Finished Christoffer Carlsson’s “Brinn mig en sol (Blaze Me a Sun).” I wouldn’t go as far as the obi copy calling it “a masterpiece that comes once every decade,” but I definitely enjoyed it as a mystery, and it was also an excellent piece of literary fiction.
Its simple prose carries that uniquely Nordic mystery sense of loneliness and melancholy while speaking about solitude and life itself, but what impressed me most was how richly and meticulously the novel depicted the region and society beyond just the crimes. The goal of a mystery novel is to pursue the full truth behind an incident, but the closer one gets to the truth here, the more one peers into layered human “crime and punishment” that perhaps should never have been exposed. After finishing it, I was left with the same kind of heavy, bitter aftertaste I get from Dennis Lehane’s novels. Now I’m curious about the author’s other works.
