XXIII edition
10/15 December 2013
Henning Mankell, 2013 Chandler Award winner
December 13, the day of Sweden’s patron saint Lucia, finally saw the arrival in Courmayeur of Henning Mankell, the 2013 Chandler Award winner and creator of the Commissioner Kurt Wallander series, ten books that inspired both film and television adaptations (the BBC version of which starred Kenneth Branagh and will soon be rebroadcast in Italy on the new Feltrinelli channel).
A novelist, playwright and political activist, Mankell has little in common with Wallander; mostly their age and love of Italian opera music.
Mankell’s sets the birth of Wallander (over 40 million copies sold, one million of which in Italy) on precisely May 19, 1989, when he was living in southern Sweden. At the end of a walk he decided he needed to write a book about the problem of xenophobia and the failure of Sweden’s social-democratic model. When he returned home he looked up a last name typical to the area in the phone book, randomly choosing Wallander, which was not too common and which needed a short first name: Kurt, for instance.
Thus began the adventures of the police offer from Ystad, who has changed over time: he’s gotten older, gotten sick (first it was diabetes, then Alzheimer’s), divorced and he’s had problems with his daughter (the protagonist of her own novel as well). Wallander is not a politically correct man. Says Mankell: "I have very little in common with him, but he too is part of our world, a world where Balzac’s saying ‘Behind every great fortune there is a great crime’ is still topical. I talk about these things. The greatest wealth comes from trafficking drugs, human beings and weapons. It’s incredible to see those enormous yachts, the symbols of this wealth, the crews of which don’t even know who the owners are".
Mankell, considered to be the driving force of Swedish crime fiction (in the way that Bjorn Borg was for tennis), has written more than just the adventures of Wallander. He lived for years in Africa, mostly in Mozambique, where he runs a theatre, always writing numerous plays, including Lampedusa, on the problem of immigration. He adds: "No one wants to live in a world in which there are people dying on the beaches. Lampedusa isn’t just an Italian problem, it’s a problem for all of Europe. Which is why I think the Sicilian island should be the capital of today’s Europe, because you can’t run away from these problems. When I wrote the first Wallander book, racism was already an enormous problem, and nothing’s changed today, the situation has even gotten worse, and that novel is still topical. And our responsibility is enormous, because racism is a product of our culture, through which we’ve justified our colonialist politics."
The third thing that Wallander and Mankell share is a lack of laziness. Mankell continues to write prolifically: he’s just finished a new 10-part television series, The Ambassador, about a female Swedish ambassador who immediately makes a lot of enemies upon starting a new post in an unspecified capital city.
