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Der Chinese (2008)

by Henning Mankell(Favorite Author)

3.44 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

3552054367 (ISBN13: 9783552054363)

languge

English

genre

Mystery & Thriller

publisher

Zsolnay und Deuticke

review 1: As someone who loves to read foreign fiction, Scandinavian becoming one of my favorites, and someone who has a slight obsession with everything Asian, it's no surprise that I wanted to read this book. I'd heard great things about Henning Mankell's work which also led to this purchase.The Man From Beijing started off with a wonderful plot. Nineteen people and their pets are brutally murdered in a small town in Sweden with no trace of who did it or why. The only link is that all the people were related. Then it takes a turn. Birgitta Roslin, a judge in another Swedish town, gets mixed up in the story when she realizes that one of the couples murdered were her mother's foster parents. From there she throws herself into the middle of the investigation. So far, not too bad.That... more's when the book decides to tell the reader a back story that leads us to who committed this horrible crime. Yes, we are flat out told who committed the murders and why over the next few chapters. What?It gets worse from there in my opinion. We are then thrown into China and a lesson on its political system and what the "new" China is going to do and needs to do to have a successful future. At this point, I started to feel as though Mankell wasn't sure what book he really wanted to write so he wrote a few different book ideas into one. Again, Birgitta Roslin comes into the picture and we meet new characters that seem to want to give out too much information that I'm pretty sure would be illegal or just plain wrong to do and some that know way to much about Birgitta without us ever really finding out why.I hate to give this book two stars because it's well written and engaging if not that well put together. I also don't think it deserves three stars for the same reason. I think I would've really enjoyed the book about the murders and would probably enjoyed the book about bad guy Ya Ru and the upheaval in China just not together in one book. As a side note, it also bothered me that almost every time Mankell mentions a characters name he puts the full name. Birgitta Roslin is referred to as such almost every time her name is written. This book has not put me off reading Mankell's other work. I'm actually looking forward to reading his Kurt Wallander mysteries. Hopefully they don't give too much away too soon.
review 2: I definitely prefer the Wallander books to this stand-alone mystery. The plot has some exciting potential--for instance, the starting scenario is terrific and seemed very promising. But the fact that the narrative kept cutting from one person to another, and each character seemed to have somewhat puzzling motives for a lot of their behavior put me off very quickly. Why did Roslin not share more with the police and why weren't the police more interested in what she had to say? The police are vividly introduced at the beginning of the book and then pretty much disappear from the narrative. (Spoiler alert) Why was Ya Ru so motivated to kill all those people, just because his ancestor suffered? This needed to be explained more. What about the dead boy? What role did he even play in the whole plot? Indeed, the whole massacre almost disappears from the plot about half-way through the book, which is too bad, since that was the center of the mystery.The political narrative underlying the book also seemed under-developed and rather incredulous. Mankell seems to have a nostalgia for the old China under Mao before Deng's opening. How many Chinese really feel that way, I wonder? Hong Qui's longing for the old days start to sound like a conversation old men would have at a tea house, where they wonder to each other, "What's become of the world"? It gets tedious, to say the least. I still enjoyed reading the book--I like Mankell's style of writing and his ability to connect local politics to larger geopolitical issues. But he does this better in some of his other books. less

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