Home »
The Shadow Woman is a very good read
Book Review
By Derryll White
Edwardson, Ake (1998). The Shadow Woman.
The novel has a very unconventional opening, through the eyes and voice of a child. It is somehow innocent, unrelated to drug wars and biker gangs. But such is the real world as well, many simple vignettes linked into what may become a horror story.
One of the things I appreciate in the new Scandinavian writers such as Edwardson is the attention to real life. Sex leads to questions about where the relationship is going, in spite of the fact that Inspector Erik Winter is quite taken with the idea of sex for its own sake. Pretty natural among men, but the author doesn’t leave him long in denial, instead pushing forward into discoveries common in real life relationships. I love the insistence of the demand for resolution, which takes me back into many previous relationships of my own. That also seems to be a trait of the Scandinavians, pulling the reader into rediscovery of his or her own life as the story unfolds.
It doesn’t take long for the sub-text of immigration and its constant partner racism to appear. A common theme I find in Scandinavian literature, this author handles it well while making his own position on the subject very clear.
One of Inspector Erik Winter’s endearing qualities is that everything is personal. He doesn’t deal with things in the abstract. If a murder victim doesn’t have a name then Winter is convinced someone is trying to foil him personally. He turns case developments into personal affronts.
The combined effect over the length of a novel makes Erik Winter an interesting, driven man. It also allows him an almost poetic sense of the world. He identifies, looking at a victim in the morgue – “In here, under the spotlight, death was definitive; the woman died a second time. She still belonged to the world while she was lying out there in the damn ditch.”
Unique for a fictional homicide inspector, Winter does humanize his subjects, hears distant cries from dead lips. It makes the story more immediate and it makes Winter more human, transforms him into the guy next door. “She was dead and the dead have no friends, but he wanted to be her friend right up until she got her name back.”
Edwardson asks the hard questions in this book, the one that particularly struck me being “How immense could loneliness be?” Pretty damn huge when you start factoring in poverty, single moms and old age. Edwardson documents one answer to the question, or rather perhaps a response. A group of seniors set up a free day care centre, providing release for the young single moms and focus and meaning for the seniors. I loved it, a democratic socialist response to a social need.
I loved it. This was a book that charted my own loneliness and spurred me to find ways out of it. A very good read.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.