That was in April 2013 at the polar Quays festival Lyon. Time with Henning Mankell had full audience, in the beautiful Trinity Chapel. The tired, so exhausted old lion in the white mane, but the look still nailing, writer chic shirt sky rocked from the start: “I am so old now that the next time I come This may be in the coffin. “ Whispers in the room who knew very direct, and not one to laugh or to simper. As proof, his companionship with the Commissioner Kurt Wallander: Friction is everywhere, empathy rarely measured and in all cases the balance uncompromising, marked by much more than the triumph failure. Wallander was nevertheless sesame of Henning Mankell, the main character of a series of twelve novels that made his success and celebrity, who installed it in very specific category of genre archetypes of creators. In this case: the Commissioner in Scandinavian country, lonely, taciturn, moralist afflicted by a company sold as a social democratic model wrapped in egalitarianism and happiness of living together, but the true syphilitic, tense, crossing more disorders that gleaming showcase.
common
This is precisely behind the scenes material Mankell, worthy heir of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Swedish duo very social 60s A vein that endures. In the wave of Nordic thrillers current decade, the likes of the Icelander Arnaldur Indridason (with Commissioner Erlendur) or Norwegian Jo Nesbø (with Harry Hole inspector) are clearly in descent Mankell – more than Stieg Larsson and Camilla Läckberg, closer to the thriller that chills the black novel questions.
End bloodhound and lame duck
Henning Mankell deciphered very pragmatically his relationship with Wallander. Its genesis in the early 90s? “Sweden experienced a strong surge of xenophobia, I wanted to evoke denounce it, as racism is a crime, I thought a thriller. And I knew a police officer who inspired me. “ The name? Found “in the directory” . The city of Ystad, a small port city in Skåne, the southern tip of Sweden, where most surveys take place? “I have chosen to show that the crimes do not happen in big cities.”
Professionally, Wallander is on top, formidable sleuth combining tenacity and intuition . But psychologically and socially, it is a lame duck, soon divorced, loving father but uncomfortable with his daughter Linda, and diabetes increases this general picture subdued. Henning Mankell: “That’s why Wallander is popular: it is average, like everyone else, and it changes, it evolves, he wonders, he doubts he gets older. Hercule Poirot, for example, is not a human being, it does not move. And who could imagine James Bond is an injection of insulin? “ On television, in a quality adaptation, Wallander took the features of Kenneth Branagh. Despite a paper mache complexion and a preoccupied air quite idoines, British actor remains sexy, adjective that Mankell reader would never use about Wallander.
The recurrence of a character tends to melt with his Maker, to imagine a merger, transfer. Completely wrongly in this case. If they were born the same year, in 1948, Mankell and Wallander live their times at odds. Henning Mankell has ceased to be of his time, to engage, to go on the grounds of its causes. Wallander is for its part stuck in a splenetic melancholy and nostalgic imaginable intolerable Mankell. “He belonged to the generation that had stopped growing in the 60 He had never been involved in a political movement, had never participated in a demonstration, had never really understood the issue the war in Vietnam, nor that he had been interested in liberation struggles in countries that have had difficulty locate on a map. He was ignorant “ ( worried Man , 2010). Touching? Not for Mankell, who sighed in Lyon: “You can not imagine all the mail I receive, addressed Wallander … Women from around the world intend to leave their families to be able to care for him.” The decor itself, this small town of Ystad (16 000), is the object of a cult: a tourist circuit was set up, tracks game that mixes murder scene and locations of everyday life … Mankell Wallander assessed, mitigated: “. I do not want this to become a business” Far from the image of Epinal, confronts Mankell Wallander regularly to the history of Sweden and shadows, that of the Cold War, for example.
Henning Mankell has walked twenty-two years (1991-2013) with Kurt Wallander. And things have gone from bad to worse for Wallander. He did not disappear but it’s like: memory nibbled by Alzheimer, is a man increasingly disoriented and fragile as Figure worried Man last survey Wallander. “Knowing that we lose the head is terrifying,” said Henning Mankell. Who will therefore Wallander put to the test to the end. As for probing or provoke, resistance
Read also:. moving Sand , the literary testament of Henning Mankell
“The fate of human beings is to be forgotten”
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