{"id":2792,"date":"2016-10-25T13:34:31","date_gmt":"2016-10-25T18:34:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/?p=2792"},"modified":"2018-08-08T13:40:03","modified_gmt":"2018-08-08T18:40:03","slug":"where-roses-never-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/2016\/10\/25\/where-roses-never-die\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Roses Never Die"},"content":{"rendered":"<div data-modular-content-collection><h2>By Gunnar Staalesen<\/h2>\n<h4>Orenda Books 2016<\/h4>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"2705\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/2016\/10\/25\/where-roses-never-die\/whererosesneverdie300\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/files\/2016\/10\/whererosesneverdie300.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"325,500\" data-comments-opened=\"0\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"whererosesneverdie300\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/files\/2016\/10\/whererosesneverdie300.jpg\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2705\" src=\"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/files\/2016\/10\/whererosesneverdie300-195x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"300\" \/>This book was the gift of my good friend Einar Vannebo, Director of the International Summer School at the University of Oslo. It was Einar who introduced me to Nordic Noir a decade ago, and all these years later I\u2019m still reading and enjoying that genre.<\/p>\n<p>The Norwegian detective novelist Jo Nesb\u00f8 describes Gunnar Staalesen as \u201cA Norwegian Chandler.\u201d He\u2019s referencing Raymond Chandler, the American author of such great hard-boiled detective novels as <em>The Big Sleep<\/em>. I can see why Nesb\u00f8 makes that comparison.<\/p>\n<p>A distinctive feature of Chandler\u2019s prose is his frequent use of similes, so frequent that he is sometimes mocked for his reliance on them. Staalesen out-Chandlers Chandler. He apparently never met a simile he didn\u2019t like. Here are some from pages 89-91 of <em>Where Roses Never Die<\/em>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cThe coffee looked black and bitter, like a poisoned chalice from the beyond served by a brimstone preacher on the first Sunday of a fast.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cI felt a shudder go through me, like frost. And I knew what it was. I had experienced it before. The frost was the incomprehensible, the coldness of a foreshortened life.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cI tasted the coffee. It was as expected \u2014 more bitter than broken New Year resolutions.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here is another:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cAll of a sudden my throat was drier than a temperance preacher\u2019s on the booze cruise from Denmark.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You get the idea. Staalesen, like Chandler, uses similes to establish atmosphere: cynicism, foreboding, world weariness. And like Chandler he approaches the point where they seem like a mannerism rather than contributing to the novel\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n<p>The detectives in noir fiction frequently inhabit an ambiguous moral state. They operate in a world of broken people where the rules of civil society don\u2019t apply, and their personal lives are often fraught with broken relationships, hostilities with the police, a sense of loss and despair. Staalesen\u2019s detective, Varg Veum, fits the mold. As he says of himself, \u201cMy bank balance was catastrophic and my physical shape the worse I had been in since the 1960s. My moral state was even worse.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Noir detectives are aware of the ambiguous moral state around them, and the burden of finding and the truth in a complex web of events and then passing judgment on what happened weighs on them. Other people notice it, too. One of the suspects Veum is interviewing says, \u201cYou give the impression of a hopelessly old-fashioned moralist.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Part of Veum\u2019s problem is his struggle with alcohol. Staalesen writes evocatively about addiction: \u201cThen I lifted the aquavit glass and drank deeply. For a second or two I had to close my eyes. I was sailing into a harbor I had left much too long ago, and on the quay stood people I hadn\u2019t seen for years, who received me with cheering so quiet that I could hear my pulse throbbing in my ears.\u201d Or, \u201cThen it was back to the bottle. One open and a second in prospect, until empties clinked wherever I turned, whether at home or in the office. I was the emperor of empties, and I had hundreds of vassals, empty, silent and glassy-eyed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t want to give the impression that Staalesen is just a pale imitator of Raymond Chandler. <em>Where Roses Never Die<\/em> is a compelling novel, and Varg Veum is interesting and complex. How many other fictional hard-boiled detectives had a prior career as a child welfare worker?<\/p>\n<p>See for yourself. You\u2019ll enjoy both the novel and its noir atmosphere.<\/p>\n<h2><em><a href=\"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/reading\/\">Back to the Bookshelf<\/a><\/em><\/h2>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Gunnar Staalesen Orenda Books 2016 This book was the gift of my good friend Einar Vannebo, Director of the International Summer School at the University of Oslo. It was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":126,"featured_media":3225,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pdas-bookshelf"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/files\/2016\/10\/where-roses-never-die-43.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/126"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2792"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2805,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2792\/revisions\/2805"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}