Reviews for The Black Path (Rebecka Martinsson Series #3)

The average rating for The Black Path (Rebecka Martinsson Series #3) based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-01-02 00:00:00 David Tereschuck When a book contains a detailed description of a work of art, and especially when it explains how the work was created, that's often a clue that the object in question is standing in for the book itself. In Cat's Cradle, Newt's ironic and deceptively simple painting is the focal point of the story. In A la recherche de temps perdu, Proust uses Elstir's canvases and Vinteuil's sonata to give you some indications about his overall plan. And in Kjærstad's Jonas Wergeland trilogy, the TV series Å Tenke Stort is so clearly the book that I often have trouble remembering which is which. Self-referentiality may be a trick, but many authors are clearly unable to resist the temptation to wink at their readers in this particular way. Åsa Larsson, a Northern Swedish writer I had not come across before, appears to be another member of this distinguished family. One of the threads in Svart Stig follows Esther, a young Lapp girl who composes a number of disturbing paintings, several of which are linked to the story. One, in particular, attracted my attention. Esther's fostermother is also an artist, and sells her work to tourists who want to go home with a Lapp souvenir. She tones it down to fit the lowest common denominator: it's not smart to be too fancy and get ideas above your station. Esther loves her mother, and what she wants most of all is to paint in oils like her. But the mother won't let her, because they are too expensive. The girl has a suggestion. She asks if she can just paint a little on the canvas, and then her mother can paint over it. It would be so cute, she begs. She'd know it was there, and her mother would too, but no one else would even guess. Her mother likes the thought, but refuses: the paint would be too thick, it'd look wrong. But Esther won't let go of her discovery and realizes it in a different way. She does a watercolor on paper, then sticks another sheet on top with a different picture. She leaves one corner loose, so that it's possible to get a glimpse of what the original painting looked like. I think that this painting, once again, is standing in for the book. On the surface, it is a competently realized thriller set largely in Northern Sweden. There is a passable intrigue which starts with a woman being found dead in an ark, a kind of little mobile home that Northern Swedish people use for ice-fishing in the frozen lakes. The charm of the novel is derived from the use of similar details about life in the Kiruna region, a desolate Arctic mining area where many of the locals are more comfortable speaking samiska or tornedalsfinska than Swedish. It's a nice piece of work and has sold well; the blurb boasts that it's already been translated into a dozen languages. I do wonder, though, if it is the book Larsson really wanted to write. Clearly visible under the surface there is a second book, a magical-realist story with a much less clearly defined plot. It is about snow and blood and loneliness and madness, about a world where it's just as normal to own fifty reindeer that you herd and slaughter yourself as it is to spend an hour painfully composing an email to the city slicker from Stockholm that you've had the bad luck to fall in love with. It's a beautiful and unusual piece of work, judging from the fragments that are left, and it's a shame that Larsson felt she had to paint over it. But I'm sure she was right. It wasn't anything that the tourists were likely to appreciate.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-08-03 00:00:00 John Brown THE BLACK PATH is the sort of book that you need to read with your preconceptions and expectations firmly locked in a drawer. Having not read the second book in the series yet, I know something happened to Rebecka in that book, but the details aren't important to understanding, from the start of THE BLACK PATH, that she has been through a traumatic experience and she's struggling back into normal life. But one thing you will find with THE BLACK PATH is that Rebecka, or Anna-Maria or any of the other characters that either reoccur from earlier books, or step forward into the limelight in this book, won't necessarily remain as the focus of the book. This isn't a book that's specifically about a single person's journey through the events that lead up to a crime (perhaps with the exception of the victim herself), but a story about the swirling circumstances of lives lived. That's not to say that the book has an unfocused or messy feel to it, rather the opposite. But it does give the way the story unfolds a fascinating, sort of ephermeral feel to it, as the focus moves around, and the events that somebody - but not everybody - are involved in, all lead to a resolution. I have to say, that for me, there was a strong sense of Swedish about this book. But this was a combination of things. The weather, the environment, the sensibility of the people, the way that the supernatural interwove with the mundane facts of life. The book also incorporates some glimpses into Sami culture which were absolutely fascinating. As with the first of this series that I read, I still find Rebecka and Anna-Maria slightly offputting as characters. Don't know why, but they just are. Having said that, they are fascinating, and people I'm interested in and care about slightly from afar. There's some real skill in writing a story with characters like these that keeps you so involved. But I was also very taken with the lack of predictable styling of the book - I liked the way that the story evolved without the need to ensure series characters got their alloted page space.