Karin Fossum, the Queen of Nordic Noir

The best place and time to enjoy a good thriller in the US is Minneapolis in winter, at least that's my opinion. The long, harsh, and dark winters, the snow covered white grounds, and the frozen lakes and dead trees, all conspire to provide the perfect setting for a perfect crime. It doesn't come as any surprise that many residents of Minnesota can trace their ancestry back to the Nordic countries, and that the writers from these Nordic countries have established themselves as leaders in this genre. 

Writers like the Swedish couple Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, Henning Mankell, Steig Larsson, Hakan Nesser, Icelandic authors like Arlandur Indridason, and Norwegian writers like Jo Nesbo and Karin Fossum have comes to mind when one thinks of the crime thriller genre (although my introduction to non-British crime fiction was through the works of the acclaimed Swiss author and dramatist, Friedrich Durrenmatt, whose creation, Inspector Hans Barlach, seems to embody all the essential characteristics that define the typical Nordic detectives who all were created much later). All the Nordic detectives (like Kurt Wallander, Harry Hole, Konrad Sejer, Martin Beck, Carl Morck, Erlendur Sveinsson) have the same traits - they are sharp, contemplative, dedicated, single, and tortured souls. They all want to believe in the goodness of mankind but their daily crime investigations make it hard to have faith in that proposition. 

The creators of these memorable characters are highly innovative writers, each with a distinct literary styles - Wahloo and Sjowall uses the setting of the crime thrillers to analyze the perceived injustices of the utopian Swedish society from a Communist perspective, Mankell's crime fictions bring into focus contemporary issues (like immigration, cult religions, neo-Nazis) that simmer under the quiet surface of the peaceful Swedish populace, Indridason's stories deal with the issues like that of the limited gene pool in Iceland and its harsh weather in winter etc. 

But what sets Karin Fossum apart? It's not the plot, for it's similar to all the other writer's. In fact her novels are much less of "who dun it?" than others. It is relatively easy to identify the culprits, and sometimes they are identified upfront by the author herself. There is hardly any Hollywood thrill that readers of Nesbo encounters in his novels. So what kind of thriller does Fossum write?! Karin Fossum's novels are not about "who", they are about "why", they are all psychological thrillers where the author gets into the minds of the characters involved in the story. She narrates both the victim's and the perpetrator's perspectives and the motives behind actions. Understanding the motives (like solving a puzzle) is the obsession of her detective, Konrad Sejer. 

This meditative style of writing in the Nordic noir is very unique to Fossum, and it perhaps  is a reflection of her past as a poet. Her writing is also shaped by her own personal experience of a crime in her own small and tightly-knit village community when she knew both the victim and the murderer. The interactions between people in small towns where everyone is aware that the criminal is right among them is an element that features prominently in all her stories.

Her novel, Black Seconds, narrates a story of the disappearance of a little girl and how an innocent person is almost convicted only to later discover that the secret lies within the girl's own family.

In Water's Edge, a child body is discovered by a couple taking a walk in the jungle, and much to the horror of the wife, the husband takes a picture of the victim before calling the police. What ensues is a thrilling tale of obsession and repentance.

In the novel, The Caller, Fossum takes us into the mind of a prankster and his rebellion against the society which ends in a tragedy. Once again Fossum lays bare the deep divisions within the society and how simple pranks can upset the fragile balance we maintain with our commonly accepted societal norms.

Bad intentions is another interesting novel which echoes the familiar motif in Fossum's work where there are no real villains or heroes, but it is the randomness of events that affects our lives in unforeseeable ways and with tragic consequences.

It is this insightful and tender analysis of human psyche and our relationships within the framework of a mystery novel that makes Fossum the unchallenged queen of Nordic noir. The philosophic and poetic treatment of often grisly subject matters is the hallmark of this truly distinguished writer of crime fiction.

Italo Calvino's "The Path to the Spider's Nest"

Set in a small town on the Ligurian coast during Mussolini's regime, Italo Calvino's "The Path to the Spider's Nest" is a story of a boy named Pin, who is a cobbler's apprentice. Pin gets caught up, almost unwittingly, in the battle of his times.  Pin lands up with the Italian resistance (partisans) who are engaged in war with the Germans and Mussolini's Black Brigade. But this is not a story about the war raging outside, it is above all a tale of the war and scars that each individual carries within oneself.  

Each member of the ragtag band of resistance fighters that Pin joins has his own fight: Dritto, the team's captain is a man who would like to be in command and be respected, but he knows that he is just a mere pawn in the hands of his superiors;  'Cousin' is a man who bears the scar of a wife who cheated on him and denounced him to the Germans; Pelle is an aimless and lost young man who had joined the resistance but defects later to the Black Brigade; Carabiniere is a part of the resistance to wipe out his darker past of having worked for the State.  As Kim, the Brigade Commissioner observers, these men fight not for a better future but to simply vent their hatred that is "due to a resentment they have dragged along with them since their childhood, and which may be either lively or dormant. It comes from the squalor of their lives, the filth of their homes, the obscenities they've known ever since babyhood, the strain of having to be bad. All that becomes hatred, an anonymous, aimless, dumb hatred, which finds expression in firing machine guns, making prisoners dig their own graves, and in a bitter yearning to get to grips with the enemy." 

Italo Calvino mastery lies in preserving the dark undercurrent of complex human emotions beneath the smooth surface of this simple narration of a boy searching for a true friend, one whom he will show where the spiders make their nests, but is caught up in the dramatic world of the grown-ups that seems beyond his comprehension.  

David Hockney's Art

David Hockney has been hailed as the greatest British painter alive, and perhaps only a few would like to disagree. The reason I am writing about Hockney is in part because he is one of the few artists who have appreciated the role of technology in the advancement of art, and used the latest offerings of science to create truly modern works.  

Hockney was already a rising star in Britain when he chose to move to Los Angeles because (by his own admission) he liked both the weather and liberal environment of California. He rose to fame in the 1960s (along with artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein) when the Pop Art movement was at its peak. One of Hockney's most famous paintings from this time, "A Bigger Splash" (seen below), is a playful and masterly composition in which rectilinear shapes (horizontal lines of the house and the pool edge, and the vertical lines of the trees) are only interrupted by the the oblique lines of the chair and the diving board, harmoniously echoing the way in which a splash left by an unseen diver interrupts the quietness of the surrounding scenery. It is also worth noting how the splash is crucial in providing the 3D effect in an otherwise remarkably (and deliberately) flat painting. This playfulness is very characteristic of Hockney's art.

 A Bigger Splash

But Hockney is an inventor, for he keeps reinventing himself in different mediums. His deep admiration for photography has led him to adapt it as an integral technology used to create his compositions. However he has not fully satisfied with video recordings because he felt that any recording was limiting the viewer's ability to wander about in the composition by imposing a linear timeline on the sequence of photos that form the video. Instead he advocated "photo collage" or "joiners" as a better means of capturing and highlighting the aspects that the painter wants the viewer to notice. Seen here is an example of Hockney's photo collage of Minneapolis Walker Art Center's director and his wife solving crossword puzzles. It captures the entire process of thinking, wondering,  and the excitement of the "Aha!" moments as they solve the puzzles together. For more information about his "Joiners", watch  Hockney's interview on YouTube. 

Joiner: Martin Friedman and his wife solving a crossword puzzle

Hockney also explored this idea of capturing a sequence of events in his paintings after he came across Chinese scroll paintings, which depicted scenes temporally as opposed to a single snapshot or a single point of view. This led him to paint a series of pictures of the road that he took and the surrounding landscapes on his way to a hospital to meet a friend (see below). What Hockney was trying to capture in this series was the essence of the journey itself - the process rather than the end.    

An unrelenting innovator, an aged Hockney took up plein-air painting ("in the open") in 2006 when he returned to his native Yorkshire and created a series of fascinating landscapes in huge panels for the "A Bigger Picture" exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Hockney went back to using the photography and the latest digital technologies to align and superimpose the canvas paintings to create the large panels (seen below).

  Plein-air painting

A Bigger Picture

But what is most impressive about this extraordinary man is that he has moved onto a new medium -one which only the techno-buffs will become the early adopters of, or so you would think. This new medium is the iPad. Hockney, the innovator, is now creating his paintings on the iPad, and he recently had a successful exhibition in CA. Some of his paintings on the iPad can be seen below. You can also read more about Hockney's iPad paintings (wired.com). Hockney has opined that this technology which is poised to usher in a new wave of creativity is now in the hands of everyone, it's a new medium of self-expression -one that is accessible to all, even those without any formal academic training in art schools. Technology is once again advancing the arts and democratizing it for the masses to appreciate, much like the way the Renaissance painters brought art closer to masses. As Contemporary art continues to become ever more esoteric and idiosyncratic, trapped in the art galleries, cut off from the ordinary people, this is perhaps a very sobering voice of reason. 

  

 Hockney's iPad paintings

It is Hockney's fascination with not just painting, but the process as well, including the role of technologies in shaping art, that makes Hockney stand out. In 2000, Hockney and physicist Charles Falco proposed a controversial theory (and some evidence) that art historians had not fully grasped till then. Hockney argued that Renaissance masters like Jan van Eyck, Lorenzo Lotto, and Vermeer were using  concave mirrors to make their paintings realistic. In essence even before the advent of modern day photography and lenses, Renaissance painters had begun to use the basic principles of optics to make photorealistic paintings. Hockney argued that Arab scholar Ibn Al-Hytham's "Book of Optics" was the source for the Renaissance painters discovery of the technology, which resulted in a sudden improvement in their ability to paint realistic portraits and images in early 1400s. His theory has opened a new discussion on the history of science and what role it played in the advancement of Renaissance aesthetics. To learn more about this theory, watch Charlie Rose's interview of David Hockney about Camera Obsura.

It is Hockney's ability to bridge the worlds of science and arts that makes him an important figure in today's world. One without the other would be a much poorer world to live in. Hockney understands that and explore this interdependency to inform us of the past and open our eyes to imagine future possibilities.