Vidar SundstølCritiques
Auteur de La terre des rêves
Critiques
The Devil's Wedding Ring par Vidar Sundstøl
My first impression of this book is place dropping - between Old Dutch Potato Chips, Minnesota Vikings, and Two Harbors - everything needed to place the story in Northern Minnesota. At times, its like the author is using a hammer to yell "THIS IS MINNESOTA".
As for the story itself, the author manages to write the feel of the area - residents who are of Scandinavian origins, reticent in words, distrusting of outsiders. The book is written by a Norwegian, and has direct ties back to Norway in an Investigator from Norway sent by the Government to investigate the death of a citizen.
There is a secondary story that follow a murder set in settler times - a medicine man disappears and his death goes mostly unnoticed.
The author had done his research. Between modern day North Shore, and the history of the region from the first settlers, it makes for a history book as much as a mystery. Unfortunately, the large amount of information tends to drag at times, bringing down the whole story. The other problem is the main character, Lance Hansen, doesn't add much to the book. He's a leading character, but is mostly a stand in for the events happening around him. I think he's written correct for the region, but he needs a greater inner voice to make him interesting.
The plot involves three deaths, all of which occur around the Summer Solstice. Peter Schram was a scholar studying the 13th century pagan legends associated with the local stave church and its wooden statue of Saint Nikuls. Before he split for Florida, Max was investigating Schram’s disappearance. More recently, Cecilie Wiborg, a graduate student also interested in Eidsborg’s stave church disappears. Max is drawn back for the funeral of his former partner, Knut Abrahamsen. This death was thought to be a suicide by drowning but Max doesn’t buy it and sticks around to solve the murder. It should be clear to anyone paying attention that these three deaths are linked and have something to do with the stave church. Sundstøl includes some clues to point the detectives toward that conclusion, including a ghostly monk messing with the Saint Nikuls statue in the middle of the night and a severed pigs head.
What seems like an interesting marriage of the detective and horror genres ultimately never really develops a head of steam. The plot has few surprises and seems to develop too slowly. Moreover, the characters are not well drawn. The relationship between Max and Tirill seems promising but is never fully explored. The concept of Christianity’s tense relationship with Paganism also is intriguing, but was not developed well enough to provide the reader with an understanding of the motivations that might drive people to commit murder or to engage in strange rituals in the woods at night.
Max Fjellanger left Norway and his job as a police officer in a small town in Telemark to become a private investigator in Florida. When he gets word that the man who had been his partner has died, he flies home for the funeral, intending a short visit. But there's something strange about the man's death. Why did he go back to the town where they had worked to fill his pockets with stones and throw himself into a lake? Max is also haunted by a memory: the sheriff he reported to refused to let him use an eager tracker dog when they were looking for a missing man – a man who was never found. Before long, he's postponing his trip back to the States to put his memory to rest.
Tirill Vesterli is a university librarian who reads Swedish crime novels in her spare time after putting her little boy to bed. She finds herself intrigued by unsolved crimes, including the case of a young graduate student who disappeared on Midsummer Eve. Tirill has a theory that the student's research about an ancient statue in a medieval stave church is the key to her fate, but when she took it to the police they laughed at her. Undaunted, she raises her theory with Max and, since the man Max and his partner had searched for had also been researching the church, they decide to delve deeper.
Sundstøl is known to American readers as the author of the Minnesota Trilogy, set on the north shore of Lake Superior. The first book in the trilogy, LAND OF DREAMS, won the Riverton Prize, Norway's highest honor for crime fiction. This story is a more modest affair. As in the trilogy, Sundstøl is inspired by landscapes and history. In this case, the stave church and its ancient statue is a well-known historical site in southern Norway, and the story imagines the possibility that ancient rituals involving the statue have been preserved and are still practised in secret in parallel with a tamer re-enactment that is performed for tourists.
Though the ending is overly cinematic, the two detectives are well-drawn and engaging companions on this eerie journey into small-town Norway and into its darker past.
The publisher's blurb tells us the plot and raves on about the author Vidar Sundstøl. Well the truth is that the book really is good and Vidar Sundstøl is a good writer. I found the story to be unusually scary for what is basically a murder mystery.
I received a review copy of "The Devil's Wedding Ring" by Vidar Sundstøl translated by Tiina Nunnally (University of Minnesota Press) through NetGalley.com.
This book is less of a gripping crime thriller than a meditation on the ways one's sense of self is intertwined with place, history, and folk. And that's fine -- in fact, I'm probably more inclined to enjoy the latter than the former. But this type of novel demands evocative writing, and I found the prose to be anything but. It's bland to the point of banal. We are treated to excruciatingly detailed descriptions of everything the characters do, whether or not those descriptions do anything to advance either the plot or the aforementioned philosophical questions. We get conversations between characters that manage to be both stilted and painfully mundane all at once. And we get the trope of having the protagonists' every emotion spelled out for us in detail, which I thought was the first thing any aspiring writer learned not to do.
So this is where I wonder if something was lost in translation. If I was more taken with the prose, I could have enjoyed the book (though it certainly still has moments where it is repetitive or forced). Maybe it works better in the native Norwegian.
Set in Minnesota, on the shores of Lake Superior, the book looks at the lives of the local communities; both the local people who are mainly of scandanavian origin and the native Ojibway. A brutal murder occurs in which a Norwegian man is beaten to death and the main suspect is his travelling companion. Investigated by Nyland, a police officer from Norway, the murder forms a backdrop to the bigger themes.
The main character is Lance Hansen, a park officer, who finds the body and is interested in local history. He becomes obsessed with the disappearance of an Ojibway man a hundred years ago and the potential link to his family. Similarly he realises through the course of the book that the murder of the Norwegian may be solved close to home.
Beautifully written (and translated) this book explores the themes of family and culture and is less of a crime novel and more of a literary novel. It makes one think and that is no bad thing - a very good book.
Lance Hanson has survived what he thought was an attack by his brother, Andy, at the end of Only the Dead and has been hiding out by pretending to be in Norway. In fact, he actually went to northern Ontario in Canada but now he is back in Minnesota where his niece Chrissy runs into him in a bar. He tells her he has been working undercover and makes her promise not to reveal that he’s back. He is still obsessed with the murder of a Norwegian tourist and he still suspects his brother’s involvement. As he learns more about his niece’s drug problems and her relationship with both her father and Lenny Diver, the man charged with the murder, he begins to learn more unsettling truths about his family than he had previously thought or wanted to know.
The Ravens is the third and final book in Norwegian author Vidar Sundstl’s Minnesota Trilogy. If the first book, Land of Dreams, was a strong police procedural and the second book, Only the Dead, was a claustrophobic thriller, in style The Ravens lies somewhere in between the two, a literary mystery, with elements of both books. It contains descriptions of the northern Minnesota landscape as well as Lance’s efforts to solve the case through examining the evidence like in the first book while maintain much of the mystic qualities of the second but here much of the book is taken up with the slow and heart-breaking dissolution of a family, torn apart by secrets and lies and Lance’s inability to act faced with knowledge that could free an innocent man but could also send someone he loves to prison. Most of all, like the first two books, The Ravens is an intelligent, beautifully written and original mystery novel almost lyrical in its prose, and a fitting end to the trilogy.
The Minnesota Trilogy is a bit different than what I expected. Sundstøl is a Norwegian author who lived on the North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota for some time, and when he returned to Norway he wrote this trilogy of books focusing on US Forest Service policeman Lance Hansen who discovers the dead body of a Norwegian tourist and kayaker at Baraga's Cross. The books cover Hansen's unofficial investigation: unofficial both because he was a witness, because the US Forest Service does not have jurisdiction over the murder inquiry, and finally, because he goes off-grid after the second book because he suspects his brother is the murderer.
It's also an unexpected trilogy for me because the books delve so heavily into Lance's obsession with local history, both Norwegian immigrants and Ojibwe ancestors: it's a crime story that's very much about the small communities that Hansen inhabits and visits and their history.
After a very brief and thriller-esque installment in book 2, The Ravens feels more like a sort of police procedural or amateur investigator story (because Lance's investigation was informal and not sanctioned by the police). The plot wasn't nearly as twisty as I'm used to reading, and in that sense the solving of the mystery was a bit of a let-down for me. It's still a devastating outcome in many ways, but the narrative arc of this book wasn't as fast-paced as I like.
It's a trilogy I'm glad I read both because of the setting--it's always refreshing to read a good book that doesn't take place on the East or West coasts-- and because it's quite different from other crime novels in terms of pacing and focus. While it's quite slow and meditative in parts, it's also a thriller in the second book.
I've reviewed the entire trilogy:
The Land of Dreams
Only the Dead
Are we all right then? Ready to carry on? I did warn you.
Okay . . .
We know from the first volume that Lance Hansen, a “forest cop” who patrols Cook County, Minnesota’s national forest lands, discovered the body of a murdered Norwegian tourist. Officials from the state and a Norwegian detective take on the investigation. In parallel, Hansen comes to believe that one of his ancestors who came to Minnesota from Norway may have murdered a native man, Swamper Caribou, in 1892. Hansen is literally haunted by the past, since he keeps seeing a man who appears to be from another time. And he’s haunted, too, by his suspicion that his brother Andy may be the man who killed the Norwegian visitor. That seems impossible when the detectives make an arrest, until Hansen uncovers another family secret: DNA evidence that the murderer had Indian ancestry had ruled Andy out as a suspect. But Hansen discovers that he and Andy have Ojibwe ancestry.
The second book is quite different in tone. Though it’s short, it’s packed with a densely threatening atmosphere. The mood is obsessive, claustrophibic, and almost hallucinogenic at times. It opens as Lance and Andy are engaged in a Minnesota tradition: hunting deer. They take turns driving the deer and shooting. But it’s clear from their tense interactions that they’re really hunting each other.
As the men track through the dense woods, we learn what happened in 1892 from the point of view of a young Norwegian immigrant as he crosses the frozen lake, hallucinating as he fights off hypothermia, frightened by the world he’s in and its savage inhabitants, determined to get his own piece of the new world. His story is interwoven with the hunt, each narrative growing more intense, more disturbing, less connected to what we think of as reality with each turning page. The natural world itself is transformed as an ices storm descends on the North Shore, making the woods beside the vast frozen lake a labyrinthine and disorienting forest of ice. It’s in this weird, frozen world where the past and present touch, where the hunter becomes the hunted, where things are stripped down to their elemental essence.
This is not a comfortable book. Though it doesn’t take gruesomeness to the heights that the average serial killer thriller aspires to, the violence in it is far more real and much more disturbing. And because the story is so disorienting and unresolved, it doesn’t provide the usual resolution that readers expect from the genre, that at least justice is served in the end. Perhaps that will come in the third book, but I wouldn’t count on it.
At one point in the book, as Lance is following his brother into the woods, he thinks to himself:
. . . were the rules still valid after what had happened? Was it even possible to talk about things like rules anymore? Lance had broken the most important rule of all, which said that specific subjects were not to be discussed. Not under any circumstances. The world he knew was a world that was held together by keeping silent about certain things. These things were not clearly defined, but everybody who lived in the same world as Lance recognized them at once whenever they cropped up. As long as no one broke the rule, this world would continue to exist. It had already endured for a very long time.
Though this book is short, it’s packed with strangeness, The rule of silence, once broken, lets all kinds of weird things bubble up. I’m very curious to find out what will happen in the third book of the trilogy.
SPOILER ALERT!
It’s not really possible to discuss this book without inadvertently revealing some of the surprises in the previous two.
Just so you know.
You’ve been warned.
Okay, then. In The Ravens, “forest cop” Lance Hansen continues his obsessive quest to find out whether his brother Andy is responsible for the murder of a Norwegian tourist who was camping on the shore of Lake Superior. As a forest ranger, Lance has no responsibility for investigating this crime, rumored to be the first murder in Cook County, a wooded tract of land in the northeastern tip of the state, framed by Lake Superior, the Boundary Waters, and the Canadian border. Lance’s only involvement is that he discovered the body, close to Baraga’s Cross, a local historical landmark marking the place where a Catholic missionary landed in a storm on his way to minister to an Ojibwe community stricken with an epidemic.
Because the crime occurred on federal land, it is handled by the local FBI office with the help of a Norwegian detective. An Ojibwe man whose fingerprints are on the bat used to bludgeon the Norwegian to death and who can’t or won’t provide an alibi has been arrested and is awaiting trial. Blood evidence also suggests that the killer was an Indian, not a white descendant of European immigrants. But Lance, a local historian who is more comfortable in the past than in the present, has uncovered a family secret. He and his brother have Ojibwe ancestry. He also finds a second murder victim – an Ojibwe medicine man who disappeared in 1892, just as Lance’s ancestor stumbled ashore after walking across the frozen lake, delirious and half-dead. As Lance thinks to himself “his family had spent a century perfecting the art of forgetting.”
Because he saw his brother’s truck close to the scene of the crime, and because he knows Andy is probably gay (as were the Norwegian tourists) but ashamed of his sexual identity and has a history of committing extreme violence, Lance becomes convinced his brother may be a killer. In the second book of the trilogy, that suspicion makes a hunting expedition take a threatening turn as Lance and Andy stalk one another. Layered in this narrative is the story of their ancestor, a young Norwegian immigrant who has crossed the frozen lake and who is terrified by the Indian medicine man who is trying to help him. It’s an intense and disorienting book that leaves us hanging.
In The Ravens, the hunt resumes. Lance continues the family tradition of lying by hiding out in Canada for weeks, convincing his family he is vacationing in Norway. On his return to Minnesota, he continues to lie about his activities while gathering information, particularly from Andy’s daughter, who has been dabbling in drugs and feels oppressed by her father’s protectiveness, which has become physically abusive. Lance reconnects with a woman who he loved many years ago and wonders if it’s too late to love again. He also visits his mother in a Duluth nursing home, where she’s beginning to lose her grip on reality but still seems saner than anyone else in the family. Throughout this concluding volume, Lance is suffers from the same condition as Hamlet. He feels compelled to act, but is paralyzed by introspection.
Though in some ways this final volume has more elements of a mystery than the previous two volumes, it fuses stylistic elements of both: the deep psychological conflicts within a man who seeks the truth but feels the pressures of convention, a mixing of past and present in the figure of Swamper Caribou and what Lance has learned about his murder, moments of visionary hallucinations, and inchoate tension as two brothers circle each other, full of fury and twisted family loyalty.
Throughout the three books, the landscape plays a major role, particularly the vast frozen lake that’s always there, that seems to be without boundaries, a frozen world where figures hover in the distance and large shadows move beneath the ice.
All in all, I found this an intriguing, poetic, and really unusual crime fiction trilogy, well worth trying. The translation is by the always reliable Tiina Nunnally, who has done a great job.
We hear so much about what Lance thinks and feels that there is little room for police/inspector action. You wonder what the police are doing, and why did an inspector have to come from Norway for this.
Lot of loose ends (marital problems that indicate infidelity, discovery of mixed blood heritage, who else may be homosexual) but I guess that sets us up for the trilogy. I'll just have to live with the unknowns, since this was too brooding for my taste, despite enjoying reading about the north woods culture. However, if you are at all familiar with the area, you can skip most of chapter 9-historic info dump that doesn't really add to understanding.
This was not a novel, in and of itself, but rather part two in the serialization of the first book. Except for the brief sections illuminating the back story (absolutely necessary for someone like me who can't remember the details of mysteries these days), the entire thing was the interior dialog of US Forest Service ranger Lance Hansen -- out hunting with brother Andy whom Lance is certain committed the murder in book one -- contrasted against the italicized thoughts of the 19th century immigrant uncle whom Lance believes committed the first murder at Baraga's Cross in 1892.
It might have helped if I'd known that this was just some sort of hunting-in-an-ice-storm ramble -- then I would at least have chosen a different time to read it -- but I went into it expecting a new mystery for Lance to investigate. As a result, I skimmed madly.
And a word to those who like an actual resolution to their mysteries: the first book ended with the wrong man behind bars -- this one ends in total ambiguity. I fully expect book three to pick up where this one left off in this three-part serialization of a single novel.
Only the Dead is a short sort of thriller that feels very different than the first book in the Minnesota trilogy, The Land of Dreams. It works best if you've read the first book in the trilogy, which involves U.S. Forest Service officer Lance Hansen's investigation into the stabbing death of a Norwegian tourist at Baraga's Cross at the Cross River on the Northern Shore of Lake Superior, but if you're one for taut thrillers, I'd skip the first lengthy book and start with this one. He believes it to be the first murder ever in the county until he suspects one of his ancestors of having murdered Swamper Caribou, an Ojibwe settler. The two stories alternate in this book as well as in the first book, and they take on a sort of hallucinatory quality.
So what exactly goes on in Only the Dead is a series of hunting trips with Lance and his brother Andy, whom he suspects murdered the Norwegian tourist. Lance is fueled by guilt because another man is in jail facing murder charges, but he can't prove that his brother is the murderer. Andy in turn is suspicious of his brother, and their hunting excursions in increasingly dire weather in early winter are very suspenseful.
I read this book because I'm invested in the case of the dead Norwegian kayaker, and I'm glad this book felt like a surprise compared to the first one. It's a thoughtful book as Lance tries to come to terms with his family's past and his ancestor's past (he discovered he has Ojibwe ancestors in the last book). I wonder how the case develops in the next installment, entitled Ravens, and I wonder what kind of format that book will take: meditative crime story or a thriller?
In this second book, Lance and Andy are on their annual deer hunt but the hunt is marred by suspicion and tension on both sides. As he spends this time alone with his brother, Lance becomes more convinced of Andy’s guilt. On his side, Andy is convinced that it was Lance who broke into his cabin and is lying to him about it. When an ice storm begins and the two are separated, Lance loses his way. He become increasingly paranoid as he sees or imagines Andy stalking him. As Lance tries to find his way in the storm, he imagines an eerily similar story about a relative who immigrated to America a century earlier and his possible role in the disappearance of an Ojibway man.
Sandstol is a master at creating mood with his use of language and description. Despite this being the same story, these two books have completely different feels to them. The first book seemed wider in scope and lighter in tone despite the murder. Sundstol devoted much of the first book to descriptions of the role the area played in the early fur trade, of the small towns, and details about the early Scandinavian immigrants to the area as well as giving a much broader outline of the earlier mystery. Somehow, all of this gave a strong dreamlike quality to the first book. Even the title was less dark, reminiscent of the song, Land of Dreams which was part of a Discover America campaign and, in many ways, this first book was as much an ode to the beauty and history of the area as it was a mystery.
Only the Dead, on the other hand, is much darker. All of the action is confined to a small and isolated area of dense forest and within a shorter time span. There is no sense of history or civilization. This reduction in space and time gives the tale a strong claustrophobic feel. Even the character of Lance seems much darker in this second part. There is a greater sense of tension and immediacy to the conflict between him and Andy than there was even about the murder in the first book. The ice storm and Lance’s disorientation makes it even more chilling as does the similar and eery tale of his ancestor’s own search for the American Dream.
The juxtaposition of tone between Land of Dreams and Only the Dead outlines the more nightmarish qualities of this second book. Where the first book is slower, more objective, more real, the story here has taken a much darker almost mystical turn. In some ways, it seems more active even though much of the action is only in Lance’s imaginings. Where the first deals with events in a more objective way, the murder, the investigation and the actual history of the area, this deals much more with Lance’s own interpretation of events including the murder a century earlier coloured by his fears and suspicions.
Where the first book was, despite all of the history and description of the area, at heart, a straightforward police procedural, Only the Dead is a straightup psychological thriller But despite their differences, the two books are tied together by their intelligence, by the beauty of the language and descriptions, and by their exploration of death and the complex nature of families, what binds them together and what tears them apart.
Read from October 30 to 31, 2013
Uncorrected proof from University of Minnesota Press
From the description: The grandson of Norwegian immigrants, Lance Hansen is a U.S. Forest Service officer and has a nearly all-consuming passion for local genealogy and history. But his quiet routines are shattered one morning when he comes upon a Norwegian tourist brutally murdered near a stone cross on the shore of Lake Superior. Another Norwegian man is nearby; covered in blood and staring out across the lake, he can only utter the word kjærlighet. Love.
**phonetically that would be 'shareligt'.**
Opening: The lake glittered in the sunlight. Seemingly endless, far in the distance it merged with the sky.
This story is set just right for Norwegian migrant descendents based in Minnesota today. Ladies and Gentlemen, a recipe:
- Lake Superior scenery
- a feeling of the history of this land in north America, their settlement
- add in some ever popular Nordic crime
- and top it off with a dose of sentimental Old Country reflections
Should be good to go...
...except that is not quite the case here, it will read a little flopped-soufflé to connoisseurs; somewhat undercooked, even pasty in comparison to how this oeuvre has evolved - readers have been spoilt recently with some top-drawer material.
However, whilst Vidar Sundstøl does not possess the verve of Lars Saabye Christensen, Jan Kjærstad or Jo Nesbø this is a good enough story to curl up with in front of a crackling fire on a late autumn evening, especially if there is a glow from the moon sifting through the swirling fogs above the waters of a lake, and an inexplicable Swamper Caribou-esque flicker of the tea-light inside the carved pumkin.
Best line: How do you tell an extroverted Finn - he is looking at your shoes instead of his own. Boom Boom.
2.5*
As the novel opens, Lance Hansen, a forest ranger who patrols the national forest that occupies so much of Cook County, a vast wedge of land stretching between the lake and the Canadian border, is on his way to speak with campers who have illegally pitched a tent near the lake not far from Baraga’s Cross. This is the kind of work he does – enforcing rules, preventing people from dumping garbage on public land, organizing search parties when vacationers got lost, occasionally encountering illegal logging or hidden meth labs. Nothing too dramatic. But this morning will be different.
"He parked his service vehicle at the end of the road and got out. It was 7:28. In front of him stretched Lake Superior. There was nothing to see but light and water and sky – no opposite shore on which to fix his eyes, just the illusory meeting of sky and the surface of the water far off in the distance."
As he heads down the path toward the granite marker that marks the spot where a European missonary once erected a wooden cross after surviving a stormy crossing in 1846, he finds a shoe and a handprint marking where someone fell. Then, as he gets closer to the cross, he sees a bare leg sticking out. A naked man is sitting against the cross, covered in blood and muttering something inaudible. The intonation seems familiar and Hansen realizes he’s speaking Norwegian. Only one word is audible: kjærlighet. Love.
Hansen finds another man not far away, bludgeoned to death. Soon the county’s sheriff arrives. Homicide isn’t a crime they’ve handled much. In fact, there hadn’t been a murder in Cook County in the 25 years he’s been its sheriff. Because the crime occured on federal land, an FBI agent is summoned fom the St. Paul field office, and he is soon joined by a Norwegian detective. Hansen’s involvement in the investigation is over – though there is one thing he’s holding back. He’d seen a familiar truck near the cross, one belonging to his brother Andy, who he understand less than his immigrant ancestors, whose history is stored in binders on floor-to-ceiling shelves in Hansen’s home office.
As the unofficial county historian, Hansen feels more comfortable in the past, and as the FBI agent and his Norwegian colleague try to discover whether a tourist killed his companion or whether someone else was responsible, Hansen becomes fascinated by old news accounts of a body found near the same place in 1892, It could have been the body of an Ojibwe medicine man named Swamper Caribou who’d gone missing earlier, a disappearance that may be connected to an old family story about a fifteen-year-old boy crossing the lake on a winter night – and possibly to Hansen’s dream of walking under the frozen surface of Lake Superior.
The Land of Dreaams, beautifully translated by Tiinna Nunnally, is an evocative novel that draws together past and present, the lives of immigrants and the indigenous inhabitants of the North Shore, American dreams and suppressed violence hidden behind calm exteriors and polite silences. In some ways this sounds like Karin Fossum’s explorations of the squirmy things living under the rocks of peaceful small towns in Norway, but in tone and style it’s far closer to Johan Theorin’s Öland quartet, which combines an atmospheric natural setting with pscychologically probing portraits and a very light touch of the supernatural.
I’m not surprised that it was awarded the Riverton Prize. It’s a very good book. I admit that I particularly enjoyed a setting that is familiar to me – just a few weeks before reading this book we traveled to the places where the story is set. Even if you haven’t been to the North Shore, this book will provide you with an interesting journey. The only problem is that you’ll want to return as soon as possible, as there is obviously more to the story.
I picked up this book for a number of reasons: (1) I’d like to read some Norwegian crime fiction that’s not by Jo Nesbø or Anne Holt. (2) The Land of Dreams has won or been nominated for a number of awards, which could be a plus or a negative because I don’t know the idiosyncracies of judging panels for every crime fiction award. (3) I liked Nunnally’s translation of Misterioso by Arne Dahl. (4) It’s a book written by a Norwegian about an area of the U.S. teeming with Norwegian Americans, which makes for an interesting perspective. According to the publisher, Sundstøl and his wife lived in Minnesota on Lake Superior for two years, and the time inspired him to write the Minnesota Trilogy. (5) And finally, I’m interested in the history of Great Lakes states since I’ve lived in Michigan over 10 years. But what about the story?
The Land of Dreams is a moody book that centers on Lance Hansen, a forty-something U.S. Forest Service police officer who discovers a dead Norwegian man near an area named Baraga’s Cross on Lake Superior. While Lance is not a participant in the investigation since he’s a main witness, the story follows him the most because of his discovery of the body and he is the local historian, complete with the county historical archive in his home. The moodiness comes about because of the gruesomeness of the crime, the intractableness of the investigation, and the lonesomeness of Lance as he’s trying to cope with the shock of the crime.
Some readers may fault sections of the book as an info dump: there’s an awful lot of time spent with the Norwegian settlers of Cook County Minnesota, Lance’s ancestors and his immediate family, the Ojibway who first settled the land, the fur trappers, and more. I didn’t mind the slow pace because I don’t know much about the background and history of northern Minnesota. Also, the history and the stories people tell are central to the solving of the crime as well as Lance’s investigation into the disappearance of an Ojibway man named Swamper Caribou over a hundred years ago. It definitely left me with a lot to think about “stories people tell over and over though they know it’s not true.” While I tend to prefer novels with more plot, this was an interesting read.
The Land of Dreams is as much a psychological study of how our pasts and our relationships effect us as it is a murder mystery. As such, the pace tends to be rather slow and the story frequently wanders off in other directions seemingly unrelated to the crime: Hanson's family genealogy, the history of the early fur trade in the area and the Voyageurs, the influx of people of Scandinavian descent, and even some interesting details of the small towns in the area like Grand Marais and the Grand Portage Reservation. Hanson spends a great deal of time trying to solve another murder which happened over a hundred years ago which may explain something about the new murder.
Personally, I found all of this as interesting as the mystery itself but I lived in Thunder Bay where the fur trade moved after Grand Portage was closed to the British at the beginning of the 19th c., I have been to Grand Marais and have eaten at Sven & Ole's and I really like history. However, I'm not sure how others who don't know the area and who don't care about history would feel about all of this. I suspect many will find it boring which is a real shame. One thing, though, also unrelated; if you ever want to see some of the most beautiful and underappreciated scenery in either Canada or the US, this is where it's at.
The Land of Dreams has won awards in Norway and deservedly so. It is, as I said a bit slow-paced but, if you are willing to take the time, you will find its somewhat meandering path to its ending well worth the effort. To borrow the words of the poet, it is a 'path less travelled'. It is not your usual mystery. It is intelligent with some keen observations of the human experience and psyche. The ending came as somewhat of a surprise as it seems to leave the story hanging. it may be that the real outcome is in another book (this is part of a trilogy) but even if it isn't, there's a certain rightness to this ending, sort of a Lady and the Tiger kind of thing which forces the reader to reexamine some of the question pondered throughout the book: questions of family versus justice and where our responsibility lies and do we have the right to make these kind of judgments anyway.
Lance Hanson is a forest policeman who's real love is history. He is the area historian, and he feels a real connection to the past. His work is pretty uninteresting until the day that he investigates a report of camping in an area that is supposed to be off limits. There he finds a remarkable crime scene that I will leave you to discover if you choose to read the book. The question is raised that day as to whether this was the first ever murder in the recorded history of the area. This, along with the memory of the scene itself, haunts Lance, and he is determined to figure out the answer. In researching the past, he finds a connection to a distant relative's arrival in the area and the disappearance of a native indian man. He is preoccupied with the connection and finds himself drawn more and more toward believing that a murder may have taken place involving this relative. Along with this, he starts connecting bits and pieces of evidence that may point toward his brother's connection to the present day crime. He is torn between doing his job and protecting his brother and family. The evidence swings back and forth and so does Lance's mind. The story is compelling but I was disappointed in the lack of conclusion. I did find the characters of the story to be well developed and interesting. The connection the author made between Lance and the Norwegian investigator sent to help with the case added a depth to the story telling. I also appreciated the history that the author brought out in the telling of this modern story and how he created a symmetry with Lance's predecessor. I did not know that this was previously published in Norwegian as the first of a trilogy until I finished the book. I will probably read the next book when it is translated and republished with the hope of a more solid conclusion, but I am not sure that the author has chosen to bring about such. I would guess that this is a title that will have many different reactions from readers. Some will undoubtedly love it, while others might not even choose to finish it. For me, it was a good story that made me think, but left me flat with the lack of a conclusion; either good or bad. I leave it to you to make your own decision.
Norden von Minnesota einen so ruhigen Job, dass er sich
nebenbei noch intensiv mit der Geschichte des von
skandinavischen Einwanderern besiedelten Landstrichs
beschäftigen kann. Doch als er auf der Suche nach illegalen
Campern auf einen blutverschmierten, nackten Mann stößt und
kurz darauf eine ebenfalls unbekleidete Leiche findet, ist es vorbei mit der Beschaulichkeit und zum 1. Mal seit
Menschengedenken ermittelt die Polizei in dieser Gegend in
einem Mordfall. Ziemlich langatmige Geschichte - unspektakulär und phasenweise langweilig.
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