“Not much had been said during the meeting, no new progress had been made. They were now working from the theory that the killing spree was over and that the deficit for the Swedish business world was going to stop at three and only three entries: Kuno Daggfeldt, Bernhard Strand-Julen, and Nils-Emil Carlberger.

They were wrong.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (JUL 13, 2011)

Misterioso by Arne Dahl is a unique and wonderful book. It is part mystery, part police procedural, part existential philosophy and part comedy. There is something so distinctive about this book that it resists categorization. On the surface, it is a mystery but so much of the novel lies below the surface, getting into the characters’ minds and thoughts as they live their lives and work at trying to catch a serial killer.

The title of the book comes from a piece of music composed by Thelonius Monk, a famous American jazz pianist and composer, now deceased. There is a serial killer on the loose in Sweden who is killing very rich and powerful men. The killer waits for his prey in the victim’s living room listening to Monk’s Misterioso on the stereo and when the victim arrives he is shot in the head two times. The killer views the music as “a pantomime, a peculiar dance of death.” The Swedish police put together what they call an A-Team to find this killer.

Paul Hjelm is one of those chosen for this select group. It is ironic for him as on the afternoon he was picked, he expected to be fired. He was with his colleagues that morning and there was a hostage situation in a building near police headquarters. An Estonian immigrant, here illegally, was holding a group of people in the immigration office hostage. Paul decides to take matters into his own hands and he goes into the office and shoots the man holding the others hostage. Paul feels very badly about doing this and expects Internal Affairs to fire him for his impulsive action. He acted on his own without waiting for back-up. Instead of being fired, he becomes a national hero.

The group gathered to form the A-Team is very original. There is a singer – a man who used to be Mr. Sweden when he took steroids; there is a Chilean who is called black-head because he is not blonde like most Swedes; there is a woman who also sings and likes to masturbate in her office; there is a Finn who has a secrets from his past life prior to coming to Sweden; there is a pedantic idealist who loves to give his political views. The reader sees how the team interacts and gets to know one another. Hultin, the team leader, always enters the room through a mysterious door that no one knows about. Where it comes from and where it leads to is a mystery.

As the team works together, there are four victims dead. The A-Team checks out all kinds of leads including the Russian and Estonian mafia, the victims’ businesses and personal lives, and they find out a lot of information. One of the victims is a pedophile, together the three of them tried to rape a woman who later committed suicide, and some of their businesses are involved in mafia corruption. “An amphetamine-babbling proprietor of a video store with private viewing booths in Norrmalm had cheerfully offered them some child porn films with Russian subtitles, even though they had shown him their police ID. He was arrested.”

Paul is in the midst of a marital crisis, an existential aloneness where he and his wife of many years, Cilla, can no longer communicate and find themselves totally separate. Paul has this “dreadful, unbearable feeling that we can never really reach anyone else. Never ever, not even those closest to us. The horrifying sensation of absolute existential aloneness. And now he saw this same emotion in Cilla’s eyes.”

We learn about the Palme murder that is a huge deal in Sweden. It is mentioned several times in this novel. Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden, was assassinated in 1986 and the murderer was never found. The A-Group does not want to be seen as ineffective like the investigation of the Palme murder turned out to be. It is very much in the back of their minds as they search for the serial killer. When they do not have luck finding the murderer after a month “either they were doing something fundamentally wrong, or else they were dealing with another Palme murder.”

We also learn about the prevalence of xenophobia in Sweden. The term black-head refers to anyone who doesn’t have blond hair as do most of the Swedes. There is a great deal of prejudice against immigrants and looking like a Swede is considered very important.

“The more they got to know each other, the harder it becames to understand each other. As always.” This background of existential ennui reminded me of Sartre and Camus, especially Sartre’s book Nausea. Paul becomes obsessed with a mark on his cheek, most likely a common pimple. However, he worries it’s melanoma and the mark takes on different shapes depending on his mood and the different crises he is facing.

Much of the dialog is tongue in cheek and I found myself laughing at the oddest moments. Tiina Nunnally did a wonderful job of translation and the book flows throughout. There is not a dull moment. It seems like the Scandinavians are having a true renaissance in crime writing and Arne Dahl is right at the top with this first in a 10 book series finally available to US readers.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pantheon (July 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Arne Dahl
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Scandinavian mysteries:  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson The Shadow Woman by Ake Edwardson The Snowman by Jo Nesbo

Bibliography (translated only):

• Misterioso (1999; July 2011 in US)

“She wants to hear that once upon a time, Apollo did this or that to a nymph and snow was the result. I can’t offer it. Divinity for me is that very plume of birds, the patterns of stars, the recurrence of seasons. I love these things and weep for the joy of them. The reality of numbers, again, for instance: I could weep if I thought about numbers for too long, their glorious architecture. I want to weep, now, for the beauty of the sky dispensing itself across my courtyard, the cold warmth in all our cheeks, the fear-turned-to-pleasure in my slaves’ eyes.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd (SEP 7, 2010)

The best books are not necessarily those with dazzling prose or mind-numbing theories. The best books are those that steal up on you, and lead you gently into a world made real, not by an abundance of detail, but by honestly rendered characters that, from the very first page, so completely captivate that before you know it, you’ve read half the book and there are but a few hours until dawn. That is, the best books understand the allure – our insatisfiable longing to compare and contrast our minds with others – of interesting characters. Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean is such a book, and her accomplishment – the surprising irresistibility of her story – is all the more incredible when you consider that she’s chosen to focus on rather prosaic moments in a great man’s life.

To the non-philosopher, Aristotle is perhaps best known for being two (interestingly symmetric) things: Plato’s student and Alexander the Great’s teacher. The Golden Mean takes its subject as the latter of these, chronicling Aristotle’s grudging attempt to make a life in the Macedonian capital, Pella, after nearly a quarter-century abroad.

Aristotle was the son of a Macedonian scientist, who worked his way from country doctor to royal physician. A precocious, if socially withdrawn, boy, Aristotle was always fascinated with the unseen principles behind the natural world. He most loved to dissect things, to peel back skin and muscle to reveal the structure underneath. He learned quickly, however, that his thirst for knowledge was easily misunderstood and he took to burning his dissected specimens to escape detection. Yet, it was no secret to his parents that Aristotle was strange, and unsure of what he was meant to do, unsure if the strange in him would, indeed, prove to be his greatness, his father sent him to study with a debased tragedian, Illaeus, who although now estranged, was once the student of the great philosopher, Plato.

When fateful tragedy hits Aristotle’s family, Illaeus’ referral secures him a spot at Plato’s famous Academy in Athens. It is the prestige of his education, and the esteem in which he is held by his peers, that attracts rich, politically-connected patrons, such as Hermias of Atarneus. However, after three years in Atarneus, with whispers of war in the air, Aristotle moves with his wife to the island of Lesvos. There, he spends peaceful days swimming and studying the marine animals. When we enter the story, five years have passed, and Aristotle is anxious to return to Athens.

But, called upon by Hermias to deliver a message to King Phillip II of Macedon, Aristotle is obligated to pay what he thinks will be a brief visit to the decidedly rough Macedonian court. Phillip remembers him fondly – he used to play with the doctor’s son as a boy – and after his son, Alexander, professes his preference for Aristotle’s pedagogy, Phillip offers him a position as Alexander’s tutor. Although, fond of the young Alexander, Aristotle considers the job beneath him. But, when Phillip implicitly guarantees him the position as the head of the Academy in Athens, a position he was passed over for previously, in favour of Plato’s nephew, Speusippus, Aristotle can hardly refuse.

It’s Aristotle’s attempt to make a life in Pella, all the while looking forward to his future in Athens, that forms the bulk of the book. While he does his best to make a go of it, he falls in and out of favour with both King Phillip and Prince Alexander, and after war breaks out between Macedonia and Athens, his philosophical education and his “effeminate” ways –both unmistakeably Athenian – prove to be a burden. This is a historically important period – Macedonia posed to take over the ancient world – however most of the geo-political happenings take place off-stage, leaving the reader with a series of wonderfully inconsequential moments such as Aristotle’s household greeting their first snow or Aristotle teaching Arrhidaeus, Alexander’s mentally-disabled half-brother, his “alpha-beta-gammas”.

Actually, this is Lyon’s great achievment: there’s something in these small moments that keeps us from looking away. Perhaps, it’s that the private moments of great people (however, fictional) can be as compelling as the most gruesome battle scenes, and so we find ourselves reading about Aristotle’s lonely childhood or his platonic infatuations or his sexual relationships with same disgusted glee we read the scenes of brain surgery without anaesthetic or Alexander peeling the skin from a dead soldier’s face.

Lyon’s clean, unadorned prose can be wonderful:

“I am garbage. This knowledge is my weather, my private clouds. Sometimes low-slung, black, and heavy; sometimes high and scudding, the white unbothersome flock of a fine summer’s day. I tell Pythias sometimes, an urgent bulletin from the darklands: I’m garbage. She says nothing.”

And while much of the story progresses through dialogue, Lyon wisely allows her characters to speak in a contemporary vernacular (no affected formality or contorted syntax to mark milieu, here).

The book takes its title from Aristotlean ethics, which basically councils the moderate course, the relative mean between two emotional extremes. Much of the narrative drive comes from the inherent tension between extremes of pride and shame, cowardice and rashness, ecstasy and despair. But, although Lyon makes the ingenious choice to afflict Aristotle with manic-depression – smitten with the moderation he finds so difficult, he holds up temperance as a moral paradigm – Aristotle’s manias and depressions are little more than assertions – “On the worst days, I stayed in bed, unable to speak or eat, until the blackness lifted . . .”; “. . .the other times, when I simply don’t need sleep, and the books seem to write themselves, and the world seems painted into every last corner with colour and sweetness . . .” – and I couldn’t help but wish Lyon had let us suffer in bed or write through the night with him. A lost opportunity to further explore Aristotle’s character.

But, perhaps that’s in keeping with the overall balance of the book. As the book’s epigraph suggests, great men are best known, not by the events that immortalize them, but by the multitude of unextraordinary moments that make up most of their lives. And if the knowledge of greatness isn’t to be found in the extreme deed, then perhaps it isn’t to be found in emotional extremes, either. And so, perhaps, in limiting our access to Aristotle’s excesses of emotion, Lyon has, in fact, best equipped us to know the Aristotle that she has so skillfully brought back to this world.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Annabel Lyon
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt An interview with Annabel Lyon
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another you may enjoy: Ransom by David Malouf

Bibliography:

• Oxygen: Stories (2003)
• The Best Thing For You (2004)
• The Golden Mean (2009; September 2010 in US)