Book Review

By Derryll White

Fossum, Karin (2001). Calling Out for You.

Karin Fossum is careful to capture the essence of Norwegian men – quiet, a little reserved, self-confident. It strikes me she might be talking about Canadians.

Fossum is a patient writer. She never rushes the story, choosing to give the reader a strong background image, then inserting jarring action into that quiet place. She does it intelligently and intuitively. The reader always has a psychological profile registered before the action demands choices. She has pulled me into each of her novels that I have read. Fossum does not permit the reader to stand in the margins of the story.

The police unpack a suitcase, a very common act. There are no real surprises but Karin Fossum has the reader spellbound, forgetting to breathe. The whole novel is like that, holding rural Norwegian people up to the uncomfortable light of a brutal murder. There is much here about the Norwegian character, from an author obviously proud of her nationality.

The other factor that makes Karin Fossum so compelling is that she never backs away from the big questions. What is love? What is God? What does it mean to be a member of a community? She never simply writes a mystery/suspense story. Somehow the whole world is also included. We all love, we all cry, we all die – and here Karin Fossum pays honest witness to all that.

****

Excerpts from the novel:

KONRAD SEJER – There was never anything hasty or rash about him. Similarly he always thought before he spoke. Young people who did not know him made the mistake of thinking he was dim. Others saw the calm personality and sensed a man who rarely did things he regretted and even more rarely made a mistake.

LOVE – He felt weighed down by guilt and had to sit there for a while to recover. Then he drove slowly home. Whose interest am I CONSIDERING IF I ASK FOR THE OPERATION, HE WONDERED, Kollberg’s or mine? It’s acceptable, isn’t it, to keep alive those you are fond of. Am I expected to ignore that and treat him strictly as the animal he in fact is? Do what’s best for him and not for me? Still, he felt loved by this scruffy animal. Although animals can’t love. He had assigned these feelings to the dog.

LIFE – She would tuck him in every night. The moments follow each other and make up a life. Perhaps they had been mostly good ones. Still, you could end up with this one thing, evil. Life is more than thoughts and dreams. Life is the body, muscles and a pulse.

– 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.

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