The Shadow in the Water
Inger Frimansson,
trans. from the Swedish by Laura A. Wideburg.
In the disturbing second tale of revenge to feature tormented and twisted
Justine Dalvik from Swedish author
Frimansson
(after Good Night My Darling),
Justine is still battling demons, both real and imagined, while living in her
family home in Hässelby. The tall, forbidding manse was the last place married,
mother-of-two Berit Assarson was seen alive. Seven years have passed since Berit’s
disappearance, and her husband, Tor, and her best friend, Jill Kylén, are
trying to move on with their lives. Both harbor lingering, foggy suspicions
about Justine, just like young Micke, whose father, Nathan, vanished while
traveling with Justine. In spare prose, Frimansson
skillfully weaves themes of darkness and light, guilt and innocence, life and
death. Not for the faint of heart, this bleak mystery will linger in readers’
minds long after the last page is turned. (May)
from Publishers Weekly.
Reviews
from Foreign Presses:
Inger
Frimansson excels in describing the feeling of frustration, fear and anxiety
that surrounds these people, whose lives inevitably are intertwined. The plot
thickens and loose ends are tied together, each in their own way – Tor, Micke
and Jill, Berit’s girlfriend – clear up the past. At the same time the
nasty, violently inclined policeman Tommy catches sight of the case. I read in
one sitting, am completely engulfed by these lives depicted so well and with so
much insight by Inger Frimansson, and I shiver at the fateful environs in Hässelby,
a well-to-do Suburbia suddenly becomes a true everyday nightmare and the waters
of Mälaren menacingly dark. - Helsingborgs Dagblad
She
shows that there is no need for all that action for it to feel horrible, scary
and suspenseful. It’s at its best – and at its worst! – when she takes the
time to stop and tighten the screws, the knife carving yet another shiver
producing floor down in the human psyche. The reader holds his breath and awaits
the inevitable. - Ystads
Allehanda
The
idea, the suspense and the game, is what we feel, but here there is also a sort
of endgame. Here, Frimansson once again takes up her “case” and follows it
along. Makes it come to life, without becoming redundant and without using old
tricks. It’s apt. And it must be there that the strength in Inger
Frimansson’s narrating is located, somewhere between the constructed and the
arranged, and the open, that which goes without saying. In addition her
meticulousness concerning the seemingly simple – but in reality the depth that
has drilled itself inside and down into the human memory – is as unusually
thrilling as is it sharp. Why hasn’t anyone turned her stories into film or
television? I wonder each time I meet the equally real and lunatic persons in
outer and inner dialogs at a light year distance from those of ”Queens of
Crime”. The
Shadow in the Water can be read as a
sequel to Good
Night my Darling (always taken out at the
library but available on the folio shelf, extremely pleasant to the eyes I
discovered, having lost my “original” copy!) or stand entirely by itself. A
tip is to take a few days off in August, make yourself comfortable in a garden
free of snails somewhere and read them one after the other – you won’t be
able to put any one of them down before you’ve finished them! - Gefle Dagblad
Her
language flows like water – she has tasted each word, each sentence before
they are approved. The proximity to both people and surroundings clearly also
contributes to enjoyable reading and the suspense present until the very end. - Jönköpings-Posten
Justine
in The
Shadow in the Water slowly and with
growing anxiety discovers that she still cannot recover her breath and leave the
violent past behind her. She feels persecuted and her big wild bird with which
she lives as though it were tame flaps and shrieks more than ever, as though it,
too, experiences the invisible threat. Justine Dalvik is the main character and
at the same time she isn’t. All paths sooner or later lead up to her, but
Frimansson’s many subordinate characters steadily take shape, and as much as
we can almost physically feel Justine’s almost paranoid anxiety somewhere in
the abdominal region, we gain a reluctant empathy for the very unpleasant young
man who’s lost his father, while we with painful pointedness feel what it’s
like to be abused by your husband, as Ariadne is. Many subjects are dealt with
here – guilt, sorrow, revenge and love to mention a few – but in the same
way that Frimansson lets each person have their space and a voice, nothing is
scrambled through. – Västerbottens
Folkblad