The Resurrection of Asa Larsson

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After ten years of silence, the Swedish narrator returns with ‘The sins of our fathers’, an intrigue about corruption and family secrets

For many, she is the queen of the Scandinavian crime novel. The scepter was disputed and almost shared with Stieg Larsson himself, the author of the “Millennium” saga. Like him, he gathered millions of readers around the world, although not as many as Lisbeth Salander’s father. But after touching the cusp, Asa Larsson (Uppsala, age 56) sank into silence. Ten years after her last date with the Spanish reader, the Swedish narrator returns from the cold with ‘The Sins of Our Fathers’ (Seix Barral). It comes out next week and concludes the series of prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson, her most iconic character.

Larsson grew up in Kiruna, a city just 200 kilometers from the Arctic Circle. From the Arctic, he moved to Stockholm to work as a lawyer and stormed in like an icy cyclone of crime novels. Spain is one of the countries that most welcomed his works, which were regularly published until he fell into a long silence which he is now breaking. Titles like ‘Aurora borealis’, ‘Spilled blood’, ‘The dark path’, ‘When your anger passes’ and ‘Sacrifice to Molek’, in which extreme violence and rudeness are the trademark of the house.

In the nearly 600 pages of “The Sins of Our Fathers,” Larsson presents a Martinsson accuser who has become smarter, more astute, and more aware of her weaknesses over the years. The plot allows Larsson to tackle the dark side of real estate speculation, family secrets and also the relentless weight of the past.

On the brink of death, forensic pathologist Lars Pohjanen asks Martinsson to investigate murders from sixty years ago. The body of the father of a famous boxer who disappeared without a trace in 1962 turns up in a freezer on a remote farm. The clues point to the boss of organized crime in the Kiruna region, a city in full transformation due to the mine devouring its foundations.

The tone is raw, as usual in Larsson’s gory fiction: “He weighed his organs, cut livers, hearts, kidneys and lungs and arranged them in perfect rows on the stainless steel table. He opened stomachs, cut intestines and checked their contents, he sawed skulls, extracted brains, changed the batteries in Pohjanen’s dictaphone,” reads one passage.

“The Sins of Our Fathers” is the final episode of six that Larsson has programmed for his special pair of heroines, Martinsson and little police inspector Anna-Maria Mella. Martinsson is a tribute to Martin Beck, the inspector in the novels by Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall, a Swedish couple considered the true fathers of Scandinavian ‘noir’. It’s also a copy of Larsson, who knew the legal world inside and out firsthand before indulging in his very black confabulations.

Larsson became a writer seeking a radical change of life. With a lavish bank account and growing disillusionment with life, she worked in Stockholm as a tax lawyer and prosecutor. He experienced the relentless competition from law firms and offices long enough to abhor it. During her first daughter’s maternity leave, she started writing and soon decided to give it all up. «I have never felt integrated in that materialistic world where only success and money are pursued. I started writing and as soon as I could I quit that job,” he explained.

Raised in Laestadianism, a conservative Lutheran movement, she attributes her love of crime novels to children’s reading of the Bible, “full of violent stories.” And that her father, a librarian and communist, led her to other lectures.

‘Aurora borealis’, about an anti-abortion cult that supports sexual abuse, hit like a bomb. It sold more than 110,000 copies in Spain alone. Thanks to the success, enhanced by the cinema, Larsson was able to share the rural tranquility with Rebecka. He fled Stockholm as soon as he could and moved to Mariefred, in southern Sweden. The powerful debut was followed by four bestselling novels: Blood Spilled, about the murder of a Protestant preacher; ‘The Dark Path’, featuring Martinsson hospitalized in Kiruna for a nervous breakdown while investigating the murder of a woman found on a fishing boat; ‘The Dark Path’, about the murder of a mining company executive; ‘When Your Anger Is Gone’, which dealt with the dark collaborative past of the Swedes, and ‘Sacrifice to Molek’, whose plot unleashes the discovery of a human finger in a bear’s stomach.

“If I leave the icy landscapes of northern Sweden, the novels get stuck,” confessed Larsson, setting some of his fictions in the frozen landscapes of Kiruna. Blood, cold, icy deaths and plenty of intrigue support some stories of an intense black that contrasts with the white of the ice in which terrible crimes are committed.

“Rebecka and I are daughters of the north, a desolate area inhabited by introverted creatures, with rough manners and heavy drinkers, who regard the rest of the Swedes as rednecks,” the narrator explained, much less taciturnly than her compatriots. He also reiterates that to block his novels, he makes his brain work like a screen on which images follow one another on a journey in which the readers must accompany me.

Source: La Verdad

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