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The mystery itself is interesting enough, and the early hints of Wallander's uneasy relationship with the rules is just what I expected, but what made me devour this story was the abuse of Wallander at the hands and tongue of Mona, who would become his wife then ex-wife, and the abuse of Wallander at the tongue of his not yet dementia reduced father. So much of Wallander's personal life, so much of his failures as a friend and father and lover, so much of his obsession with the lonely victims he comes across, is tied up in these two unhealthy relationships. When Kurt is thinking of breaking it off with Mona, is then afraid that Mona will break it off with him, all I could think was, "Christ, YES! End it. Let it end," and when Kurt considers never seeing his father again, considers cutting off the old man after a particularly nasty bit of passive aggressive manipulation, I was thinking the same thing. Of course, I know Kurt's going to go ahead and make his mistakes, but it didn't stop me wishing for a different outcome.

Slightly aside: this story takes place in the early seventies, and I couldn't help wondering when Martin Beck was going to show up. He never did, but I dearly wanted him to. I wonder how hard it was for Mankell to keep Beck out of the story?

This tight, taut little story kept me in mind of Sjowall and Wahloo's Martin Beck mysteries. Only this time, I couldn't help noticing how much the character of Wallander owes to Sjowall and Wahloo's chief protagonists, Martin Beck and Lennart Kollberg. The pair are partners and completely realized characters in their own rights -- not mere archetypes -- but much that Wallander is, especially in this story, can be found in those men. He is a complex blending of the two, and when this story engages in a consideration of apartheid South Africa (did this early case of Wallander's ever come up in The White Lioness?) with the young dissident turned murderer Mankell's debt to the Martin Beck novels comes into sharp relief.

There is a lot of suicide going on in this book, but somehow that feels perfectly in place with the mood that the Wallander books have created through the years. The bleak landscape of rural Sweden might make suicide seem fitting, but I think it is more about the quiet despair of people living rurally in a modern society than about the space they live in. It certainly feels that way to me in this story where murder comes first, then suicide follows as a result. This is the most depressing story of the bunch -- so far.

Two things:
1. It never ceases to amaze me when an author hits on something that speaks to me directly. It is why I read, I suspect.

"'He must have been crazy in his own way,' Hansson said. 'To spend his spare time distorting images of well known people.'

'Perhaps the explanation is quite different,: Rydberg suggested. 'Perhaps there are people in today's society that feel so powerless they no longer partake in what we call democratic society. Instead, they devote themselves to rites. If this is the case, our nation is in trouble.'"

2. If you've read the Wallander books to this point you are aware of what has gone on between Martinsson and Wallander(view spoiler)[, and you know that Martinsson betrays his mentor, specifically citing Wallander's unorthodoxy in his attacks on him to the higher-ups. Reading this story now, which falls right at the beginning of Martinsson's time on the force and his relationship with Wallander, I was shocked to see how clearly his feelings and his inevitable betrayal informed their interactions and Martinsson's attitudes. (hide spoiler)] Once again these stories show that their true worth is what they tell us about Wallander and his relationships.

This felt much more like the Wallander stories I'm used to. I think this is both because the story directly precedes Faceless Killers, so all of his relationships are reaching the place I am familiar with, and because the story was much longer than the other four in this volume, putting it closer to the level of plot complexity in the novels.

Yet I don't think this is the best story in the book. In fact, it almost felt like this story was something discarded rather than a story that Mankell felt he really needed to tell. The other short stories felt like little explorations that Mankell needed to produce for himself, but they were complete and packed enough of worth that Mankell could share them without reservation. The Pyramid, however, felt like an idea Mankell played with but couldn't imbue with enough complexity to suit his needs, an idea that aspired to but didn't reach the high standard of plotting in his other Wallander novels, an idea that took much too much of Mankell's writing energy to simply let go and was published merely to clear the docket.

Still, I am glad I read it if only for Rydberg, Martinsson, Linda and Wallander's father. More time with them all is appreciated by me, and I can't wait to see what Linda is like as the protagonist in Before the Frost. I hope she isn't just a copy of her Dad.

I have been tossing around an idea I have about the shift in novella writing from a thing unto itself into a portion of "larger" works (I first started talking about it here), and it seems to me that John Scalzi's quite marvelous Redshirts is just such a work.

I would split it into two novellas: Redshirts itself, and the three Codas. Redshirts is, after all, a mere 200-ish pages that read very quickly. Its length is similar to many of the classic novellas (many of which, like Heart of Darkness are densely packed into their slim editions); it gets going, gets its story told and gets out.

The Codas, then, make up the second novella. Though they work as narrative additions to Redshirts proper, they also work on their own, stringing together three short stories (a novella in short stories?) that make one cohesive unit, and I think they could be read as one piece minus Redshirts and be quite excellent in their own right. Moreover, they offer up first, second and third person perspectives, respectively, binding themselves together as one unit with a mechanical throughline that weaves together the narrative threads into a piece.

You may not consider it two novellas, but the idea works for me in my brain, and next time I read this book I am going to read the Codas all by themselves to see how they work.

Novella talk aside, this is one enteraining piece of fiction. It hits that special place in my liver where my Trekkie love rests, it hits that special place in my hypothalimus where my Firefly love rests, it hits that very special place in my testicles where BSG rests, it hits that special place in my joints where Deep Space Nine rests, etc., etc.. Scalzi knows all the pressure points (and of course he would being the nerd that he is and having worked on Stargate too), and he pokes at those points with joyful abandon. I haven't had so much fun reading in a year.

Fuck yeah! Anyone who is interested in Baudrillard or Eco or spends their time seeing the removes in everything they perceive with enjoy their time down the wormhole or ten.

A Yeti in the Jeffries' Tubes. Seriously fun.

A subtle, ingenious, poetic and picturesque book; the uncertaintly principle embodied in brilliant fiction...

[[author:Gene Wolfe]'s] tragico-Catholic perspective leads to a deeply unglamorized and unsanitized awareness of social reality. This book is a very sad and extremely dense, complex meditation on colonialism, identity and oppression.