force with devastating insight and humour. Terrific.

THE PAST, by Tessa Hadley.
A middle-class family from the Smoke descends on their holiday cottage in the West Country for three weeks of bucolic life. But with such a potentially explosive mix of disparate personalities living in each other's pockets for so long, something has to happen. And it does...
      Tessa Hadley is widely respected both here and in America, where she regularly contributes to the prestigious New Yorker magazine. And that she can write there is no doubt. This is certainly superior to, say, Up Close, by Shelagh Weeks (see last month's review), even though it covers quite similar territory, but oh dear, this is not what I call great writing. Intelligent members of the chattering class winding themselves up a treat over the minutiae of their individual brands of existential angst is not what I really look for in a book these days, if it ever was.
       I have said in the past I tend to go after the greats of an earlier age, the dead novelists society, you might say, the French, the Ruskies, that sort of thing, and I am not about to apologize for that. I want real class in my writing, and there are very few writers alive today who can do it: Will Self, perhaps, or Andres Neumann. Other than them, you're hard put to find anything current that will stand comparison with Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, or EM Forster. And until you've explored those geniuses and others in some detail, you can afford to leave Tessa, God bless her, on the shelf.

FROM PUSHKIN TO BUIDA: AN ANTHOLOGY OF RUSSIAN SHORT STORIES, edited by Robert Chandler.
Being what it says on the label: a collection of the greatest short stories to come out of Russia in the last 200 years, collected by Robert Chandler, who has himself provided a fresh translation for many of them. From The Queen of Spades, perhaps one of the most famous short stories in any language, to more modern offerings by Buida and Solzhenitsyn, you can dip in and out wherever you please, which is perhaps the editor's intent. With all due respect to la Hadley, this is what I call writing.

Please see next blog for movies of the month.