Henning Mankell gets no respect

I missed this yesterday but The Washington Post had a hefty profile of the multi-bestselling Swedish author who hasn’t quite made the splash in North America that was expected:

Why isn’t Swedish writer Mankell better known in the United States? After all, he has written 40 books that have been published in more than 35 countries and sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. He has outsold Harry Potter in Germany, his American publisher, the New Press, likes to point out. His recurring detective, Kurt Wallander, is quirky, wise, flawed, a lover of music and eventually successful in solving tough cases. It may be because Mankell’s books are cheerless things.

"Americans seem to have a problem," writes a reviewer in Publishers Weekly, "with the austere qualities of his prose and his heroes, and the rather bleak atmosphere that pervades much of his work."

He has not had a title on the Washington Post or New York Times bestseller lists.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. But Mankell’s dour voice is extremely pervasive in his books:

Pick up a Mankell and you know immediately that he is a practitioner of the popular postmodern No Style style — that is, short sentences with few modifiers and almost no flourish. He writes spare sentences. But he is also a master, as Laymon says, of pinpointing societal problems and exploring them, sometimes in graphic detail. Wallander is an old fat guy who is beset by adult diabetes and other chronic and corrosive maladies, which the reader hears all about. Wallander does not shy away from life’s sicknesses and sadnesses.

The character, says Ebba Segerberg, who translated "Before the Frost" into English, "is so ordinary, really, but he gets under your skin."

I do have to confess that much as I love crime fiction in translation — including a number of Scandinavian authors — Mankell just doesn’t do it for me. Maybe it’s the voice, maybe it’s the atmosphere, but whatever it is, I just can’t get through his books.

Personal tastes aside, I was amused (and somewhat bemused) by this particular tidbit:

Mankell has quirks of his own. When he comes to New York, he likes to stay in a particular room at the Drake Hotel. If the room is not available, he will wait a week until it is. What he likes most about the room: There are no neighbors.

Because, well, that’s just kinda weird…