Italian Shoes is a Good Fit

Henning Menkel is More Than a Well-known Mystery Writer

Jun 4, 2009

Swedish writer Henning Menkel, author of the bestselling Kurt Wallander mystery series, is also adept at other kinds of fiction, as proved by his novel Italian Shoes.

Many viewers of the recent PBS Masterpiece Mystery series Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh (who’s hopefully drumming up financing for his next Shakespeare movie project as we speak) as a dangerously burned out Swedish police detective, are hearing for the first time the name Henning Mankell. Menkell is the Swedish writer of a series of widely translated and read mystery novels centered around the figure of Detective Kurt Wallander, who, like all great fictional sleuths, is as perplexing and fascinating as the cases he solves.

And many will be interested, and perhaps surprised, to learn that the prolific Mankell has written many other novels besides mysteries. One of them, Italian Shoes, published in Sweden in 2006, has been translated by Laurie Thompson, and was published this year in America by The New Press.

Gloom But Not Doom

Despite its title, Italian Shoes wallows in rich Scandinavian gloom (and not simply because the story is set there) without exactly buying into or exploiting that cliché, just as the transition from the Wallander books to an English television production was a smooth one. Mankell’s protagonist, Fredrik Welin, in the tradition of the novels of the great Norwegian writer, Knut Hamsun, is estranged from the world, living on a tiny island entirely surrounded by ice, for an existential purpose: He’s determined to find himself as well as make sense of his troubled past.

Soon, that past literally comes back to haunt Welin, and Mankell, wielding his narrative skill as a mystery writer, weaves a tale of convincing redemption. Along the way, the book gathers enough force to deserve to be included in a list of fine novels in which mature first-person narrators are entranced by their pasts, such as Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, and Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger.

A Real Problem

It should be noted that fans of those particular books, or others of that ilk, might be disappointed by the overall sober tone of Mankell’s fictional narrator, which stems, it seems clear, not so much from Scandinavian gloom as Mankell trying too hard to sound in control and unsentimental. He makes the mistake that many novelists make: confusing even-temper with a kind of stately profundity.

True, the voice comes across as authentic, but also so stripped of embellishment and nuance and all the myriad colors of the human psyche that it threatens to mitigate our interest in it. In such cases, the reader seems to be handed a fictional idea of what authenticity is supposed to be.

There’s no denying, however, the overall power of the novel, and the unique, multifaceted nature of Mankell’s talent.

The copyright of the article Italian Shoes is a Good Fit in European Literature is owned by Douglas Nordfors. Permission to republish Italian Shoes is a Good Fit in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.