I have just finished a short one: Stewe Claeson´s "Mördaren är död" (= the murderer is dead). I suppose it´s a murder mystery, in a way. The mystery is not who killed whom, but why. Except the reader has it solved way, waaay before the six brothers, whose father posthumously has confessed to murdering a priest.
Actually, this is a rather boring book. I imagine it´s supposed to be deep - the detective story format employed to say something profound about life - but it´s not. Not that I can detect, anyway. Page up and page down, the author drones on with dialogue that´s, ok, maybe we talk like that in real life (some of us), but just because a dialogue is real it doesn´t necessarily mean that it feels real in a work of fiction. At quite a few places there also seems to be unmotivated repetitions, like the author wrote two versions of a dialogue and then forgot to delete one of them.
I remember vaguely reading another work of Claeson´s, "Tiro", a few years back. It was about an aging roman, probably deep as well, I remember being slightly bored that time too, but not irritated, as I am now. Maybe there is a subtle greatness to these books. I just can´t see it.
I have googled the reviews and I think they are, for the most part, undeservingly positive. I imagine Claeson has a lot of literary capital, has probably done some great work in the past. Not that I´m particularly curious. Perhaps I´m missing out. And perhaps not.
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