Crime Novels From The World, 1- Henning Mankell, Sweden

I love to read. But I develop an addiction for a single author, and can easily spend a year reading no other book than by him/her. So this year, I'm going to chose a genre addiction, and the choice fell on crime novels.

I chose crime novels, because they're portable. Their reading can be taken to Starbucks, to Second Cup, to a parking/restaurant/theater/ waiting for an unbelievable tardy companion. I also love to learn more about cultures, since I've never traveled outside Lebanon, and yes, countless other "serious" authors probe their societies, or their childhood memories in search for an explanation, an understanding or an elucidation of some social norm, I find crime authors, when they themselves are "serious" to bring a more objective look on society, with a wider scope of people and places, albeit at the detriment of a less detailed social and psychological study.

This is one of the rare times in which I know what I actually want to do, or, what I actually want from reading.

Proceeding with the blog's title, I got a book of Mankell, Les Chiens de Riga (The Dogs of Riga), as a Christmas gift. Even though I asked for it, having finished the book, I regretted my choice.

The reason for this, is that the book feels like a journal, more than a novel. It is a very detailed account of what Mankell's Inspector Wallander does every minute of the day. It's like an omni-present camera.
The character is modern, which means single looking for something in life, a meaning or a purpose, with a complicated relationship with his father.

The book is long, long as in unecessarily long; to me a crime novel, if it exceeds 200 pages, is just fishing for boring details and cliched plot twists. This is exactly what the novel degrades too after the essential plot givens are established.

Even though I just finished this book 2 weeks ago, I can't remember much of the details, and I didn't retain much that interested me, except for the writing style, which could have been mirrored in the characters as well. I felt the writing to be in blocks, with no smooth transitions between Wallander's inner thoughts and his present surroundings. Even though I'm used to this technique, I find it in Mankell to be too mechanic, and, consequently, I found the characters to be mechanic as well. I'm not sure if that is a representation of Swedish writing, or of Mankell's, but it is this particularly strange writing technique that might push me to get another book by him; definitely another book by a Swedish author, if I can spot one here.

I have now re-started Ian Rankin's Fleshmarket Close. I will post my thoughts once I finish it.