Photography: (c) Mariola Díaz-Cano. 23/10/2019. Madrid.
Jo Nesbø turns 60 March today. Norwegian crime novelist and children's novelist, creator Harry hole, opens a new decade in his long and successful career and life. This year, always if present and uncertain circumstances allow it, there will be two new titles who will arrive here after a five-year delay to Blood in the snow (scheduled for May) and something less for Midnight Sun (in autumn). I already read them. So there they go strokes of the reviews that I wrote to them. To give an idea of what to expect and what to expect. Although the fireproof is not there (for now) and pounded Harry. But let's leave it a bit, it has to rest. Not you, Mr Nesbø, you have another 60 years to go and how long it takes to keep writing.
Blood in the snow - October 2015
I would have read it to me in two days, because it's short and it doesn't take any longer. But as I usually do with Nesbø, you want to extend the reading to infinity and beyond to savor it. As it has been in English, I have had even more excuse. And, well, already I had read some criticism, of some who complained about it was very short, and others who said that Nesbø had become a soft And would you please dedicate yourself to Harry Hole, period. It seems like a lie that the regular reader of this writer (of all his work, not just Harry) complains about that supposed softness when if there is something that is Mr. Nesbø it is a ROMANTIC From head to toe, no matter how tough and psychopathic he is.
And it is that here it is marked a great love story with another of those house brand characters: a hit man, Olav Johanssen, apparently a soulless, who knows, who he is telling us his very black past and fatalistic future and what reads The Miserables. Your boss, a mob hotshot In Oslo in the late 70s, shortly before Christmas, instructs him to get his wife out of the way. The problem is that Olav falls in love with her, or so it seems, because it really is another antihero signaled by destiny.
Emotion
In other words, we have a classic history of the genre, written in the first person, where all the characters are dark (or not), there is no shortage of those Nesbø twists and is finished off with a final that, even if you imagine it, it does not stop nor you can avoid getting excited. The known ability of this man to empathize with the best and the worst of the human being. So that has hooked me again with its prose, their stories so black and twisted, but with that romanticismo so authentic that distill.
He had all the time in the world. I liked to wait. I liked the time between making the decision and carrying it out. They were the only minutes, hours, days of my assumed short life when I was someone. I was someone's destiny.
Midnight Sun - July 2016
Fire, air, faith, atheism, bigotry, crime, fear, loneliness, darkness with the perpetual clarity of that midnight sun in the middle of August, cowardice, surrender, redemption, love in all its forms, fatherhood, loss, pain, hopelessness, hope, lose, win, cheat, convince ... Jon hansen -or Ulf, as it says to be called under its appearance little achieved from innocent and clueless hunter- feel it and goes through all that when he arrives in a tiny town lost to the north farthest north of all norths. Besides, the community that inhabits it is so closed as ultraconservative. Hansen is going to find Knut, niño ten years old, and su mother Lea, a woman with a history staff full of drama and surprises.
From there the escape to nowhere that Hansen has undertaken also reaches his end. The history Redeveloped in the 70s and Hansen has made a move to the fisherman, the boss of the Oslo mafia (who was already out in Blood in the snow), and now they're going for it. All for his incompetence —Or rather inability — to kill. Hansen considers himself a coward, a pathetic loser that he has made many mistakes, and when he reaches that wasteland already almost in the Arctic, he senses that it will be his last getaway. His relationships with the hermetic population, but especially with the small and inquisitive Knut and his reserved but intuitive mother, will force him to make a decision once and for all. Or to give up altogether.
Last romantic
Y again we have to Nesbo has definitely become the last Romantic. What writes a crime novel? Yes, it seems so, but maybe not. Maybe it happens to you that, with age, you need to tell more intimate and personal stories for himself rather than for the reader (again in the first person), or reflect about beliefs y feelings. Sometimes we need that and we just take an eternally known story but to tell it in our own way, with our style, and Mr. Nesbø's readers already know what his is like.
On one side I feared the worst, but I was surprised that it could happen after having read the previous one. Moreover, I was surprised again by that capacity to be reading one thing that then becomes another, suspense until the last minute, and that grotesque touch (in the style of that tremendous and eschatological scene in another of his titles, headhunters) that here goes more to what gore in another very graphic scene. A hint for the short: there is a similar one in the movie Rob Roy.
The critics have been again that is fond of the first person of criminal protagonists but with good background, that their stories are too short or predictable ... Does not matter. It's Nesbø. And I have read it dropper, savoring it as always. What am i going to do. I like. Throughout.
"I'm just saying that anything could exist," she said, "even everlasting love."