Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (20 page)

I adapted, eventually, to Jay Rubin’s perfectly good translations, and even to the slightly more whimsical voice of Philip Gabriel, who did the English for some of Murakami’s more recent novels. (Both Rubin and Gabriel worked on the gigantic
1Q84
, and I have to admit I couldn’t tell the difference between their sections.) But all along, the Birnbaum passion simmered. So you can imagine how the flame leapt up when I finished the Rubin translation of
Norwegian Wood
—Murakami’s first huge bestseller in Japan, published there in 1987, but not brought out in America until 2000—and read a reference in the Translator’s Note to “Alfred Birnbaum’s earlier translation of
Norwegian Wood
, which was produced for distribution in Japan … to enable students to enjoy their favorite author as they struggled with the mysteries of English.” We should
not
, the note enjoined us, try to obtain this bootleg version, for “the present edition is the first English translation that Murakami has authorized for publication outside Japan.”

Naturally I sought out the bootleg version immediately. Thanks to the internet, such things are readily available, if at a shocking price: the two little paperbacks of the Kodansha English Library edition cost me more than a hundred dollars. Not surprisingly, I found that the Birnbaum version
was
better, in exactly the way his opening sentences of
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
were better. But I have yet to read the whole of the Alfred Birnbaum
Norwegian Wood
. I am saving them for a rainy day, those two cunningly miniaturized volumes, a red one and a green one, each encircled with a band of metallic paper covered in Japanese writing. They’re like a souvenir brought back from a country I’ve never visited—a strange hard-boiled wonderland of wild sheep and vanished elephants, a place that never existed except in the imaginary terrain inhabited jointly if briefly by Haruki Murakami and Alfred Birnbaum.

If you can lose an author through a change in translator, you can also gain one in the same way. I found this out with Dostoyevsky, who by now has benefited from more than a century of good translators, beginning with the remarkable Constance Garnett and going on to include David Magarshack, Sidney Monas, David McDuff, Andrew MacAndrew, and many others. Dostoyevsky’s latest English incarnation is the work of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. To date these two have translated
The Brothers Karamazov
,
Crime and Punishment
,
The Idiot
,
Demons
(their name for
The Possessed
),
The Adolescent
(elsewhere called
A Raw Youth
), and a number of the shorter novels, such as
Notes from Underground
,
The Double
, and
The Gambler
. What I found when I read their
Demons
, my earliest encounter with one of their translations, was that I consciously perceived, for the very first time, that strange narrator who is both there and not there, who comes in when the author needs him and quietly disappears when he doesn’t. Pevear and Volokhonsky have done something with Dostoyevsky’s language—I don’t know exactly what or how—so that you can actually
hear
that ingratiating, whiny, gossipy, unreliable, all-seeing fellow who conveys the story to you.

Once you have had your ears opened to this, you can go back to the Magarshack or the Garnett and hear it in them as well. The narrator, it turns out, was there all along, but it took these new translators to make me aware of him. So in giving us their own insightful version of this great Russian novelist, Pevear and Volokhonsky have magically enriched all the previous versions. Perhaps it takes a writer as large and multivoiced as Dostoyevsky to make room for all these translators at once. Or perhaps it takes someone who has been dead for over a hundred years, so that several generations of interpreters are required to convey him to us. But either way, it gives me hope. As long as a literary work is there in its original language, however inaccessible to me, there remains the possibility that it will eventually be given a new voice with which to speak its old lines. The new version will not quite duplicate the original—nothing can ever do that—but it will at least get me a step closer to my golden prison’s exit.

*   *   *

All translation work is underpaid and underpraised, but there is one kind of translation which, in my experience, operates almost completely beneath the radar, and that is the translation of mystery novels. Thanks to all this skillful drudgery, I have spent many of my most pleasurable and certainly my most addictive reading hours in an imaginary Scandinavia. Though I’ve never been to Stockholm, Oslo, or Copenhagen, I know the street names in these cities almost as well as European teenagers of the mid-twentieth century knew the landmarks of New York and Los Angeles. Their tour guides were American movies. Mine were the thrillers and mysteries of Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall, Henning Mankell, Arne Dahl, Jo Nesbø, and a long list of other Scandinavian authors, all of whose craftsmanlike works were brought to me by equally craftsmanlike—that is to say, nearly invisible—translators. Without looking them up, I cannot tell you the translators’ names; from a readerly point of view, their identities have merged completely with those of their respective authors.

What is it about Scandinavian mysteries that makes them, on average, so much better than anyone else’s? I’m not saying Americans can’t write good thrillers: Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series would come near the top of any aficionado’s list, as would Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books. But these psychological, individualistic portraits of twisted motivation represent only a sliver of what the genre can do. In the right hands, the mystery novel becomes not only a thrilling cat-and-mouse game between a clever murderer and a persistent detective, but also a commentary on the wider society that spawns, polices, and punishes murder. It is this aspect, the wider, social view, at which the Scandinavians excel.

Perhaps one can attribute this in part to the small size of these far northern countries, their relatively homogenous populations, their stable cultural traditions—a setting, in short, in which murders, and especially serial murders, stand out starkly and beg for analysis. Or maybe this wider focus is connected to the firmly if mildly socialist perspective of even the most conservative Scandinavian governments, a view in which individual behavior contributes to or detracts from the public welfare. Possibly the dark, cold, long winters also have a role: with those extreme alternations between everlasting night and midnight sun, the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians may be more likely than the rest of us to reflect on the role of environment in shaping character. The citizens of these countries also seem unusually alert to their own national pasts (unlike Americans, say, for whom the mid-twentieth century is already History), and this in turn makes them more likely to seek cause and effect in these collective historical influences. In any event, what all these factors add up to is a worldview that places the criminal at the center of a social web. This is not necessarily what makes Scandinavian mysteries addictive—
that
can probably be attributed to the more usual thriller qualities of suspense and surprise—but it accounts for at least part of what makes them satisfying, in that you reach the end of each novel with a sense of fulfillment rather than letdown.

The greatest of all Scandinavian mysteries are undoubtedly the Martin Beck series, ten sequential volumes written in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Swedish husband-and-wife team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who sought to convey a changing Swedish society through the crimes investigated by Detective Beck and his band of policemen. Closer to our own time, the worthiest inheritors of the Sjöwall-Wahlöö mantle that I’ve been able to find are Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander novels. I should pause here, though, to admit (for once) that my “undoubtedly” is not universally agreed to. Louise Glück—who in her own way is as much of a mystery addict as I am—believes that the Kurt Wallander books are even greater than the Martin Beck series. She has read and reread each volume many times, and at least one of her own poetry collections,
Averno
, is infused throughout with images that she privately but very consciously borrowed from the Wallander novels. Where I find Mankell’s sentences serviceable, she finds them compelling and evocative. She is so adamant in her devotion, and so effective in her expression of it, that she has almost begun to shake my own conviction about the superiority of the Martin Becks.

I began reading the Kurt Wallander novels in the final years of the twentieth century, when they first started appearing in English, and I have reread most of them at least once since then. The first one,
Faceless Killers
, was published in Swedish in 1991, and after that they came out on a nearly annual basis, with each book set about a year earlier than its date of publication. What this topicality meant was that Mankell was often riding the wave of history before it had even had time to break on our shores. The 1992
Dogs of Riga
, for instance, anticipated the disarray into which the Soviet Union and its satellite states would soon fall; the 1993
White Lioness
was even more prescient about the dying gasps of apartheid in South Africa. Part of the reason for reading Mankell obviously lies in his penetrating social and political vision. He occupies a larger world than ours (than mine, anyway: he spends part of each year in Sweden and the rest directing a theater company in Mozambique), and he is able to make a great deal of what he observes in that world. But to rest the praise for the Kurt Wallander series entirely on this largeness would be to ignore what is perhaps best about the books: their rueful, tender attention to detail.

The books are compulsively readable, but that is not because they pack one wallop after another. On the contrary, part of what makes them so easy to sink into is the relative leisureliness of their pace. We spend a lot of time with Kurt Wallander doing his laundry, or rather, forgetting to do his laundry and having to sign up once again for a slot in his apartment building’s laundry room. We watch him make shopping lists, stop for hamburgers at fast-food restaurants, take his old Peugeot in for repairs or replacement, go to the doctor, visit his elderly father, call his daughter on the phone, and check the thermometer outside his kitchen window. There is a lot of reference to the weather in these books, and most of it is not case-related: it is instead a central element in the small-town Swedish world which becomes, for the duration, our world. We learn the street names of Ystad (the town in the Skåne region where Wallander lives and works), and we learn that it is possible to walk from Wallander’s apartment on Mariagatan to a downtown restaurant, or from the police station to the local hospital. Probably no detective in literature—and certainly no other overweight detective—has done more casual walking than Wallander. I guess the others are all in too much of a hurry, or else they live in places where you can easily catch a cab or the subway. Wallander is not slow, but he’s methodical. When he’s on a case, he’ll often work halfway through the night and still show up at the station by seven the next morning. (The books are very precise about reporting the time of day and the day of the week.) There are occasional moments of sudden tension, shoot-outs and car chases and the like, but mainly what we do in these books is watch Wallander think.

The detective form has always been well suited to showing us thought processes—look at Sherlock Holmes and his carefully explained deductions—but Henning Mankell goes a step further. Thought, in Mankell’s hands, is not entirely logical or rational, though it can be both; it is also the hunch, the instinct, the unconscious realization. Sometimes we spend two or three pages just sitting with Wallander while he reads through the case file once again. Sometimes we watch as he looks at photographs, or stands quietly in a victim’s apartment, hoping to be able to spot the one thing that’s not quite right. Fully half of Wallander’s time seems to be spent waiting for these elusive thoughts to rise to the surface. The solution, or part of it, floats at the corner of his mind, just out of reach, and if he turns to face it directly, it darts away. It is this motion, of the mind’s attempt at retrieval, that is the most characteristic and alluring action in the Wallander mysteries. And it is perhaps this ongoing process of
watching thought take place
which explains why we don’t, at the end of a Wallander book, feel the usual letdown of the mystery novel. The arrival at the solution is not all that matters; a great deal of the interest, and the pleasure, comes from how we got there. This is why the books can be compelling even on a second or third reading: even if you think you have picked them up again to skim for the plot, you will find yourself willy-nilly relaxing into that luxurious, detail-studded pace.

All ten Inspector Wallander books have by now been translated into English, including a belated volume of stories, long available only in German and Swedish, called
The Pyramid: The First Wallander Cases
. The translations—from three different translators: Laurie Thompson, Ebba Segerberg, and Steven T. Murray—are unobtrusive, and that is a great virtue. In fact, I am tempted to say, though of course I don’t know them in Swedish, that the writing in the Wallander books is itself unobtrusive. The sentences of the Wallander books (with all due respect to Louise Glück) do not beg to be read aloud as poetry. That is not their strength. Like Wallander himself, they are serviceable, methodical, decent, and often transparent, though capable of hiding information at times. They are the perfect medium in which to transmit thought, which can be fragmentary and inchoate as well as solid and complete. Their unobtrusiveness is, in this respect, their most valuable quality, for it enables us to feel that the thoughts are coming to us direct.

You can read the Wallander books in any order you choose, which is what I did the first time around. As mysteries they are entirely self-contained, and the personal material is recapitulated often enough for outsiders to catch up. Even on your first exposure to a Wallander novel, you will soon learn the names of Wallander’s regular colleagues, the status of his relationship with his longtime Latvian girlfriend, the nature of the current job held by his daughter, Linda, and the fact that his elderly father, a painter, has spent a lifetime executing a series of nearly identical sunset landscapes, some with a grouse and some without.