Harry hole he's back. His thousands of followers have taken to the streets today, March 23, to get hold of Thirst. It is published la eleventh novel in the series by Jo Nesbø about his most acclaimed character and one of the most particular and charismatic of the genre. Whoever gets hooked idolizes it and whoever doesn't, you know, for tastes, the colors. I consider myself Big Sister of the Harry Hole Guild for Eternal Glory, so all is said.

Also this year it's 20 since the publication of his first novel in your country of origin, The bat. Here he came with his third title, Petirrojo. And we remember that in October we have the Film adaptation de The Snowman, by the Swede Tomas Alfredson and with Michael Fassbender as the main character. So it goes this special. For fans of Hole and, of course, Jo Nesbø, that this Saturday 25 will be Barcelona on his presentation tour.

First of all say that I have read everything by Nesbø in addition to the Harry Hole series. What is published in Spanish -Doctor Proctor series y headhunters- and what is still missing, that I have been able to get in English -The are, blood on snow y midnight sun-. And I like all of them. Hopefully those titles will be released soon.

Jo Nesbø

Jo Nesbo (Oslo, 1960) is a lean and wiry Norwegian writer. Half the fifty of March, in six days it will be 57. He has clear, cold and calm eyes, and the triangular face of a blond and scrawny cat who likes to climb rocks to overcome his fear of heights. Anyway, a gesture of not making a noise, if I was just passing by. But he also has the face of a psychopath, a harmless pimp who hides a soulless monster with a diabolical mind and creator of the greatest atrocities.

We can all imagine atrocities at some point because cruelty and doing evil we take them as standard. Those of us who read and love the crime novel know it to unsuspected degrees, although reality always surpasses fiction. But this man imagines and writes them with an unsurpassed art and mastery. And since I was little. At school they had to write essays on topics such as a field trip. Well, in his no one came back alive, which led to the teachers getting a little pissed off with him.

In other words, the boy was already pointing out very dark ways, but then he would throw more the football. An untimely injury to the ligaments in the knees deprived Norway of the legend that would have been their most famous striker. Out of disgust, he spent a few years military and then, clever as he was also with numbers, he studied Business Administration and Economics while walking on more jobs.

Finished shark of the Stock Exchange. At once, he played the guitar and composed songs for his band, Di Derre, which he formed with colleagues and a little brother, whom Odin called too early to Valhalla a few years ago. They were bad to rage until they were less bad, they hit a pitch and started touring around the country.

But one day the kid, nothing kid anymore, got burned from working in the office in the morning and catch planes to sing at night in the gambling den on duty. So he said he was taking a break. He went as far as he could and, logically, that's the Antipodes. Earlier, a publisher friend had asked her to write something about her band's history and success. But he had no intention of writing any of that.

Harry Hole is born

And for me it must have been him jet lag or turned upside down as it approached kangaroo land. That, or that he was lucky enough to touch of divine inspiration that only comes to you once in this life. So he started to hit the key and resumed the early tendency to burden the staff in fiction.

As protagonist He invented an uncle who, in principle, had nothing to do with him and who ended up being the CHARACTER that every writer dreams of creating. And the first. It gave him thirty-two years and an imposing physique of viking to use: 194 centimeters tall, of course blond and light-eyed always flushed, big ears, brush cut hair and, in theory, unattractive appearance. She dressed him carelessly with jeans, Tshirts, jackets or coats and Dr. Martens boots. And with that look and size you rather imagine a bad beast of those who change the sidewalk if you cross it.

The name you gave it, Harry, he borrowed it from his favorite soccer player and surname, local police chief from his grandmother's town, where he used to spend the summer as a child.

On that Harry Hole he hung a biography with a family in which his mother is missing. His father, OlavHe does not finish overcoming the loss of his wife or accepting the complicated profession of his son. And his younger sister, sosHas síndrome de Down and it is their weakness. He also put the fears to the darkness and lifts.

He added a series of vital hits difficult to digest and a character with as much intelligence as ingenuity. Harry is stubborn, lonely, antisocial, full of contradictions, even wild and brutal sometimes with himself more than with others. But also delivered without reservation to them and what he believes and is from a generosity or with a romanticismo exacerbated and ravishing.

But most of all, Nesbø did it unpredictable. And the way Harry evolves throughout the series is what gets you. Plot, secondary, etc. they work because there is him and at the same time they complement him. Of course, if you do not get hooked, you will not achieve it no matter how hard you try. That also happens. But if he has hunted you, he will not let go of you, even if he ends up disappearing one day by the grace of his lord father.

Such a personality turns out to be a Oslo police inspector and hopeless alcoholic. And one has a concern for law enforcement officers of any nationality (fictitious or real) wounded or with defects on the outside or inside. So he discovered a specimen like Harry Hole and gave up hopelessly too.

Harry Hole Series

With all this Nesbø placed the first novel of Harry Hole in that particular country that is Australia, as a first warning that his character was also going to be like this. It set him chasing a serial killer, fell in love with him as deeply as tragically and made him count a few of those bad hits. At the same time it took him through that hell of alcohol in which it will make him come and go, whenever he wants, for another nine books. To write that first one alone it took five weeks and titled it The bat.

The point is that, for me, Harry Hole is a character who has managed to represent the complex and ambiguous human nature with perfection bordering on the absolute. I even define it as the perfection of imperfection and, in addition, with magic to get what if Hole were real, you would want to cross it, you would go behind and put yourself at his disposal for what is third. And what will be done is FOR WHAT WILL BE MADE (everyone understands what they want). That is called charisma.

That, or take him home to adopt him and put a chip on him: this dog is mine. I will no longer allow his father to put him through so many misfortunes, accidents and torture. That poor Harry happens to everything. Beatings, drownings, avalanches that bury him alive, mutilations, disfigurements, total hitch to the Jim Beam, to opium and occasional shots of harder drugs, almost slaughterings and shots.

That not to mention enjoy / suffer a love / heartbreak It doesn't make him crazy miraculously (not him, but you do). In other words, the least thing is that he drinks. There is little vice to endure so much whiplash, although Harry go bad than good, always give him a hand that he never explains or believes he deserves and ... even if everyone wants it, the first, its readers.

The fact is that those who have found it now are lucky to start with The bat. Me I recommend that you follow the order of the titles. Your reading will evolve like the series and the characters, and they will enjoy more. But the rest we met in the third story, Petirrojo, where characters appear that will become habitual in the series (until Mr. Nesbø wants, of course).

Single touch

Just start Petirrojo there is that special touch. We see it from the first and chaotic scene of the surveillance in a car where there are two policemen who are companions. A woman and a man whom she has to control by her constant anticipation and intuition of what happens, and her unpredictability for whatever occurs to him to do.

Then they can be the dialogues, some with a very particular humor that exists throughout the series. Or it can be that instability but self-assurance showing Harry, his capacity to see that he will solve the problem or the case in his own way. Or maybe it's just a phrase or one of those gestures, as I said. But you know what the feeling reading and imagining them is nueva. Harry can share characteristics with the many policemen you already know. But he is different. It has something UNIQUE that I don't think can be defined well. Or maybe it's not something, but EVERYTHING.

It is very difficult to excel in a genre like the crime novel. There is so much stereotype, so many roads already traveled, so many great leading police officers ... But when I finish Petirrojo, I had burned with Harry Hole I eat very very seldom. Be careful with him, with that success in the way of being built. The plot is still classic, more or less already read in so many others, but he it's brand new.

So you get the series and you devour it more than reading. You are getting to know Harry more. You even get older with him from his early thirties to the early forties, which he already spends in Police. Good, him and all the other excellent secondary that surround it. But from The Redeemer, you start to think that the next book IS BETTER.

When finished The leopard, whose pages you have been turning almost shakily already, you have become so hooked that you stir heaven and earth to find that bat, Cockroaches, Ghost y Police —Then not yet published in Spanish. I found them and read them in English, but I would have done it even in Norwegian and with a crappy translator. Police FINISHES YOU. And with the emotion in your body for many days later, you conclude that in just over five months you have read yourself one of the best black series of all time.

Harry and everything else

It is not only because of the protagonist, but because of the progression in narrative and plot quality. For how you see polishing the style and technique. Of course, you have been manipulated at the whim of Mr. Nesbø, but you do not care exactly the same. It's what you want: to keep finding that 180 degree turn that you sense but don't think is possible. Or yes, but you don't want to believe it for more than Harry show you that he falls a hundred times into the same mistakes and horrors, which is capable of the best and the worst.

It disappoints you, it saddens you, its weakness infuriates you, how it stumbles incomprehensibly when it has everything, intelligence, sagacity, intuition, perseverance… But it doesn't matter. His capacity for attraction and seduction makes you fall with him and also get up with him, forgive him even the worst, share all those blows. Some are as truly unexpected as the anthological ending of The Redeemer or, in my opinion, the most terrible of the whole series that happens in Police. And of course there is no lack of terrifying and shocking scenes in all the books.

In addition, you are warned. You see it coming because you caught him trick to Nesbø. But no, you insist that this is not going to happen, that no, that no ... But it does. And you don't want to keep reading. You have believed it, you think it HAS REALLY HAPPENED. The (I don't know if the minimum) consolation is that Police He also takes the cake with the brightest, most in love and happiest Harry.

You have never read it like this, almost with the naivety from the beginning, always with insecurities but, for a change, with an optimism that feels phenomenal, although it scares you even more. This is going to go bad, for sure. Then you get to the end and ... Oh, that ending ... Anyway, also incredible after so much bad drink after the intense The Snowman, The leopard y Ghost. Specially in Ghost you have seen him become the darkest, most dangerous and out of control Harry.

Usual characters

Anyway, what you empathize with everything. With Harry and with the cohort of secondary, from the good ones to the most bad bad ones.

There are the bosses Bjørn Møller and Gunnar Hagen. Companions like Ellen, Jack Halvorsen, Bjorn Holm or the immediately darling Beate Lonn, The psychiatrist Ståle aune, friends like crazy taxi driver from Øystein and the geek of tresko, the unstable but gifted Katrine bratt: Kaja Solness, a ray of hope in The leopard.

There are also those scoundrels like the refined bastard Tom waaler and the elegant and fearsome Michael Bellman with that rat that is his acolyte Truls Berntsen. And murderers most monstrous, the impossible situations, most gruesome crimes or the most impressive staging. You like them ALL And you can't help it

And as: Rakel Fauke and her son Oleg, or the more real love, full of ups and downs, setbacks and disasters, but immense and deep. The yes but no constant and addictive, devastating and glorious at the same time.

And when it's over

So when I finished, first I was empty, then I felt the knot of anguish to fully understand Harry. I had run out of my Jim Beam and was waiting for a hangover of epic proportions, as it was. Lastly, I begged Thor to give that Nesbø the hammer blow. "Smash his head!" I said to myself with my most Hole vein unleashed. So everything stays as it is, that is, PERFECT.

But no, a very disturbing door is left open. Yes, there are more Harry. Now in Thirst. And the questions return, the uncertainty about his future. More cabal. How will it stay this time? Will it be the last, the final? Will Mr. Nesbø be able to rid his cock of all the golden eggs? Sure not, or yes? Anyway. You almost don't want to imagine it anymore, you think you won't resist it. NO LONGER.

But yes, we will resist it and we are looking forward to reading this new story from vampire theme. Again with a lot of blood, plot twists and moments that are not what they seem, so Nesbø. We meet again with the usual characters and there is some new. The review will be shortly, because there are already 23 pages and things promise a LOT. So nothing will last in my hands.

So ...

... accompany someone -Even if it is fictitious- that makes you feel, with so much truth, despair, fear, suffering, intrigue, surprise, horror, sacrifice, lack of control, friendship and love with the intensity that means Harry Hole is a pleasure that is rarely achieved.

That of to get hooked so much that you would go to hell with him is the merit of the greats. And Mr. Nesbø is. Of the biggest. Infinitely grateful for making us enjoy so many.

More information:

• JO NESBø Website (In English)
• JO NESBØ. SELECTION OF INTERVIEWS on Youtube
• On Facebook: Hooked on Jo Nesbø.
• More about Nesbø here at Actualidad Literatura: Harry Hole returns in 2017.