Events on the water

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Kerstin Ekman
The Nordic wilderness landscape plays an important role in events on the water ; it has had a lasting impact on the people of the region.

Events on the water ( Handel's vid vatten ) is a widely read novel by the Swedish writer Kerstin Ekman , for which she has received numerous literary prizes. In a multi-layered plot, the author puts the victims of a crime in the foreground. In the 1997 selection of the best Swedish books of the century by Biblioteket i fokus magazine , the work came in 14th place.

content

The teacher Annie Raft wants to visit her friend and lover Dan Ulander with her six-year-old daughter Mia on Midsummer Night 1974. He lives in a left ecological commune in the Nordic wilderness, where she works as a teacher and wants to start a new phase of life. When Dan did not pick her up in the small northern Swedish town of Svartvattnet (= Schwarzwasser) as agreed, she and her daughter had the shopkeeper Lill-Ola Lennartson bring her to the end of the street and set off on foot from there to the commune of Stjärnberg search. She is a city dweller and gets lost in the inhospitable Jämtland region. At some point, a strange-looking young man walks past her in a panic, and a short time later she comes to a tent in which she finds the corpses of two young tourists who have been brutally beaten. The investigation remained unsuccessful for eighteen years, partly because there were numerous inconsistencies in the statements and actions of many innocent people, including the shopkeepers and residents of the commune. The village and the commune are now in danger of living with an unknown murderer; this attracts tourists to the area, so that many residents are no longer interested in solving the mysterious murder case and keep their various assumptions and conclusions to themselves. Annie, however, leaves the commune due to an unwanted pregnancy and the fear of the perpetrator and from then on sleeps with a shotgun behind her bed.

Other main characters in the novel also experience a biographical break through the murder. The doctor Birger Torbjörnsson, for example, who had observed important details for the explanation, is abandoned by his wife; Another, the supposed seed Johan Brandberg, who was tormented by his brothers the night before the murder and therefore fled, remains a suspect as a result and now lives in Norway. The police officer Ake Vemdal is suspended from the investigation due to personal involvement and resigns, but keeps illegally copies of the investigation files, which later help to resolve the case.

Eighteen years later, Annie Raft still lives in Jämtland. One morning when the teacher sees her daughter Mia in the arms of Johan Brandberg in front of her house, she thinks she recognizes the murderer who was fleeing at the time. She immediately calls Birger Torbjörnsson, with whom she is now in a relationship, but then remains missing. A little later she is found not far from the scene of the murder at the time with a gunshot wound from her own shotgun, and it is initially assumed that there was an accident. In fact, Gudrun Brandberg, Johan's mother, like Annie Raft, believed that he was the murderer and shot Annie to prevent this supposed truth from coming to light. So a mother became a murderer because she believed that her own son was the murderer. At the same time, Birger Torbjörnsson, Johan Brandberg and Ake Vemdal are privately resuming the investigation. The murderer at the time is successfully exposed.

The surprising truth brings numerous shocks. In a tragic mistake, Johan's brother Björne suspected the shopkeeper Lill-Ola Lennartson in the tent with the tourist, from whom she had previously rented the tent. He wanted to confront him for theft or beat him up, but Björne's violence escalated and led to a double homicide. Since then he had lived secluded in an alpine hut.

Form and text analysis

The plot of the novel is very complex. It is presented on different time levels and is nonetheless written in the present tense throughout. There are also three parallel storylines that are only linked at the end. In them, the events are drawn from the perspective of the people. The investigation of the murder fades into the background, but the crime continues to determine the lives of the protagonists.

The work can only be seen as a detective novel to a limited extent . Ekman puts the victims first. It illustrates the changes that people in Norrland are experiencing as a result of the modernization of society, for example the contradictions and prejudices between the members of the commune and the village population or between Sami and Sweden. But it does not judge, it does not give any answers, rather it is more questions that it asks. “Mother's love with its positive and dubious consequences is the real issue - and not least the role of mother nature.” Signs of nature take up a large part of the novel; the landscape has had a lasting impact on the residents.

“Here, mythological and psychological primal forces are at work, which once again confirm that the modernization of the region is only an external one, while irrational needs and standards of evaluation persist beneath the surface. Ekman describes the vacuum that arises when old value systems have become obsolete, but no new ideological orientations take their place. "

- Antje Wischmann : Scandinavian literary history

reception

Events on the water was a great success, was launched on the book market in over 20 countries, and Kerstin Ekman received numerous literary prizes for the novel, including the 1993 Swedish Crime Prize and the most prestigious Swedish literary prize, the August Prize . In 1994 she was for the book with the Nordic Council's Literature Prize and in 1995 with the International Finnish Krimipreis excellent. The work has received numerous reviews and discussed in literary periodicals.

"Kerstin Ekman unfolds a furious panorama of the Swedish north" wrote the columnist Andreas Platthaus , who praised the "grandiose descriptions of nature" and found that the author's characters were "excellently successful", but also said that the German edition "was edited rather sloppily " be. Weltwoche found it remarkable how much the author had succeeded in “ writing from a male and a female point of view” and noted that it was “not a book that wants to teach us; none that knows what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong. Nobody is right here, everyone is in debt, albeit to different degrees. [...] she [the author] leaves in the balance; in this sense the great novel is pleasantly un-German. "

expenditure

Swedish editions (selection)

Kerstin Ekman: Handel's vid vatten

German-language editions

Kerstin Ekman: Events on the water . Novel. Translated from the Swedish by Hedwig M. Binder

Translations

The novel was published in numerous languages, including English: Blackwater (London 1995, ISBN 0-7011-6276-7 ), Finnish: Tapahtui veden äärellä (Helsinki 1994, ISBN 951-1-13319-5 ), Hindi: Blaikavâṭara ( New Delhi 2003, ISBN 81-87649-97-6 ), Icelandic: Atburðir við vatn (Reykjavík 2000, ISBN 9979-3-2080-X ), Croatian: Crna voda (Zagreb 1998, ISBN 953-173-890-4 ), Latvian: Notikumi pie ūdeņiem (Rīgā 2007, ISBN 978-9984-37-793-3 ), Dutch: Zwart water (Amsterdam 2002, ISBN 90-5713-672-4 ) and Russian: Proisšestvija u vody (Sankt Peterburg 1996 , ISBN 5-87135-029-1 ).

Quote

“Now the forests and the great forest cuts began. The bus didn't stop that often anymore. In each village, boxes of milk and other fresh produce were placed on the ramp by the shop. The post women came out, opened the door for the driver, and he brought in the mail bags. People sat in cars and waited for letters and evening papers. Many had been drinking beer and they were talking loudly to the driver and to each other.
,What are they saying?' Mia whispered.
But Annie didn't understand what they were saying either. You drove through a foreign country. "

- Kerstin Ekman

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ List of the 100 best Swedish books from the journal Biblioteket i fokus  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Accessed on the web on May 8, 2009@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.biblioteketifokus.se  
  2. ^ FAZ of October 10, 1995, page L 4
  3. ^ Scandinavian literary history . Stuttgart 2006, page 338
  4. ↑ For example: Lars Wendelius: En mångtydig kriminalhistoria en läsning av Kerstin Ekmans 'Handel vid vatten' . In: Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap , No. 28 (1999), Umeå, ISSN  1104-0556 , pages 21 to 51
  5. ^ FAZ of October 10, 1995, page L 4
  6. ^ The World Week of October 5, 1995
  7. ↑ page 14 of the German language first edition from 1995