| Title | : | The White Lioness (Kurt Wallander, #3) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0099464691 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780099464693 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Mass Market Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 576 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1993 |
| Awards | : | Svenska Deckarakademins pris för bästa svenska kriminalroman (1993) |
Combining compelling insights into the sinister side of modern life with a riveting tale of international intrigue, The White Lioness keeps you on the knife-edge of suspense.
The White Lioness (Kurt Wallander, #3) Reviews
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L’UOMO INQUIETO
L’ispettore Kurt Wallander è il protagonista di questa serie di romanzi firmata da Henning Mankell, di cui questa è la terza storia.
Non so bene perché ho cominciato da questa, se girava per casa o se avevo letto che era il migliore.
Fatto sta che io e Mankell ci siamo conosciuti con questo romanzo e mai più rincontrati.
Il perché è presto detto: l’ho trovato sufficiente, diligente, non brillante, abbastanza standard, non meritevole d’approfondimento, di insistere.
Non so bene come quando e perché, ma credo che anche nella letteratura di genere thriller poliziesco sia successo quello che è successo con la settima arte: presumo sia un mix di gusto e di sviluppo tecnico che consente cose che prima erano difficili o impossibili, basta vedere come viene composta un’inquadratura da una ventina d’anni a questa parte per sentire se in un film o serie tv il tempo ha fatto danni.
Altrettanto mi pare sia successo con la letteratura poliziesca, thriller. A me verrebbe da pensare che dopo la trilogia Millennium non si può più scrivere come si faceva prima.
Ora, il romanzo di Mankell anticipa il primo scritto da Stieg Larsson di una dozzina d’anni (1993 questo, 2005 Uomini che odiano le donne). Elemento che giustificherebbe il suo essere così solidamente nel solco antico, senza scossoni.
Ma evidentemente il mio gusto è cambiato e ormai mal si adatta anche a un romanzo che non è certo un brutto poliziesco, tutt’altro. È solo, come ho detto, un po’ vecchiotto nello stile, nella struttura, nello svolgimento, nella dinamica.
Avrei dovuto leggerlo quando è uscito, lo avrei trovato attuale e interessante. Perché un aspetto centrale del caso che deve risolvere l’ispettore svedese è strettamente legato alla storia del Sudafrica, all’apartheid, alla fine del “regno” dei bianchi, all’African National Congress che sta per prendere il potere, Mandela viene rilasciato, lascia la prigione dove l’hanno tenuto per ventisette anni, e quattro anni dopo diventa il primo presidente nero del Sudafrica. E sarà l’unico a dire qualcosa di intelligente sul genocidio dei tutsi.
Dopo un prologo ambientato in Sudafrica nel 1918, si salta in Svezia al 1992, per poi tornare in Sudafrica. Wallander indaga su un omicidio: è stato ritrovato il corpo di una donna, un’agente immobiliare di confessione metodista, una donna normale, moglie e madre di famiglia, è stata uccisa e gettata nel fondo di un pozzo.
Ma c’è anche un incendio dal quale emerge un dito nero: nero non perché bruciato, ma perché appartiene a persona dalla pelle nera.
E certo non poteva mancare un ex agente del KGB, che ci sta sempre bene.
Come si conviene, il poliziotto è tormentato, in questo caso malinconico, inquieto come dice anche il titolo dell’undicesimo romanzo della serie (di dodici, per ora). È solo, ma con una figlia. L’indagine che deve risolvere si snoda in modo ‘classico’: missing person, indagini su eventuali precedenti e passato, ritrovamento, prime ipotesi…
Mankell per renderla più ghiotta abbina una situazione politica internazionale, un evento che entrerà nella storia. Solo che dalla Svezia al Sudafrica sembra esserci qualcosa di tirato per i capelli, come si suole dire. Qualcosa di un po’ artefatto.
Non ho visto il film svedese. Mi è bastato vedere il pastrocchio che hanno combinato con Millennium.
Però ho visto alcuni episodi della serie TV con Kenneth Branagh, qui al suo meglio, finalmente nel ruolo giusto, in abiti che gli vanno a pennello: bravo, giusto, la serie con bella fotografia e giusta intensità.
Ma anche questa, derivando dai romanzi di Mankell, dopo un po’ si rivela troppo classica, con casi da risolvere un po’ sciapi, senza brio.
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”A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child has to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization.”
Kenneth Branagh is Wallander/
When a real estate agent turns up missing, Kurt Wallander of the Ystad Swedish police catches the case along with most of the department. They have a general idea of where she went missing, but they have few clues as to what has caused her disappearance. She and her husband are very religious, and Wallander finds himself thinking ”what it feels like to believe in God.”
As we learn more about Wallander, we realize there are good reasons why he is estranged from his ex-wife, his daughter, and his father. We also start to understand the frustrations that the other cops have working with him. He is bloody brilliant most of the time between those other moments of complete befuddlement. He has a single minded purpose in tracking down a missing woman, a killer, or solving a puzzle of a crime. If I were missing, I’d want Kurt Wallander trying to find me. He devotes himself so exclusively to a case that he has little time for those around him, or eating, or sleeping. He makes these leaps in logic that baffle his fellow police officers, but what they don’t realize is that while they are...having a life...Wallander is still ticking over the aspects of the case.
Wallander makes a breakthrough in the case, and this is one of those moments when time is of the essence, and he takes the day off to be with his daughter. He is trying to do the right thing, attempting to completely divorce himself from the case to pay attention to his daughter, but it turns into a missed opportunity. I, too, was frustrated with Wallander at this point.
They find the severed finger of a black man at the scene where they believe the real estate agent went missing. This turns out to be a digit that once belonged to Victor Mabatha of South Africa. This book came out in 1993 in Sweden and 1998 in an English translation, so apartheid was still fresh in everyone’s mind. During the course of the plot, Wallander and Mabatha intersect, and Victor gives this impassioned explanation for why he is the way he is, which is the quote I chose to lead this review with.
So a missing person case becomes a nonsensical international case somehow involving a planned assassination in South Africa. Why are these people in Sweden? Henning Mankill adds some additional spice to the plot with a demented, immoral Russian named Konovalenko. He runs the sole of his boot down the face of a person he just killed to close their eyes. Somehow that made me shudder more than the actual killing of the person. Maybe because we all deserve some semblance of reverence in death.
I would be a very considerate serial killer.
I found it interesting that Mankill takes us from the mind of Wallander to the political musings of several politicians in South Africa. We start to discover the extent of the conspiracy. The question is, can Wallander put the pieces together in time to obstruct a world tragedy?
That looks like the face of a man who put two and two together and got sixteen.
I hope most of you have had the chance to watch the spot on performance by Kenneth Branagh in the 12 episode BBC TV series. They scrambled the order of the books, which required some changes to the backstory, but not enough to bother me. I have a set of the Wallander books and plan to read them all. I set them aside to watch the TV series, which does break a half a dozen Keeten reading rules, but certainly seeing the TV episode of this book did not detract from my reading enjoyment. A story well told can be experienced many times with new insights with each retelling.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit
http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
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https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten -
This, the third entry in Henning Mankell's series featuring Swedish Inspector Kurt Wallander, appeared in 1993, and is a very ambitious effort--in the end, perhaps overly so. The story starts simply enough with the murder of a real estate agent who finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it quickly spins into a major international conspiracy involving a plot by die-hard South African whites to assassinate Nelson Mandela, shortly after he was released from prison.
The plotters have recruited a black assassin to murder Mandela, hoping to spark a race war that will enable the whites to continue to control the country. They've recruited a former KGB agent to train the assassin and have concluded for some reason that the training would best be done secretly in Sweden, which is how Wallander's murder investigation becomes mixed up with the conspiracy.
The story is told from several different points of view and jumps back and forth from Sweden to South Africa. It's quite a long and complicated book with a fairly large cast of characters. In many ways it's a very intriguing story, somewhat along the lines of
The Day of the Jackal. But it drags on a bit too long, and it's hard for Mankell to maintain the suspense throughout the book.
I'm rating this three stars rather than four because over the course of the story, Kurt Wallander occasionally takes actions that make no sense. The maverick cop who follows his own trail and sometimes takes shortcuts while ignoring the orders of his superiors is a staple of crime fiction, and most of us love these characters, at least as long as what they are doing seems logical. In these case though, on at least a couple of occasions, Wallander does things that seem totally illogical and which leave the reader, as well as his colleagues, wondering if he might be having some sort of mental breakdown.
Still, in all, I enjoyed the story and I'm looking forward to the next installment. -
I'm only reviewing this one book, but I've read the entire detective series by Henning Mankell, and I am a huge fan. I first became aware of him after returning from a trip to Sweden in 2004, and then discovered he has a cult following in Europe and is beginning to have one in the U.S. He has written all kinds of novels, but I've focused on his mystery series featuring Swedish police officer Kurt Wallander. The Wallander stories are good mysteries in their own right, but what commends the books is Wallander's struggles to live life as a middle-aged detective whose personal life is always under strain. His wife has left him, his daughter has a spotty relationship with him, he finds another woman in his life but isn't able to commit, he constantly thinks about getting out of the police force. It's that human-ness, and what I think of as a Swedish pessimism, that makes this series so intoxicating. Also, because Mankell the author lives about half of every year in Mozambique, several of his plots also have fascinating explorations of problems in Africa. I highly recommend this series.
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Thrilling!
A missing woman leads to a brutal murder, which leads to a conspiracy of murder, all the way to apartheid South Africa.
Wallander is racing the clock, as he focuses on cleaning up the crime. But he is running out of time. -
Kurt Wallander and South Africa.
One of Sweden’s most recognized fiction crime fighters gets caught up in international espionage in this 1993 post cold war thriller that has half of it’s action involving the end of Apartheid in South Africa as the reigning Boers free Nelson Mandela and all hell breaks lose.
What keeps this moving and what holds it together is author Henning Mankell’s excellent writing (and to be fair Laurie Thompson’s translation) and his ability to convey a subtle but unsettling sense of disquietude in the Swedish coast town of Ystad.
What slows this down is Mankell’s overly ambitious design. In a medium sized city (Ystad is around 30k population) an assassination attempt is uncovered following a murder. This connection to South Africa is both thrilling and stretched out – leading this reader to believe that Mankell uses his Wallander pulpit as a vehicle to talk about South Africa. Which is fine, it just spreads thin what would otherwise be a pretty good whodunit.
This reminded me of Jo Nesbo’s 2000 publication
The Redbreast of his Norwegian detective Harry Hole in the international intrigue, but unfortunately also Nesbo’s 2002 follow up
Nemesis in that both writer’s felt the compulsion to throw everything but the kitchen sink in to an already busy mix.
This also made me wonder about Ystad. The map shows this as extreme southernmost Sweden and of medium size. I looked up some comparable United States and Tennessee towns of the same size to give me an idea about the kind of place Mankell describes. These are some very modest places. Towns like Oak Park Michegan, Lebanon Tennessee and Monterey California. What is Mankell’s inspiration for such a setting?
And what about Wallander? Hasn’t the whole dark and wounded, brooding and philosophical, sloppy outside of a razor mind kitsch been done before? Well, sure, but Mankell does it very well in the Scandinavian crime fiction.
So, not his best but still very good and worth another visit to sunny Ystad.
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Henning, dude, if you want to write a book about how it sucks to live in racist South Africa, I'm all for it. But I picked up this book because it was a KURT WALLANDER mystery. Wallander--the SWEDISH policeman, for christsakes...is he really going to foil a plot to assassinate Nelson Mandela? I want to read about SWEDISH police doing SWEDISH things like solving murders in SKANE, drinking coffee and eating sandwiches. If I wanted to read the Ladies Detective series, I would have joined a book club...
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This is the third and by far most ambitious of Henning Mankell’s Wallander series. I’ll call it 3.75, some points in favor because of the ambition, and some points against because of the ambitihon, but on the whole I think it is very good. I haven’t read anything about what Mankell was trying to do in this series, but this is how I see it: He is trying to see if his global and social justice interests can merge with te typical tropes of the police procedural/mystery/thriller novel. Serious global issues merge with entertainment.
In the first book, Faceless Killers, we establish that Kurt Wallander is the Everyman sad sack aging detective--wife leaves him, daughter’s estranged from him, he’s drinking more, gaining weight, generally sad and grumpy to fit the isolated small town Swedish landscape where he is a middling detective. Mankell has deep commitments to social justice--immigration, racism, and so one--so he brings these issues to the small town and the small town cop, who initially seems politically disnterested. They/we must wake up to the changing nature of the world, Mankell seems to be saying.
In this third book a woman is brutally slain and this is already head-shakingly disturbing to the small town and even the cops. Who would want to do this?! What is the world coming to? Well, there are two basic threads in this novel, one that connects this seemingly random small town murder with a plot to kill a major political figure in South Africa, in 1992, as Apartheid slowly collapses, with pushback against the ANC from Afrikaaners still in power. Along the way, Wallander’s father and daughter are endangered (somewhat like several of Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole novels), and the family is pulled into the intrigue. But small town cop Wallander has an opportunity to impact world events by doing the right thing. This is the up side of Mankell’s ambition in his detective fiction novel, that he injects real world global politics into a crime fiction, a whodunnit, and it basically works.
There are some much slower parts (the down side of the ambition) than we typically see in crime fiction, as we examine the injustices of Apartheid in South Africa, through quite a bit of talk, though this is not a tale of simple good vs evil, blacks--good and whites--evil; things are more complicated than that. And Wallander is roughly half of this story, as we go back and forth between Sweden and South Africa. There’s a big finish worthy of a thriller, and this works well, with justice coming satisfyingly to several characters. I didn’t really resonate with the central image of the white lioness as somehow symbolic of South Africa, but I thought the work was well done, on the whole. -
رواية " جريمة الذئب الوحيد " للكاتب السويدي " هينينج مانكل " احدى سلسلة المحقق " كيرت فالاندر "...
ماذا لدينا هنا ؟...
امرأة قُتِلت إثر تلقيها رصاصة في رأسها وتم العثور عليها في بئر ، منزل احترق من انفجار مدوي خلّف وراءه اصبع أسود وجهاز لاسلكي وبندقية روسية الصنع...
إذن ليست جريمة تقتصر على البلدة الصغيرة التي تدور بها الأحداث بل سيتبين بأن السويد محطة من محطات مؤامرة خطيرة..
عن آخر عهد الفصل العنصري في جنوب افريقيا في عام ١٩٩٢ ، وتداعيات ذلك فيما يتمثل بما يُحاك من مؤامرة لاغتيال شخصية سياسية هامة وإراقة الدماء وإثارة العنف والفوضى لاندلاع حرب أهلية مُدمرة...
كان ذلك مؤثراً في تجلي صورة الفصل العنصري بما فيها من كراهية ورغبة جامحة للانتقام لدى أصحاب الأرض وذلك لإذدرائهم وإجبارهم على العيش بمذلة بل وإبداء الاعتذار عن وجودهم...
بينما من الطرف الذي يحاول فرض السيطرة تتعثر بحبائل الدسائس..الخيانات..الأكاذيب..والتعطش المروع للدماء....
نقاط ضعف هذا العمل أن أوراق اللعبة مكشوفة بلا استثناء وهذا يعني غياب التشويق لدى القاريء...فالخريطة مرسومة أمامك بلا شفرات غامضة أو إشارات مُبهمة...
كما أن هناك ثغرات في التحقيق تعكس الإهمال والغباء إن جاز التعبير...
سيادة المحقق يفتقد الجرأة والإقتحام ، كان عاطفي حذراً ومُتخبطاً وفقد توازنه عند ذروة الأحداث...
وأخيراً...المحقق كان يحب امرأة يكتب لها خطابات كلما سقط في هوة الإكتئاب ، أجرى معها مرتين اتصالاً هاتفياً فلم اسمع لها صوتاً ولم تنبس بكلمة واحدة ...لماذا ؟
والله لم يكن لتتداعى البنية النصية لو كان لها صوتاً يرفض..يساند...يتهرب...، فقط تثبت وجودها لإنني ظننتها شبحاً وإن كانت كائن بشري فلقد أثارت غضبي من جمودها...🤨
الجميل كانت مشاركة القراءة مع الصديقة الغالية هبة الله ونقاشاتنا الممتعة 💕 -
I hesitated a long time before reading the third Wallander story. That's mainly because I knew that this book would be much different than the first two since it is a lot more ambitious. It deals with Mandela... hence with world politics. Uuuughhh... is this really what I want to read in a proper noir/crime novel? Nah... I read the papers for that kinda stuff.
The first two books had many flaws but they were also interesting in a certain way because they mainly focused on the characters and the crime. This story is about Mandela and I think that this territory is way too big and grand to properly deal with when it is put into a crime novel. I obviously get the point, Mankell had good intentions but when I pick up a crime novel I enjoy reading about the most simple characters in their daily surroundings, it is absolutely enough for an exciting story. This book is simply aaaaall ooover the place! There is nooooo character development whatsoever. There were too many plotlines, too many flat characters, the villains were only bad and nearly completely one-dimensional, there were also many plotholes and moments when I wanted to shout "Ooooh pleeeeasseeee... really now?" while rolling my eyes as hard as I could.
I don't want to hate on Mankell because he wanted to do something good and had the right intentions but in my opinion it didn't work out at all. If you want to write a proper book about politics or about Mandela then that's fine. -
Here the world of Swedish detective Kurt Wallander crosses that of South African plotters intent on political murder. I'm not sure if I read this before or after
Dogs of Riga. I enjoyed this book, liked the characterisation and the settings, despite the more than slightly stretched set up. It was hard to avoid the feeling that Mankell really was much more interested in writing about southern Africa, where he spent part of the year living for a fair chunk of his life, rather than his shabby Detective living in gloomy Scandinavia.
I was thoroughly involved right up until the second murder, at which point I lost all emotional investment in the story, but if you are a murder mystery fan, you'll probably enjoy this better than I did. Reading teaches me that I'm not suited to the murder mystery genre I suppose. Come the second murder my suspension of disbelief is over, the illusion is gone and I can't see it as anything other than a constructed and unrealistic novel any more.
The reportage of
Homicide was probably the last nail in the coffin for me for this kind of book. -
Qué viajesote este librooooo. Me tuvo con la ansia. Y también creo que por toooodo lo que trata me hizo querer mucho a Mankell. Me parece un señor blanco muy entendido de sus privilegios y que los usa pa cuestionar el racismo y la misoginia y la xenofobia. Me surge la duda de cómo leería esta novela une lectore racializado por aquello que toca de Sudáfrica pero por lo demás estoy lista para entrarle de lleno a los 12 libros de Kurt Wallander.
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Very far fetched. Could a policeman ignore police procedures. The kidnapping, firefight and then keeping Mabasha as a house guest. Its just unbelievable. However, the plot, conspiracy and light linking all together is good. Wallander is at is best in being cowardly and heroic as well as his depression and the unhealthy life style take their toll.
The murder of the real estate agent and the ruthless Konavalenko lead us on a fast paced thriller. I am curious to watch the tv adaptation now. The story is set in 1992 and South Africa is in transition and turmoil. A white brotherhood of Boers plans to create a civil war to enable them to maintain the policies of apartheid. Wallander stumbles on to the conspiracy and it becomes a race to see if an assassination can be stopped. -
This is the third book of the Wallander series.
The plot is around an execution-style murder of a Swedish housewife. This apparent simple investigation unmasks a murder plot against President De Klerk and the future South-african president Nelson Mandela. A ex-KGB agent together with a mercenary south-african will be responsible for such political outrage.
As usual, Inspector Wallander gives his own personal way in this crime investigation.
The book's tittle refers to an albino lioness and its real meaning is given below:
Page 383:
He was thinking about the white lioness. A symbol of Africa, he thought. The animal at rest, the calm before it gets to its feet and musters all its strength. The beast of prey one cannot afford to wound, but which has to be killed if it starts to attack.
A movie was made based on this book:
The White Lioness (1996).
And Keneth Branagah played the role of Kurt Wallander in
BBC Series - The White Lioness (2015).
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Kurt Wallander book 3: My first Wallander, and not realising the start of my affection for this series despite the following one sentence review I gave this, when I read it: 'Kurt Wallander investigates the random killing of a 'perfect' wife… which is just the start of a plot to kill the recently released Nelson Mandela… a good read, but very close to being over the top.. Nelson Mandela!! 5 out of 12. Upgraded to 7 out of 12, Three Stars after a reread in 2010.
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Book Review
The White Lioness, the third in the Kurt Wallander series is perhaps intended as Mankell's most ambitious Wallander novel to date. I say "intended" because on some levels it doesn't succeed as such. I'm a big fan of Wallander: his idiosyncrasies, his anti-authority attitude, his loneliness and faltering family relations - they all evoke a reader's empathy in just the right amounts - but Mankell's ambitions to incorporate in this book a world stage of politics, assassinations, and third person point of views stretching across two continents may have stretched this book beyond the pale of a single mystery novel.
This book was published some 20 years since Henning Mankell's first trip to the African continent, a continent he now calls his second home. We write what we know and so it is to be expected that some of Mankell's fondness for Africa would show up in a Wallander book (he has written stand alones that focus on Africa, novels such as
A Treacherous Paradise,
The Eye of the Leopard, or his
Chronicler of the Winds), but the case can be made that as an author just because you know Africa or love its people, it doesn't mean that one should attempt to incorporate it in a Wallander series that takes place far removed from such passions.
This can create problems for the author. For example: Kurt Wallander is relatively ignorant of international politics (we know this from reading
Dog of Riga). To create a book that focuses on the flammable politics of a nation far removed and place it within a Wallander book can stretch a reader's credulity as it did with me. To circumvent this problem, Mankell created various third person viewpoints that includes allowing the reader to enter the mind of de Klerk, president of South Africa. It didn't work for me. Not when reading a Wallander book.
This is not to say that the parts taking place in South Africa didn't evoke interest. Mankell does a good job of outlining the problem and giving some salient plot elements to drive the point home...but in many ways it was a superficial glossing over and served to divide the book so that it became as if I were reading two novels, instead of one. (Reminder to self: read one of Mankell's stand-alones taking place in Africa). The metaphor of the White Lioness concretized by an observation of several very minor characters while on safari works only to a certain degree to accent the issue of apartheid. Did it really drive home the essence of the novel? I didn't think so.
On the other hand, I had a few problems with the aspects of this novel that take place in Sweden. I know Wallander despises authority, I know he bucks the system...but to start pointing guns at his colleagues, and to wander into a fog like a lunatic without sufficient cause when the solution is to behave rationally to outsmart a villain? What is the deep underlying cause for this behavior? Lack of sleep? I don't think so, Wallander has never slept well.
Having said all of the above and the resultant 3 star rating, I still enjoyed the book. That after all, is the magic of Henning Mankell. To cause us to care about Wallander.
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Series Review
Henning Mankell is an internationally known Swedish crime writer known mostly for this fictional character Kurt Wallander. He is married to Eva Bergman.
Henning Mankell - Author
It might be said that the fall of communism and the consequent increase in Swedish immigration and asylum seekers has been the engine that drives much of Swedish crime fiction. Mankell's social conscience, his cool attitude towards nationalism and intolerance is largely a result of the writer's commitment to helping the disadvantaged (see his theater work in Africa). In this vein, readers might be interested in his stand-alone novel
Kennedy's Brain a thriller set in Africa and inspired by the AIDS epidemic (Mankell often traveled to Africa to help third world populations); or read his
The Eye of the Leopard, a haunting novel juxtaposing a man's coming of age in Sweden and his life in Zambia.
Mankell's love of Africa, his theater work on that continent, and his exploits in helping the disadvantaged is not generally known by his American readers. In fact, an international news story that has largely gone unnoticed is that while the world watched as Israeli soldiers captured ships attempting to break the Gaza blockade, few people are aware that among the prisoners of the Israelis was one of the world's most successful and acclaimed writers: Henning Mankell.
It is no exaggeration when I say that Henning Mankell is by far one of the most successful writers in Scandinavia, especially in his own country of Sweden. The Nordic weather, cold to the bones, drives its populace indoors for much of the year where cuddling up to read the latest in crime fiction is a national pastime.
For many GR readers who have been introduced to Kurt Wallander it is interesting to note that ultimately the success of bringing Mankell to English speaking audiences only came after bringing in the same production company responsible for Steig Larsson's Millennium trilogy for the wildly popular BBC version starring Kenneth Branagh. Viewers had no problem with an anglicized version of Mankell's work, an English speaking cast set down in a genuine Swedish countryside. Of course, to those fans thoroughly familiar with Mankell's work, it is the Swedish televised version that is found to be a more accurately portrayal of Mankell's novels...not the British, sensationalized version. And there's a reason for that.
Henning's prose is straightforward, organized, written mostly in linear fashion, a straightforward contract with the reader. It is largely quantified as police procedural work. The work of men who are dogged and patient to a fault. Kurt Wallander, the hero in Mankell's novels, is the alter ego of his creator: a lonely man, a dogged policeman, a flawed hero, out of shape, suffering from headaches and diabetes, and possessing a scarred soul. Understandably so and if some of the GR reviews are an indication; like his famous father-in-law Ingmar Bergman, Mankell is from a country noted for its Nordic gloom. But before you make the assumption that this is yet another addition to the somberness and darkness that characterizes Nordic writing Mankell often confounds this cliche with guarded optimism and passages crammed with humanity (for Mankell, this is true both personally and professionally as a writer).
As Americans we often think of Sweden as possessing an very open attitude towards sex and that this is in marked contrast (or perhaps reprieve) to the somber attitudes of its populace. But this is a view that often confounds Swedish people. The idea of Nordic carnality is notably absent in Mankell's work, as much a statement of its erroneous perception (Swedes do not see themselves as part of any sexual revolution at all) and in the case of Mankell ironic because the film director most responsible for advancing these explicit sexual parameters (for his time) was his own father-in-law the great Ingmar Bergman. In a world where Bergman moves in a universe where characters are dark, violent, extreme and aggressive - take note that the ultimate root of this bloody death and ennui lies in the Norse and Icelandic Viking sagas of Scandinavian history - that dark, somber view ascribed to both Mankell and Bergman's work was often a topic of intense jovial interest between these two artists.
For any reader of Nordic crime fiction, Henning Mankell is an immensely popular and staple read.
Enjoy! -
Siempre me han gustado los libros de Mankell, sobre todo los del inspector Kurt Wallander. Tengo algunos (pocos) aún sin leer, los voy dosificando, porque se que ya no habrá más. Mankell me introdujo en la novela negra sueca y me enganchó, aunque, al menos por ahora, para mí, no ha habido nadie que lo supere o iguale. Sus tramas son muy elaboradas, muy bien hechas y nada tópicas. Historias con personajes muy bien trazados y humanos. Wallander es, aparte de inspector, humano, con sus virtudes y sus fallos, no es un superdetective, es humano y eso hace que me acerque más al personaje, que me lo crea más. Una novela de diez en la que Mankell vuelve a superarse una vez más.
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Quand Kurt Wallender enquête sur un étrange assassinat d'une Suédoise en Scanirsans histoire et sauve Mandella de l'assassinat! Rocambolesque mais passionnant. Une fiction sur fond d'appartheid bien réel en Afrique du Sud, au moment charnière où tout va basculer au pays des Sprinboks, quand De Klerk et le plus célèbre prisonnier de l'histoire ont décidé de rendre l'Afrique du Sud aux Africains, les vrais, les noirs...
Juste un petit hiatus. Wallender mis en congé pendant des mois mais revenu à temps pour sauver Mandella, accroc chronologique... ou j'ai mal interprété? Sans doute la deuxième hypothèse... -
I approached
The White Lioness tentatively, afraid that I wouldn't like it and that it could very well mark the end of my appreciation for the written Wallander.
Faceless Killers was a somewhat uninspired though compelling murder mystery. It was straightforward, and exactly what one would expect from the story of a taciturn Swedish cop in quiet Ystad. Coupled with the BBC movies, it was more than enough to make me want to proceed in the series.
Dogs of Riga, however, was something else entirely. It wasn't bad, but it was thoroughly unexpected. It was a political thriller in the guise of a cop mystery, and Kurt Wallander's foray into Latvia felt too forced and uncharacteristic (despite the book's early place in the Wallander chronology) to rise above
Mankell's personal, political agenda. It wasn't bad, but it made me wary of what might come next.
Once I saw the map of South Africa and the disclaimer at the beginning of
The White Lioness, I was even more frightened: "Since The White Lioness was first published in 1993, some towns and areas in South Africa have been renamed. The names in use then have been retained here.”
“Uh-oh,” I thought, “Another
Dogs of Riga. And to some extent it was, but in a more masterful and confident way. Mankell does with
The White Lioness what he probably should have done with its predecessor. He tells two parallel stories: one is a tense murder mystery starring Kurt Wallander at his unpredictable best; the other is a suspenseful political thriller set in de Klerk’s Africa at the tail end of apartheid. This time, however, he doesn’t try to force Wallander into a foreign trip. He doesn’t embroil Wallander in a Jason Bourne style international action story. Instead, he lets these two stories bleed into each other in their separate countries, showing us how the actions of men and women in Sweden and South Africa simultaneously and unwittingly affect the other.
The two stories are constantly and necessarily tied together, but few of the important characters ever meet.
It is an impressive balancing act, and it ratchets up the suspense to a level I’ve never before experienced in a Wallander book. This was the first one I couldn’t put down, and I didn’t want it to end. It’s a real shame that
The White Lioness is so rooted in its time and place. An assassination attempt on Nelson Mandela would not have the same implications today, which means that this story, barring an attempted big screen period piece, will never make it to the screen, at least not with Branagh as Wallander.
How I would love to see it, though. This really is an excellent Wallander tale. The
Dogs of Riga have been put to rest. -
Mankell undertook a difficult premise ... major related crimes on two continents, without much coordination between the police. I am intrigued by Wallender with all of his flaws and uncertainties. The African side was relatively weaker, with no well-developed characters to care about. The ending was staged and anti-climatic. So I gave it 3*** on a stretch. Other books in this series are better.
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Great storyline. A wee bit too long for me. Kurt Wallander is an interesting inspector.
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Tales of two countries, bound by a telex. That’s how I thought of summarizing this book set in Sweden and South Africa.
I have been repeatedly urged to read Mankell by many crime novel aficionados due to his pre-occupation with global themes and issues that go beyond the crime genre. After watching the very satisfying Wallander tele-drama series, where the focus was purely on the insomniac policeman who defies protocol, and after a recent visit to South Africa, I finally picked up this novel, but was left wanting.
First of all, Wallander is reduced to a bit-player in a global plot to murder Nelson Mandela; secondly, there are two different novels here, one taking place in Sweden and the other in South Africa, both lacking in substance and seemingly bound together to provide more robustness to the novel as a whole, but still falling short; thirdly, the clunky writing style, with many POVs, all of them quite similar and none producing any character delineation other than through “telling” on the part of the author; and fourth, the multiplicity of plot and character inconsistencies and contrivances that suggest the author was working to accomplish a daily output of words, with only a broad outline in hand, and was grabbing at devices and chunks of exposition at random to get through his quota on schedule. And the metaphor of the white lioness simply does not work. Die-hard Wallander and Mankell fans may disagree with me, but there were many times when I thought of laying this novel down, but I kept going, for I was curious to see how things would pan out.
On the credit side, in the Swedish story, Wallander, as the very human cop doing a terrible job— bothered by his aging and his relationships with his father, daughter and an absentee girlfriend, suffering from his neuroses, melting down when he kills someone, playing Lone Ranger—makes for an engaging character. I wondered why the Swedish police force would tolerate such behaviour? On the South African side, the evil Apartheid system is laid bare at the pivotal point when regime and system change is about to occur, creating conditions for ruthless retaliation. But the author’s popping into the heads of real-life people like Botha, de Klerk and Mandela comes as a bit of a stretch. And the stitching of the two narratives, although mirroring Mankell’s dual life lived in Africa and Sweden, does not make them hang well together either.
I’m told that The White Lioness has been televised in Season 4 of the series, which I haven’t watched yet, and with Kenneth Branagh once again playing our drowsy cop. I will look forward eagerly to watching this new series—Mankell’s creation comes across better on film than on the page. -
Published in 1993, this is the third book in the Kurt Wallander series, and the best in my opinion, preceded by-
Faceless Killers and
The Dogs of Riga. Wallander is a detective inspector in a small city in Sweden. He is divorced, out of shape and experiences waves of self-doubt concerning his abilities as a police officer, father, and son. When Wallander has a case to solve, he is like a dog with a bone. He cannot let it go, and all else goes by the wayside. In this book, he is still reeling from his last case, laid out in the
The Dogs of Riga.
He would like to begin a relationship with a women he met while on that case, but is gun shy. Suddenly, he must cope with a missing person's case. A female real estate agent is missing, and Wallander's instincts tell him that the case will not end happily.
More than half of this book takes place in South Africa, with the political turmoil of Nelson Mandela's rise to power, as the country is on the verge of its first free elections in April of 1994. Markell places Wallander, via the case he is working, in the middle of a complicated plot to assassinate Mandela as he speaks to a huge crowd. How can the missing woman, an explosion at a deserted farm house and the discovery of a unknown black man's amputated finger, found at the explosion scene, all be related? Wallander must unravel an exceptionally puzzling case. Along the way, Mankell offers some insight into the political, social, and cultural powder keg that was apartheid South Africa, in 1994. His epilogue at the back of the book is dated June,1993.
It is ironic that as I have been reading this book over the last few days, the news has been filled with reports of Nelson Mandela's ever-worsening illness. At age 94, his countrymen and the world are beginning to realize that this great man is going to be lost to us. But all that he has achieved will remain. I gained some insight into the power struggles between white Afrikaners determined to keep black South Africans bound by the horrific restraints of apartheid, of underground groups within the black population working to end apartheid, and the enormous rift between the two groups and cultures. Notwithstanding a riveting plot, readingThe White Lioness has been enlightening and most worthwhile. -
Some of the best police procedural/mystery writing is coming out of the Scandinavian countries. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, for example, also come from Sweden, and their work is consistently excellent. Not to mention there must ne some very good translators working on these books.
Mankell, who wrote this in 1993 as apartheid was beginning to crumble, has little love for those white South Africans who wanted to retain the status quo. In this, one of his lengthier works, his protagonist, Chief Inspector Kurt Wallender, from the small town of Ystad, is puzzled by the seemingly random death of a woman real estate agent. The case becomes more baffling when a house blows up leaving only traces of a powerful Russian-built radio transmitter and the remnants of a pistol manufactured in South Africa.
Mankell deftly – normally I dislike books with multiple points of view, but they are nicely integrated here – alternates between the committee and its representatives who are planning to assassinate Nelson Mandela in hopes of instigating a violent chaotic response from the black community that would force de Klerk to rigidly suppress it , and de Klerk’s intelligence man who has to work in secret himself to find the truth.
The albino lioness, visited by one of de Klerk’s agents on safari, becomes a metaphor not just for the South African white community, dangerous and unpredictable, but also the blindness and density of fog. What appears to be light may not be.
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I opet izvrstan Mankell! U ovom se romanu inspektoru Kurtu Wallanderu nižu naizgled nepovezane činjenice;između ostalog:
- oteta Šveđanka
-zakopan prst crnca
-ruski radioprijemnik
...uz to sve skupa tu su i politička previranja u Južnoj Africi (Nelson Mandela, predsjednik De Klerk) i bivši agenti KBG-a.
Sve je to skupa Mankell maestralno povezao u izvrsnu priči! Majstor žanra švedskih krimića puno, puno prije nego što je pomama za istim nastupila po cijelom svijetu. Upravo je on postavio čvrste temelje onoga što švedski (skandinavski) krimići danas jesu! -
Wallander, bueno no, Mankell, este señor era magnífico. Esto si que es escribir y además a todos los niveles, una maravilla. No se que me pasa con la historia de los 90 que me da una pereza brutal, me pasa con la URSS y me pasa con la Sudáfrica del aparheid, así que tardé demasiado en meterme en este libro y fue un error. Por la forma en que Mankell escribía es imposible no meterse de lleno tanto en la histora como en los personajes... increíblemente bueno. Y Wallander entre todo esto, desnudo pero sin dramatismo o patetismo, creo que así nos lo muestra el autor. Tengo una sensación rara, pese al marco temporal muy bien definido, me parece estar leyendo una historia de los 60 y un Wallander sesentón (se supone que tiene 44), quizá es que el tiempo ha pasado demasiado deprisa...
Encantada y a continuar. -
Review from
Badelynge.
After the underwhelming Dogs of Riga I was hoping for a big fat Swedish murder investigation this time. The White Lioness is a far superior animal by far but it's also not entirely that big fat dose of Wallander I wanted. Written just before South Africa would throw away the worst of its horrific identity, Mankell once again writes a book that is so very rooted in the time of its writing - here the early 90s leading up to the eventual free elections in 1994. The first segment of the book is excellent. Wallander is still not quite on an even keel after his ordeal in Latvia. He throws himself into the mystery of a missing woman. A woman with no reason to disappear.
My biggest problem with this book is the way this promising opening is just cut off in mid flow. We turn a page and leave Wallander behind. For a chapter we think. Well maybe two chapters. Any time now. 50 pages. Can't be long now. 80 pages. Please. 100 pages... you've got to be kidding me!!! Don't get me wrong. The narrative here is still excellently written and Mankell gives us a very creditable, though Swedish filtered attempt at showing Afrikaner society through the eyes of de Klerk, the secret service and a shadowy organisation dedicated to preserving apartheid by assassinating Mandela. Is it Wallander meets The Day of the Jackal? Oh very definitely, though the assassins here aren't really in the Jackal's class, though why they decide to train in Sweden is beyond me. Any half decent assassin would probably conduct his preparations in a neighbouring country.
Eventually the action returns back to Sweden and the book starts to burn again. Wallander skips the rails even more spectacularly than usual, which gives Svedberg an opportunity to step out of the shadows thrown by Mankel's previously sketchy characterisation, joining the very small cast of fully drawn players.
From a political standpoint the book has become a bit of curiosity, a set of Swedish tinged views on a long dead social system, separated by a couple of decades from today's contemporary incarnation. As a thriller and a detective story the book does eventually redeem itself, though the way the two threads are woven together could have been much better. -
The White Lioness is book number three in Mankell's series of crime novels Ystad detective featuring Kurt Wallander. I was really iffy on whether or not I would read this one, since it seemed more like a span-the-globe type of mystery, but I stuck with it and was happily rewarded.
The action begins when an estate agent goes out to look at a house for sale and loses her way on the road. Stopping to ask for directions at a farmhouse was the last thing she ever did. Called in to investigate her disappearance (and ultimately her death), Wallander and his team had no idea that their search for a killer would take them across the world to South Africa (the year is 1992), where a small cabal was planning a major assassination which its members hoped would set events in motion to stop the plans for disassembling the policy of apartheid in that country. This is one of those novels where you know who the killer is pretty much right away, and you're just watching to see how Wallander and his team figure it out.
Well written, The White Lioness takes place in two separate settings, but the story is very neatly tied together. The characters are realistically drawn -- especially the character of Konovalenko, who makes for an excellent bad guy. I liked this one much better than the previous series entry (Dogs of Riga). I'd definitely recommend this one to fans of Mankell, to those who like Scandinavian mysteries (which, in my mind, are simply excellent), and to those readers who want a mystery novel that is engrossing. Fans of police procedurals will enjoy this book and this series. -
Homicídios, investigação policial, conspiração política e bastante suspense fazem deste livro um policial entusiasmante em que as páginas voam. Gosto do comissário Wallander e gosto das intrigas engendradas por Henning Mankell. Uma saga para continuar.
