Mikael Niemi is a Swedish author. He wrote the novel Populärmusik från Vittula (in English as Popular music from Vittula). It became a best-seller in Sweden and was subsequently translated into 30 languages.
He first became famous by writing poetry, and he has published many collections of poetry.
We will tell you about the new novel by Mikael Niemi "Boil the Bear" - a detective story set near the Arctic Circle. The main character - an orphan boy Jussi - together with his mentor investigates a series of murders. Nevertheless, "Boil a Bear" is not only a fascinating noir novel about finding a killer, it is also an author's declaration of love to the author's native North.
Aside from the romance of pioneering and overcoming, the North is a generally unattractive and ill-suited place to live. Cold, darkness, monotonous landscape, infertile soil (and therefore, the eternal threat of hunger), scarce vegetation, hopeless boredom (and its faithful companions - depression, insanity, drunkenness), and somewhere in the neighborhood, a dark shadow - alien, incomprehensible and therefore frightening indigenous peoples of the North with their semi-witchcraft survival practices.
All together, this puts any artist, in one form or another, addressing the northern theme, before a difficult choice. You can retouch the picture in such a way that the northern lights, blooming tundra and the mutual assistance of harsh laconic people are in the center, and the non-photogenic swamp and drunken villagers are in the background, out of focus. You can frame it a little differently and act in the venerable genre of noir Nordic horror stories with all its indispensable attributes such as frostbitten limbs, annoying gnats, total alcoholism and rancid yogurt as a festive delicacy.
The Swedish writer Mikael Niemi, a native of the circumpolar Payala, is unique in that he dodges both well-trodden paths equally well. In his interpretation, the Swedish-Finnish North looks quite realistic (that is, gloomy, uncomfortable and creepy), but at the same time it just does not glow from the endless, all-understanding and all-accepting author's love for this poor land and its rude inhabitants.
Unlike the previous (and the only one for today) Niemi's book "Popular Music from Vittula", translated into Russian, which is not so far from our days, "Cook a Bear" is a full-fledged historical novel, which takes place in the 50s XIX century. The protagonist, a Sami orphan boy named Jussi, is brought up in the estate of Payalsky simple (as the rector of the parish is called in Sweden) Lasse Levi Lestadius, a historical personality, an enthusiastic botanist and tireless fighter for a return to the "living faith" and refusal of drunkenness, which is fatal for northerners ... Together with the teacher, Jussi will have to become a participant in a real detective investigation (a serial killer has settled in the polar regions, raping and killing young girls), and later, alone, miraculously avoid death, win love and find his true calling.
The easiest and most straightforward way to read Boil the Bear is to see a classic Scandinavian thriller noir in retro entourage. For this, in fact, Niemi's novel has almost everything you need: several bloody crimes, and an insidious killer (in advance, as prescribed by the rules of the genre, presented to the reader), and painstaking collection of evidence, and even the archetypal pair "smart detective - naive assistant" (simply Lestadius and Jussi seem to deliberately parody all analogous couples - from Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to Wilhelm of Baskerville and Adson from Umberto Eco's "Name of the Rose").
However, such a reading will be deliberately imprecise and fragmentary. Moreover, if we look at Boil a Bear as another example of genre prose, it immediately reveals redundancies, inadequacies, and flagrant violations of the narrative logic. Unlike the detective who does not hesitate and does not make mistakes from the classic detective, Lestadius is simple, in fact, wandering in the dark, constantly stumbling, coming to false conclusions and putting his own life in completely unnecessary danger. With incredible difficulty, the evidence he collected (including such exotic for 1851 as fingerprints or a daguerreotype that accidentally captured the murderer) turns out to be incomprehensible, and therefore unconvincing for his dark parishioners. The long-awaited exposure and punishment of the offender does not happen at all as the reader expects. And what is perhaps worst of all, the faithful Jussi, to whom tradition assigns the role of an impartial chronicler, in this bloody story reveals his own interest, which makes him a very, very unreliable storyteller.
However, for Niemi, all these deviations from the detective canon do not at all look like weaknesses or shortcomings - rather, on the contrary, they add warmth, reliability and charm to his novel. The detective story is a genre by its nature artificial, while "Boil the Bear" is the most natural, natural book, utterly alien to any predetermined expectations and market standards.
In fact, like many other contemporary authors ranging from Kate Atkinson to our Yana Wagner, Mikael Niemi uses a detective story as a shell that he fills with content of his own liking. And in this capacity, he uses elements of an upbringing novel (in the course of the narrative, Jussi turns from a boy-adopted boy into an adult man, ready to take responsibility for himself and his loved ones), and the drama of overcoming otherness, and the story of spiritual search and struggle with oneself (it is she, and not at all the hunt for a maniac, in the first place is simple for Lestadius), and an inspired ode to reading as a means of simultaneously saving from reality and transforming it for the better. But the main component, the key element of the supporting structure in "Boil the Bear", as mentioned above, is the author's love for the North as a geographical space and way of life - intelligent, observant love, not devoid of irony and sadness, but at the same time unconditional and therefore leaving hope for even the most seemingly lost heroes and warming the reader.
Reading Mikael Niemi, you periodically catch yourself recognizing: ethnographic realities, customs, landscapes, and everyday life seem surprisingly similar to those in Russia. However, such an attitude towards them on the part of the author in Russian literature today, alas, is unimaginable: sobriety of assessment is rarely combined with love, and understanding with acceptance. In modern Swedish literature, much can cause envy, but this inherent Niemi (and, by the way, not only him) calm and confident love for his native places without their hysterical idealization or tedious exposure of Russian contemporary literature is perhaps not enough.
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