Customer Reviews

Blackwater

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

A young man and woman are brutally stabbed to death in their tent while camping in beautiful surroundings beside a river in the mountains of Sweden. Though a number of people were in the area at the time, no one has apparently seen or knows anything and the crime remains unsolved for years.

Bleak, slow moving who-done-it style mystery sent in a remote area of Sweden, this book is a compelling read because of its characters. As well as being a complex crime novel, an intricate puzzle with clues to be picked up along the way, this is also a psychological thriller exploring the depths of human depression. The theme of this story is loneliness & being the outsider - Johan is an outsider in his own family, the Starhill community is apart from the regular country people, Annie is outside the school community she teaches in, the Lapps are outside mainstream Swedish society, and Birger is the ultimate symbol of aloneness.

This was my 2nd reading of this novel and was most helpful, the novel is so disjointed with several plot lines that this time I noticed so many more clues along the way. Events take place over years, eventually the different threads come together. I really enjoyed this book but more because of the all too realistic characters & the vivid detailed descriptions of the landscape than the actual crime plot.

This is a book full of people with secrets, people who had a hand in it, people who could have done it, people who were thought to have done it.

A book that you need to read twice over to tie it all together, to pick up the clues once you know the ending. It's all there, but like the paths through the vanished forest, they are hard to find.

A complex book, full of strands that diverge, cometogether, lie dormant for years, and finally tie themselves up in a sad little package. The list of characters helps. A little. A map would help even more.

A dark and difficult book. Full of atmosphere. Full of seasonal details. Full of fascinating, well-worked out characters. Full of secrets.

During a holiday in 1994 visiting Oslo and Bergen I was given a gift of "Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow" (F. David Translation). I finished it on my flight back to San Francisco and felt the utter void experienced after reading a book that one feels shall not have any peer. Fortunately, I was wrong. It took only two years to find "Blackwater" and Kerstin Ekman. Blackwater is a novel of vast human perception blending fatalistic destiny and paganism along with basic Sherlock Holmes sleuthing all set against a sometimes desolate, but beautiful and lonely landscape that conceals a constant undercurrent of emotional arousal. An aura of mystery and suspense surrounds each and every highly descriptive locale within the novel from the initial murder site in the woods to a secret mountain hideaway along the Norwegian border to an apartment in Stockholm and many others along the way. This has to be one of the finest novels that I have ever read regardless of genre.

This is a must-read.

Blackwater is a beautifully plotted thriller. It does what all good thrillers should do: it uses the mystery of a brutal crime to explore deeper, darker mysteries.

I came to the book having read Ekman's The Forest of Hours, a novel which shares with Blackwater an obsession with time, memory and survival. Above all, Kerstin Ekman evokes the forces of nature with exquisite detail and passion. She is a writer of stature. We need more of her novels in English.

I was really enthralled by this book. The rich development of characters plus the beautiful description of the scandinavian landscape. It does require your full attention.The smells, the sights, and the sounds were very vivid and I know I will undoubtedly reread it at some future time. I rather compare it slightly with Smilla's Sense of Snow which had the same sense of ethereal mystery. I do believe, however that the feeling that one has for the cold and unforgiving climate is a factor in the fascination of these two novels.

This novel, the first by Kerstin Ekman translated into English, is a thoughtful, gripping, and very human mystery. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoyed David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars, the only weak part of this effort is the translation, which faltered slightly throughout. Ekman effectively engages the reader in the present before taking you back to a very different time, twenty years before. It is only after becoming quite comfortable with the characters and the life of Annie Raft that the reader is wrenched back to the present and the real mystery begins to unravel

This isn't a book for the reader who wants a superficially thrilling mystery novel with a death on every page, full of broken glass and violence. The violence is contained and never either repellingly graphic or superfluous. The novel proceeds slowly and often confusingly. Although it is slow at times I was totally engaged and accepted Ekman's pace and intelligence. It is a marvelous book, way beyond the mystery genre. The environment, a people on the verge of extinction (the Sami), small-townspeople people on the edge of sanity, troubled families, people in love, people who live in small towns on the edge of society, adolescent longing, mother-love, are wrapped like a tissue of humanity around a brutal, incomprehensible murder.
It is as difficult to synopsize the novel as it would be reduce Moby Dick to a fishing story. The first reviewer on the Amazon site did a plot summary as well as could be done. The book is totally engrossing and, at the end, beautifully resolved. I loved the book. For the serious reader it is compelling and richly rewarding.

Ekman's writing is both organic and intellectual--her descriptions of the natural landscape surrounding Blackwater and environs are darkly compelling, and beautifully wrought. The reader is right there at the peak of a northern midsummer--you can practically smell the lichen clinging to the dwarf birch trees. And the vibrancy of the opening section--the simple brutality of the Brandbergs, and their resemblance to characters in the Sagas; Annie and Mia's dreamlike and confused wanderings through the twilight forest--were so vivid I just had to keep reading.

If only this were enough. I was looking forward to the darkness of it all, the psychology of both the individual characters and the village as a whole--this is something that Swedish crime novels offer in spades, and is part of what makes them so compelling. But the novel's much-lauded psychological element performs the exact opposite of a psychological exploration--Ekman shows us the emotion just below the surface, but doesn't plumb it. She also then completely shuts us off from it, by never allowing any of the characters to truly connect with each other. I mean, none, in a book full of parents and children, lovers, couples and siblings. The closest thing we get to emotion is Birger, whose justifiable emotion everyone else considers an embarrassment. The reader is left with an extremely depressing Weltanschauung, where all the characters are deeply invested in not saying things, and somehow never relating that to why they're unhappy. And since the structure of the book--which resembles Annie's confused, dreamlike rambling through the forest--exists to play on this "psychological" stuff, it mostly just ends up feeling powerful, but incoherent.

As for who done it? This is revealed at the end in the most anti-climatic manner possible, and is accepted and pushed aside so quickly you could blink and miss it. The feeling the reader is left with, that the actual killer is beside the point (the point being a study of the village), was probably what the author intended. But the rest of the book isn't coherent enough to make up for its disappointing ending.

Overall, there are things to love--the power of Ekman's writing, the echoes of something deeper that pervade the descriptions of the landscape and some of the characters. But these elements suffer when juxtaposed with the incoherent psychology and the whimper of an ending. I'm willing to put some of this down to an unskilled translation, and what I liked, I liked enough that I would try to read it again if a new translation was someday brought out.

This is a must-read.

Blackwater is a beautifully plotted thriller. It does what all good thrillers should do: it uses the mystery of a brutal crime to explore deeper, darker mysteries.

I came to the book having read Ekman's The Forest of Hours, a novel which shares with Blackwater an obsession with time, memory and survival. Above all, Kerstin Ekman evokes the forces of nature with exquisite detail and passion. She is a writer of stature. We need more of her novels in English.

This eerie story, set in Sweden, opens with a midsummers night murder. Intriguing characters, off-beat situations, a cult, a commune, a suspicious village, a fanatical mom -- kept me up all night. Not a great 'have-to-read-it" book, yet still a good read.