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- Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
- Path: sparky!uunet!paladin.american.edu!gatech!news.ans.net!cmcl2!panix!mara
- From: mara@panix.com (Mara Chibnik)
- Subject: Re: Sjowall & Wahloo and other series
- Message-ID: <1992Dec31.174206.26467@panix.com>
- Date: Thu, 31 Dec 1992 17:42:06 GMT
- References: <1992Dec28.141208.22661@samba.oit.unc.edu> <1992Dec29.001118.10561@eff.org> <1992Dec30.155425.8247@speedy.aero.org> <1992Dec30.205213.25688@samba.oit.unc.edu>
- Organization: (getting there)
- Lines: 34
-
- joan@med.unc.edu (Joan Shields) writes of Sjowall and Wahloo
- (following a comment by Miriam Nadel):
-
- >>To be fair, Sjowall and Wahloo were journalists who set out to use the
- >>crime novel as a way to explore what they saw as the deterioration in
- >>Swedish society caused by the welfare state.
- >They did a damn good job of it as well. I enjoy the series because of the
- >well-developed characters they aren't always one way or another ie:
- >sometimes Lennart Kollberg can be an ass and sometimes you just want to
- >shake Martin Beck - Gunvald Larsson is a very interesting character, a lot
- >more complex than most of his fellow policemen realize.
-
- I like this detail too. What I particularly like is the way the
- series develops as a series. The irony against the state and the
- police force as its representative gets increasingly bitter, with
- quite an obvious turning point in the middle, roughly coinciding
- with Beck's injuries. (I'm trying to avoid serious spoilers, here.)
-
- In the early books, it's clear that the crimes are heinous and that
- the police owe it to society to catch the villainous criminals. By
- the time you get to the last two books this is no longer the case.
-
- (High on my list of what I want to read when the bookcases come so
- I can unpack the rest of my cartons are these ten books, in
- sequence. At the moment, they're in a carton at the bottom of a
- four-deep stack and this discussion is making me hungry. Oh, yes:
- next week, and thank you for asking. ;-))
-
-
- --
-
- Mara Chibnik
- mara@panix.com Life is too important to be taken seriously.
-
-