Depths Paperback – April 15, 2008

I've read many of Mankell's Wallander mysteries and love them, so I was excited to learn that he had written a novel. There is much darkness in the Wallander series, albeit tempered with occasional wry humor. In "Depths", however, I only found perhaps two or three mildly amusing passages. This is a hopeless and disturbing tale of an unlikeable character who morphs into an irredeemable monster, and I empathize with another reviewer who stated that while he recognized that this is a great novel, he still did not like it.The main character's thoughts, to which we are privy thanks to Mankell's excellent ability to show us, reveal the slow process of a psychopath in the making. Lars Tobiasson-Svartman's life is fairly mundane. He goes to sea to measure depths for Sweden's Navy; he goes home to Kristina Tacker, his long-suffering wife; back and forth in this manner for the duration of most of the novel. While at sea he seems to miss her yet once home, he is anxious to get back to sea. Thus, when he happens upon independent yet lonely Sara Fredericka on her wild and barren island, he sees an opportunity to reinvent himself and escape the stifling boredom of his measured existence. All the while he actually has no idea who he really is.I loathed Tobiasson-Svartman's character; he is selfish, cruel and utterly reprehensible to me. Yet there were brief glimpses into a soul that might have become something other than what he did become once he gave in to his dark impulses and even darker obsessions. In this respect I could grant him just a modicum of sympathy.I need say no more. A feeling of impending doom permeates from beginning to inevitable end, and if you pay close attention you may find, as I did, that the ending is not so shocking after all. I highly recommend it for its psychological insights and gloomy poetics, but only if you don't mind being depressed for awhile after reading it...

Yet another dark, Scandinavian novel here; this one set in the wilds of the WWI Baltic Sea. The plot, such as is it, follows hydrographer Lars whose declared intention is to find a depth that can't be plumbed, through a liminal world of shifting seas and conflicting tides into a world of madness. But it's not so much the character Lars on which one focuses, or the two women in his life, but the liminal seascape/dreamscape of the world he inhabits. About fifty pages into the over 400 page novel, I began to ask myself what was dream and what was waking cognition here. For Lars, as he spirals into greater depths, greater confusions, "It seemed to him that he was living in many different worlds at the same time. Each one of them was equally true."Ultimately, this book is quite disturbing and brings to the surface, as it were, several philosophical questions, such as this one contemplated by Plato and Plotinus:"`Children would no doubt like to choose their parents,' she said. `Maybe they do, did we but know it.'"Eventually, in these wild Baltic waters, all waking, human cognition dissolves, all the artificial constructs we create in order to identify loved ones, to name them, to fix them in place - loved ones who, after all, are in the constant process of changing into someone else - sink into the unknown. As Lars's wife says, on the verge of clinical madness:"I have realised that I am married to a man who doesn't exist, a shadow with a circulatory system and a brain that is nothing more than an invention, a figment of the imagination."I'm only giving the book 4 starts because the staccato minimalist prose is a bit off-putting for my taste. But this book is still one to be recommended by all serious readers who realise that, in the vast deeps of this cosmos, we may well be nothing more than shadows with circulatory systems who briefly haunt it.

I have really enjoyed several of Henning Mankell's well written books. This one was completely different - and I didn't really enjoy it. Unbelievably well described scenarios but all the characters appeared mentally disturbed. A sad and very unusual love story.