Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #275246 in Books
• Published on: 1996-05-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Synopsis
In 1974 in the far north of Sweden, Annie's lover is brutally murdered. She tries to bury the past, but many years later, her grown daughter is seen in the arms of the man Annie believes responsible for the killings.

Customer Reviews

Dreary
What a disappointment. I started with high hopes after an intriguing opening 50 pages that contained a novel setting, some quirky characters and a distinct style.

Many, many days later I turned the final page without caring in the least about the final revelations, heartily sick of the monochrome characters (only one, Birgir, manages occasionally to heave himself off the page into anything resembling full-bodiedness) and still waiting for even one of the promised thrills.

By the end, the writing had descended into parody: a tedious over-use of the third-person pronoun no longer added to a sense of mystery but increased the gap between reader and characters; over-eager metaphors trampled on top of each other; clipped sentences tried unsuccessfully to suggest gravity.

Scandanavia has produced some great crime writing. On this showing, Ekman has not added to it.

A very different kind of thriller
This is an extraordinarily complex and ingeniously plotted novel, and to categorise it as a thriller or a crime novel is only to touch the surface of the different aspects of its complexity.
'Blackwater' begins from the point of view a woman called Annie who, awoken by her daughter Mia, who is in her early twenties, returning home in the middle of the night, convinces herself the man with her daughter is the same man she saw eighteen years previously and whom she has always believed to be guilty of the brutal stabbing of two tourists sleeping in a tent. Annie herself had been the first person to discover the bodies of the tourists, on Midsummer Evening, when arriving with Mia, then a little girl, to pitch in her lot with a commune in the desolate north of Scandinavia.
The novel then slowly recreates the disturbing circumstances of the murder through a long and very complex combination of flashbacks seen from different points of view, before returning, at the opening of Part II, to its starting-point and the subsquent revival of interest in a double murder whose motives had never originally been explained (and a murderer who had never been caught).
The plot itself is watertight, but the postmodernist narrative techniques deployed are complex, and sometimes deliberately misleading: information is crucially withheld in order to develop and slowly increase an atmosphere of suspense which gradually becomes overwhelming.
Yet there is much more than suspense and unsolved mystery here. The characters are complex, and all of them have something to hide, or at the very least shady areas of their pasts which they are unwilling to contemplate. The commune itself is something of a failure, and the projected relationship there between Annie and Dan, the boyfriend who, ominously, fails to meet here on her arrival, is the fruit of one of many
misunderstandings in the story. And the wilderness itself functions like a late twentieth-century equivalent of those ominous hostile landscapes in the novels of Thomas Hardy.
Yes, I can sympathise with certain reviewers' frustration: it is a novel which the reader is at certain points tempted to give up. But this is because Kerstin Ekman cleverly allows the reader to be affected by the futility and monotony which characterise many of the characters' lives. But take my word for it: although the first part is (deliberately) slow-moving and ponderous, this is because it is like a spring being slowly wound up in preparation for the revelations in store in the second part.
And the translation, by the late Joan Tate, is of impeccable quality and, presumably, a quite monumental labour of love. This is one of those very rare novels where mystery and narrative mastery meet, and as such is very highly recommended to all those who end up feeling slightly unsatisfied when they get to the end of all those more run-of-the-mill whodunnits.

A Bit Tedious
In 1974, Annie Raft takes her daughter Mia to small-town Blackwater in northern Sweden, to meet her lover Dan at a commune. When Annie searches for Dan, she instead finds two dead bodies, and spots a man leaving the scene - the same man connected with Mia years later. I read it all, but found it a bit tedious. (C+)