Eye of the Red Tsar

Sam Eastland's Eye of the Red Tsar runs into many of the problems that plague historical thrillers. Its plot is much too dependent on coincidence, even when the coincidences in question defy all rational explanation. It's a historical thriller, but the coincidences don't have the ring of historical truth.

It also lacks emotional truth, as when we are asked to believe that the Tsar's chief detective and right hand man would willingly take on much the same role for Stalin himself, even after experiencing the worst of the Gulag. Pekkela, the detective, experiences the worst excesses of the Soviet regime, yet he willingly agrees to become a part of it. And being Stalin's chief detective, well...that's like being Stalin's chief detective--neither a resume builder nor a great career move, one would think. It's hard to imagine what he thinks will happen to the "criminals" he apprehends--he doesn't seem to care to ask the question. Maybe it's because I know too much about what happened to too many people falsely accused and punished under Stalin's brutal reign, but the notion of becoming Stalin's right hand man is...unpleasant. The fact that he accepts the job--when he could go anywhere else in the world--with so little thought makes me deeply suspicious of Pekkela, who is supposed to appear in a second novel in 2011. For Eastland's sake, I hope he finds a way to give his main character some kind of moral compass.

Buddhism not Buspar

Finished Mary Pipher's book. There are lots of little tidbits of wisdom scattered throughout, certainly (e.g. when she calls herself a "stress monkey" or reminds one of the importance of mindfulness), but I have an underlying problem with the book as a whole. The premise of the book is that she had some kind of nervous breakdown following the Reviving Ophelia maelstrom and that she cured herself...with Buddhism. This might be plausible if her major depressive episode had been purely situational and could be cured by a kind of Rilkean "you must change your life" kind of move, but she makes it very clear that her depression had a great deal to do with her environment growing up, her parents' failings, and so forth. Her episode was the product of a lifetime, not just the stress and overwork and uncomfortable lifestyle of the celebrity shrink.

To hear her tell it though, she basically cured herself through mindfulness, meditation, and expanding her perspective. Now, these are all good things--and it's amusing to read about her attempts to settle her mind for the purposes of meditation--but to suggest that a major depressive episode can be essentially self-cured is, frankly, dangerous. And she's a shrink--she knows that. It's like she's taken the adage "physician, heal thyself" to its most dangerous limit. At the very least her story takes away from the very real struggles of the unenlightened majority who find they cannot cure themselves. It suggests that there is an element of shame in admitting that one needs help, perhaps even that those who fail to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps are in fact weak. And I don't really understand this failing, because, for heaven's sakes, she's a therapist--she knows the value of therapy. Maybe she even got therapy for her depression, but if she did she fails to mention it.

Additionally, the one brief mention she makes of psych meds is a comment that she recommends them for her patients only in dire situations. She also admits to taking an anti-anxiety medication to help her get through one of the worst book tours. I'm not suggesting that psych meds would have cured her...far from it. I am suggesting that they might have helped alleviate some of the worst symptoms and made her more comfortable, and really, if that's an option, why not take advantage of it? To write an entire book about a major depressive episode and hardly mention these medications seems grossly irresponsible. Again, it suggests that those who take advantage of these medications are somehow weak, and perhaps even sets up a false dichotomy between biological depression (treated with medication) and situational depression (treated with therapy or mindfulness). It's generally accepted that this dichotomy is totally misleading and that the best treatment for depression is therapy and meds, but to hear her tell it, she took advantage of neither. This is perhaps most frustrating when she describes her lifelong struggles with insomnia. She seems willing to try anything...anything that is except a sleeping pill. One wants to shake her and tell her to take a goddamn Ambien already.

Finally, throughout the book Pipher is extremely, um, forgiving. She seems at least as interested in understanding the reasons behind her parents' failings than in analyzing how these failings shaped her development. This is noble (noble beyond belief, actually), especially considering just how neglectful and damaging her parents were. I'm not saying that she shouldn't forgive them, forgiveness being a virtue in all major religious traditions and all that, I just wish she had a harder time doing it. Basically, I want her to be like Anne Lamott on this front: recognize the value of forgiveness, but also acknowledge just how bloody hard it is to pull off in reality.

Ahem...Mary Pipher

It is with some reluctance that I admit that I have (briefly) put down my Russian detective novel to pick up, ahem, Mary Pipher's new memoir on being the "worst Buddhist in the world." This is the kind of thing that my dad can get away with listening to on his daily commute, but which comes perilously close to "self-help" when read by me (and not in enough of an irreverent, hysterical, former cocaine addict--read: Anne Lamott--kind of way). But so be it.

It is, I admit, somewhat quaint and therapisty, but I was swayed by the worst Buddhist in the world line, which is a frighteningly good description of me at the moment (I understand the whole "life is suffering" part...I just don't quite get how one is supposed to detach oneself from that fact). But, as those who know me outside the blog know all too well, I'm having one of those dark night of the soul moments, struggling to establish some kind of identity outside the academy, and battling a lot of my own inner demons. Sometimes this comes out in my need to read masses of Scandinavian crime fiction and plot the perfect murder; sometimes I just want to read about someone who's been there. Besides which, I'm grateful to Pipher for delivering Reviving Ophelia into my hands just in time for me to become a troubled adolescent back in 1994. My only wish is that her sense of humor were a little more self-deprecating and biting--I'm not kidding when I say she should have taken some writing lessons from Anne Lamott. However, on my Anne Lamott, Barbara Kingsolver, Haven Kimmel nonfiction scale of the day she's getting about a B- at the moment. She'd hate that, surely, but hey, I haven't read that much of the book yet. Maybe she'll make it up to me.

Swedish film version of the Millennium Trilogy

My husband and I were lucky enough to see an advance screening of the Swedish film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo as part of the Chicago European Film Festival at the Siskel Center. What can I say? It was outstanding. It didn't once jar with my preconceived mental image of the story. Michael Nykvist and Noomi Rapace are outstanding as Blomkvist and Salander, respectively--the general consensus at the screening was that it was so nice to see actors who looked like real people--and I myself am desperate to chop off my hair in emulation of Rapace. Best of all, the director pulled no punches when it came to the grittier elements of the story--they were on full display, rape, sodomy, and all. Overall, it was a brilliant film realization, and I hope the next two, which are apparently already airing in Sweden, are every bit as wonderful.

On an unfortunate note, I've also learned that Hollywood has optioned the rights to the three books so as to make an Americanized version, no doubt aimed at those among us who don't want to bother reading subtitles and like our films to be sanitized and R-rated. I'll withhold my final judgment, but I'm preparing to hate the Hollywood versions.

Box 21

Box 21, despite its superficial similarities to Larsson's Lisbeth Salander books, is much less sophisticated, but probably all the more realistic for it. Although oppressed by members of the highest ranks of society, Lisbeth Salander has remarkable skills. She also has the advantage of enlisting a famous journalist to her cause. This allows for a deeply textured, complex narrative and, ultimately, Salander's redemption.

The premise in Box 21 is much simpler. A Lithuanian sex slave gets herself into the hospital, where she--somewhat contrivedly (how does a Lithuanian sex slave attain that much knowledge of plastic explosives?)--sets up a hostage situation with the sole motive of killing a certain detective. This is a Salander-esque move, certainly, with the big difference being that Lydia does not have a Plan B and the only possible result of Plan A is her death. Her wager is that her desperate act will leave enough clues, including a telltale videotape, that it will be impossible for her story to be ignored. Unfortunately, without some kind of accomplice to help her fight the overbearing power structure, the clues she leaves are all too easily covered up by the very power structure she intended them to indict. In the end, even the well-meaning young detective is cowed by the system. And, as the novel makes clear, the cycle of sexual enslavement hardly pauses. This makes for a profoundly unsatisfying novel, but probably one that tells a more realistic tale of the crushing reality of the fate of those living on the furthest fringes of Swedish society.

"Hostages mean that you can make demands."

This is a truth universally to be acknowledged. It is also a truth arrived at a little less than half way into Roslund and Hellstrom's Box 21, which the Library Journal claims is "bound to please readers of Steig Larsson." Larsson's books and Roslund and Hellstrom's have plenty of similarities that will, indeed, please. Most important, both have female protagonists who live on the fringe of Swedish society--in Larsson's case a young woman condemned to guardianship, and in Roslund and Hellstrom's a Eastern European prostitute who doesn't speak Swedish but seems to know an awful lot about plastic explosives.

It is also a truth universally to be acknowleged that the Swedish psyche--at least the Swedish crime writing psyche--has an unhealthy fixation on human trafficking, sexual enslavement, and anal rape...at least to the outside observer. It's hard to think of an author who hasn't dealt with the subject. (To be fair, even the most casual observer of shows like CSI, Law and Order, and Criminal Minds would see that the American psyche is itself just as obsessed with serial killers and rapists.) The interesting thing about this Swedish obsession is that it is a vice not of the masses but of the ruling class: in Larsson's books Lisbeth Salander is oppressed by a network of high-ranking lawyers and intelligence officials. Box 21 suggests much the same: Lydia's clients are detectives and doctors and (one assumes) politicians. When she lands in the hospital after her pimp nearly beats her to death, the very people who are supposed to help her turn out to be those who've been imprisoning her all along. Hence the very quick resort to plastic explosives and a hostage situation.

I don't know where the novel is going next, but I do know that it has the potential to function much the way Larsson's did to expose some of Swedish society's dirtier secrets.

Reading is Hard

Reading has become difficult for me these last few months as my decreased attention span and wandering mind have made it impossible to follow a narrative for more than a sentence. I'm hoping this will improve slowly and I will be able to get back to reading and blogging about reading.

However, I was able to watch the BBC's three-episode Wallander series, based on three Henning Mankel mysteries. The series stars an unshaven Kenneth Branaugh as Mankel's Kurt Wallander, the everyman of Swedish crime fiction. Wallander, in the books and the movie, is not overly deductive or, gasp, overly psychological--he just guts out every investigation and figures it out. The books are some of the most famous Swedish crime fiction of all time, and the mini-series does them great justice. Ironically, the three mysteries that make up the mini-series all take place around midsummer, so instead of suffering from a lack of light like so much Swedish crime fiction, they suffer from an, assumedly, intentional overabundance. The films seems hyper-saturated with light, and the irony, that even at the height of midsummer with light radiating from every crack, crime still abounds, is not lost. The special features that accompany the films confirm that the director, cast, and crew sought to make the landscape as much a feature of the films as it is of the books.

These are not the only films made out of the Wallander books. If you have a DVD player that reads Region 2 there are numerous Swedish-made Wallander films, as well as other movies made of Swedish crime fiction. Amazon.com sells much of it.

On a related note, my favorite theater has a poster up for the film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I am somewhat nervous about how that novel will translate to film, but not so nervous that I won't be the first one in line on opening night. Here's hoping.