“Quicksand” and called the book Tusquets published in Argentina last month, is the chilling log of a man for whom death was no longer a remote but unavoidable instance to become an everyday dimension that led to confront current ghosts, suddenly lined with remote darkness of childhood.
The last work of the creator of police saga of detective Kurt Wallander plunges the reader into the folds of her illness, which begins have a diffuse record in late November 2013 when he realizes that something is wrong, suspected to be enlightened about a month and a half later when doctors confirmed the cancer had begun to eat away at its vital fibers.
From there, the possibility of death, “a tragic inherent in the human condition”, enters the field of view of the narrator, who does not hesitate to dump on the role that emotional chaos for the first time . It is diversified throughout the story, through memories, books, images and reflections, all devices created on the fly to deal with the unexpected and irreversible
In this context burst memories of her childhood: “I suddenly came upon an unexpected certainty. Like an electric shock. The words are arranged in the head alone. I am myself and no other. I am me. At that moment I become my identity. Before, my thoughts were so childish as expected. Now a completely different state materialized. The identity implies consciousness (…) Life suddenly becomes a serious matter “
It is about life which emphasizes Mankell, and this return to childhood leads him to recreate his first fears.: the nightmare of standing on an ice sinking and devours or on sand that blow zigzags and drag it to an interior space without air or loophole.
The Swedish writer uses a whimsical but not deliberate to gather scraps of experiences they reappear on stage that calls for something, or because they belong to the ephemeral present where the weather changes its usual status memory: there is then a chronology but a network of vital events or thoughts that lead riff on the environment, culture or the existence of a God, oblivious to their beliefs.
The answers give way to new questions and when everything becomes too complicated Mankell looks a picture of himself in wall-mounted black and white: “It’s a picture of when I was nine. I’m sitting at a desk in school Sveg. When I see that face full of curiosity and the certainty that everything is possible in life, I feel again the strength to want to understand, “slides.
That chained overlapping issues leading the reader through the intricacies of memory and oblivion, while the narrator is preparing for chemotherapy sessions and sickness creeps into daily routines.
To Mankell, as recounted in the book, the diagnosis of cancer was a ‘descent into hell “, he decided to neutralize with writing: first newspaper articles and later in this book that spells out views on the death, fear, hope, beliefs, above all, about life. And the creator of Inspector Kurt Wallander, whose books have been translated into 40 languages, makes it clear that his testimony will focus on life, not death.
Since then, the author of “Murderers faceless “and” Dogs of Riga “began to read books on quicksand and discovered that the story of these masses of sand able to submerge in the depths of the earth and kill a man is a myth:” All those stories they have and what they describe are an invention “, narrated in the work.
In addition to reading, writing also, because literature in recent months was the best ally of anxiety before the death blow “Take a book and get lost in the text in tough times has always been a way to seek relief,” says Mankell
Also photographs of works of art and music became spontaneous strategies. raffle for a while that unwavering bustle of the disease that was silently horando your body until this morning, when the quicksand ceased to be a nightmare mind to become a merciless reality.
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