Blackwater: A Novel

I found this book rich in culture and very subtle in plot. It was in intricate and interesting mystery. I will read more bu this author.

'Blackwater' is not a bad book, despite my two-star rating. There are some good things about it. It is complex, far more complex than most books of this type, telling a story spanning almost twenty years and covering lots of different characters. It is a story centered around a sort of mystery, and there are lots of mysterious elements here too. But in the end, the good things about the book were not enough to hold my attention, and while I did slog my way all the way through to the end, I came out the other side disappointed.The characters, while rich and believable, were all very distant and cold. That may have been intentional on the part of the author, but for a story like this to work for me I need characters I can sympathize with, someone I can get to know a little bit, at least enough to care what happens to them. There's lots of "psychological nuance," as Library Journal described it, but very little warmth to latch onto for any of the characters. As soon as they start to show a little humanity or sympathy, they shut down and become distant again. The whole book had me waiting for someone to show some feeling, and never seeing it.The mystery plays always in the background, part of the story but never really the central focus. Again, this may be intentional, but I was hoping for something with a stronger mystery element and honestly more story. There is story in 'Blackwater' but only just barely -- it plods along with a deliberate and measured pace, never really doing much or saying much. When the mystery is solved in the end it doesn't seem to make much difference or change anything...it just happens, and the book is over.As I say, this isn't a 'bad' book. It's simply not to my taste. There was a great deal of potential in it, but in the end that potential went unrealized. I was able to finish it, but it left me feeling cold and disinterested and a little numb. Definitely not a book that captured my heart, my attention, or my appreciation.

Great mystery plus amazing environmental descriptions.

Although there were times I enjoyed sections of this book, I was completely disappointed by the ending. Most of the people were depressing and/or depressed. Ekman even managed to make nature depressing. I finished it right to the end, but I would not do it again.

Interesting and confusing

There are so many criticisms to make of this work that I don't quite know where to begin: The "suspense" is not a whit suspenseful, rather one is dragged along through disjointed narrative fragments; the "atmospherics" are totally bereft of atmosphere, rather one gets a feeling of what a picture postcard of this particular part of Northern Europe might look like in the mind's eye; the murders most foul are not affecting at all, the reader in fact feels a stubborn, intransigent distance from all the events and people in Ekman's novel. Finally, the psychology and silly philosophical snippets are vapid and sophomoric. No, I didn't care for the book too much, not too much at all.As I relaxed into contemplation of this work after turning the last page in relief, I realised, however, that there was a centre to it, a hub, so to speak, which remained mysterious, whilst all the gimcrack philosophy and scenery did not and "main" characters did not: Ylja.Understand Ylja and you will understand this book, not that it's really all that worth one's while. Ylja is Ekman incognito: The author acting out her sexual fantasies and other daydreams in her own fiction. She is rich, aristocratic, academic, even vatic - in a silly way - and fancies picking up the young working-class buck like Johan for a few weeks of (explicitly described herein) hedonism when she so desires, and then dropping him.Reader, if you desire to read a deep, moving, devastatingly atmospheric and tragic work about the Scandinavian region, read Nobel Prize winning Sigrid Unset's epic novel, Kristin Lavransdatter. If you desire a cerebral Scandinavian suspense novel - the oft-mentioned Smilia's Sense of Snow is the book for you.This book is nothing more than a clumsily-told bluestocking's daydream.

Good writing, but depressing. Nothing happens until 200 pages in. Terrible ending.

Book has arrived. Thank you!!!!

Two bodies are stumbled upon near a river by a young woman looking for the site of a hippy commune. Quite a good set up. The area is populated by plenty of suspects: brutish farmboys, pagan followers, drop-outs, morose villagers etc. But after the set-up everything goes downhill.As other reviewers have said this is not a genre crime novel at all. Nothing wrong with that - except that it is marketed as such. I found the book to be one of the most sprawling, meandering and tedious-detail-filled books I can remember and I couldn't get through to the end. Nothing is left out. If we go into room, the floor is described, the rugs, the furniture, the walls, the pictures on the walls - although these have no bearing on the progress of the novel. Same with self-obsessed people's interminable thoughts and recollections of their grim past lives. The author doesn't give the reader credit for any imagination.The plot movement soon drains away and we are left in a swamp of angst-ridden characters who vie with each other to be the most unpleasant and damaged. None of them is sympathetic in the least. Even the sex in the book is bleak and joyless. The characters are referred to as "he" or "she" - often without being named, so you have to guess for a good time who is being described. No pace. No drive forward. No economy at all. Repetitive. Stodgy. Infuriating.

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 manymisunderstandings 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.

Completely absorbing crime novel with richly painted plot and well developed characters. I would absolutely recommend this. Couldn’t put it down.

This isn't a book, it's a landscape. This book will stay with you forever. The tone, colours, gorgeous setting, heavy atmosphere... all unforgettable. The characterisation is equally sharp. Very few of the current crop of Scandi thrillers come anywhere near Ekman's classic. Ys, it is extremely dark, but the nature is part of the characters' inner landscape. That's what's so great. This is total writing. Masterpiece.

I was very disappointed. It reads like a travel log. More than half taken up by descriptions of the surrounding. It is supposed to be mainly the solving of a murder, but that takes up a small percentage. Wouldn't read a book by this author again. Another thing, it's put me off ever wanting to visit Sweden or Norway, which previously was one of my greatest wishes.