Henning Mankell, author of the series of detective novels starring the inspector Kurt Wallander, died Monday in Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 1987 that divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where he ran in Maputo, the Teatro Avenida company.
In January 2014, Mankell wrote a chronicle in the Swedish newspaper Göteborgs-Posten to inform their many readers – the books of the Wallander series have been translated worldwide, sold anymore 40 million copies and inspired films and TV series -. that you had been diagnosed with cancer of the lung and the other in the neck
Born in Stockholm in 1948, Mankell started early to write theater and fiction, but only published his first detective in 1991. It was called The Killer Without a Face ( Mördare utan ansikte ) and its hero, Kurt Wallander, was inspector in Police Ystad, a small Swedish town of 20,000 inhabitants. Divorced and the father of a daughter, Wallander still had a difficult relationship with his own father, a man who obsessively painted the same landscape, sometimes by adding a wild rooster.
It was the beginning of a saga of nine novels, all published in Portugal in the collection The Razor’s Edge, the presence, to which is added a short novel and a book of short stories. And you could also add up Innan Frosten (2002), the beginning of an announced trilogy starring Wallander’s daughter, Linda, who followed his father’s footsteps and also became police. But Mankell cut the series shortly after the publication of this first book, disturbed by Johanna Sällström suicide, the actress who then represented Linda Wallander in a Swedish television series.
A detective with Alzheimer
If it is fair to grant the status of parents of Scandinavian policeman Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall, the couple who wrote in the years 60 and 70 a dozen books starring the Martin Beck police (published in Portugal by road), Henning Mankell was perhaps the main reason for the international recognition of so-called nordic noir , paving the way for authors like the late Stieg Larsson Camilla Läckberg or Jo Nesbø.
As Wahlöö and Sjöwall assumed Marxists, Mankell has always been a left-wing author, and the introspective Wallander, a cop who likes opera and whiskey , shows have Too obvious political leanings, is perhaps not by chance that criminals facing tend to be members of the financial elite, or even declared fascists. “Solidarity with the weak and the oppressed through his work as a conductor wire,” has written after his death the Leopard publisher, which Mankell founded in 2001 with Dan Israel.
Wrapped in protests the Vietnam War, the apartheid South African or Portuguese colonialism in the 60s, Henning Mankell has never ceased to engage in political causes. In June 2010, it was one of the activists detained by Israeli forces when they tried to bring humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.
Your creature, Kurt Wallander, unlike heroes who seem to be forever in the bloom of youth, It was noticeably aging from book to book, with Mankell to indulge in perverse refinements, such as to diagnose her diabetes. And in 2009, when you resume your detective in the book A Restless Man – the previous novel Wallander, The Wall Invisible , dating since 1998 – is not half measures and, to use his own words, throw your detective for “empty universe of Alzheimer’s disease.”
The author of about forty plays, his playwright facet, which never abandoned, intensified through their work with the company Teatro Avenida in Maputo, where he spent several months a year since the mid-80s In a recent book by the presence in Portugal, An Angel Unclean ( Minnet av en Smutsig Angel , 2011), Mankell tells the true story of Hanna Lundmark, a Swedish in the early twentieth century shipped to Australia as a cook on a ship, but it turned out never get there, whereby become owner of the most famous brothel of the then Lourenço Marques.
“I came to Africa in order to see the world except through the perspective of European egocentricity,” Mankell wrote in 2011, in a text published by the newspaper New York Times . He added:. “I could have chosen Asia or South America, but I ended up in Africa because the plane tickets were cheaper there”
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