Sweden vs. Norway: Scandinavian Crime Smackdown!

Date: 2010.03.20 | Category: Books, Movies, Sweden | Tags:

It’s been a Scandinavian weekend so far. Yesterday, my friend Janet Rudolph hosted a mystery salon in her home for Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø. I had been looking forward to the event for weeks, partly because it gave me an excuse to go to Nordic House and stock up on Norwegian gjetost (goat’s milk cheese), crispbread and cookies. I had tried to undersell the gjetost to my friends, because to be honest, it’s a bit of an acquired taste — even San Francisco Chronicle cheese columnist Janet Fletcher doesn’t care for it, calling it “too sweet, fudgy and one-dimensional.”

I did get a chuckle out of Fletcher’s quote from a Whole Foods cheesemonger who told her that “her Norwegian customers laugh at the packaged half-pound cubes of Gjetost she sells. Norwegians, they tell her, eat way too much Gjetost to buy it a half-pound at a time.” (Those customers should really make the trip to Nordic House, which sells the cheese in five and a half pound blocks. I bought a 17-ounce cube, figuring I could easily consume the leftovers.) When Joe and I were in Bergen a few years ago, our hotel had a fabulous breakfast buffet each morning, featuring the largest block of gjetost I’d ever seen.

Happily, however, lots of people raved about the cheese, even asking where it was available. The Ski Queen brand (a goat’s milk/cow’s milk combo) is actually fairly easy to find — I’ve even seen it at gourmet groceries like Andronico’s — but ekte gjetost (made only from goats’ milk), which is what I bought, is probably only available at specialty stores like Nordic House. Perhaps it’s because I’m a Swede, but the two taste pretty much the same to me. I just didn’t want to risk embarrassing myself in front of the Norwegian author with an inferior product.

I’m not sure if Nesbø ate any of the cheese — I did see him polishing off a bowl of fruit salad — but he seemed pretty impressed that it was there. I can’t yet vouch for any of Nesbø’s books, as I’m only about 100 pages into Nemesis, but I can definitely state that he is an absolutely fascinating guy who kept the audience rapt for about 90 minutes. If he hadn’t had another signing to go to, we could probably have kept firing questions at him for another hour.

Nesbø, who turns 50 this month but looks a lot younger (one of my friends guessed he was in his 30s), was a stockbroker/rock star before he started writing mysteries. His band, Di Derre, was so successful that they had a major label deal and played gigs all over Norway, but Nesbø had promised his mom that he wouldn’t quit his day job, so he would rush to the airport after the market closed and fly to the gig, then fly back to Oslo in time for the opening bell at 9 AM. Needless to say, he burned out pretty quickly and took a leave of absence from both the band and his job. Nesbø developed his protagonist, police detective Harry Hole, on the plane while flying from Norway to Australia. He didn’t have any great expectations for his manuscript, but it was published (under the title Flaggermusmannen, or The Bat Man) — and won the prestigious Glass Key Award for the best Scandinavian crime novel of the year. He is in America promoting The Devil’s Star, his fifth Harry Hole novel and the third to be published in the U.S.

One person asked Nesbø to talk a little bit about Norway and Norwegians. He said that the Swedes are very well organized and like consensus, whereas Norwegians love to argue. If it’s late at night and a Stockholmer is walking home from work and comes to a crosswalk, he will stop if the light is red rather than cross the street, even if there are no cars in sight. A Norwegian, on the other hand, will go ahead and cross. Nesbø has worked in both Oslo and Stockholm, so he’s probably right about that.

Today, we went to see the film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, or, as I prefer to think of it because the original title is very accurate, Men Who Hate Women. The book was pretty brutal, and I was really dreading seeing one particular scene involving the heroine, Lisbeth Salander — the film is not rated, probably because it would have gotten an NC-17 if it had been submitted to the MPAA board — and indeed, it’s pretty horrifying. However, I don’t think the violence in the movie is gratuitous. I mean, a central theme of the book is the way some men mistreat women, and there’s no point in sugarcoating that. But anyone who had trouble with the book’s violent scenes is probably not going to want to see them acted out onscreen.

The main reason to see the film is the same as the main reason to read the book, which you might recall I was not wild about — Lisbeth is a kick-ass character, and the actress who plays her, Noomi Rapace, does an amazing job of bringing her to life. She is completely believable as the troubled but brilliant computer hacker who helps solve a 40-year-old crime. The far less compelling hero, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, is played by the popular Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist, whom I’ve seen in a whole bunch of films, including “Together” and “As It Is In Heaven.” One of the best things about the movie adaptation of Girl is that it makes Blomkvist less of a ladies’ man — in the book, he is for some reason completely irresistible to women, but the film wisely excises most of his romantic escapades to focus on plot.

The movie is two and a half hours long, but considering that the book weighs in at 600 pages, that’s pretty darn short. It manages to be both incredibly faithful to the source material while trimming a lot of the more convoluted plot elements and condensing Mikael and Lisbeth’s work solving the mystery. It’s fairly suspenseful, considering how much of the book consisted of two people doing research; there are lots of scenes showing the pair looking through old photographs and searching computer databases, but director Niels Arden Oplev always keeps things moving along, and throws in some lovely scenery of the Swedish countryside in winter.

If you haven’t yet gotten around to reading Stieg Larsson’s book, I’d highly recommend seeing the film instead, because it’ll save you a lot of time and everything important is in there. Since I haven’t read volumes two or three, I think I’ll just wait for the movies to come out (they’re due in the U.S. this summer). I’m sure there will be an inevitable U.S. remake, but it’s doubtful that the American filmmakers will be as true to Larsson’s vision as his fellow Swedes have been.