If someone is called Niklas Natt och Dag (Niklas ‘Night and Day’), is one of the noble families oldest in Sweden, and writes a thriller that historic court detective is up to coherent that, in its plot, in the pútridas waters that sway the Stockholm of the EIGHTEENTH float a corpse without its four limbs or anything that is not removable from his head (eyes, teeth, tongue), not too many differences in the brutality that prevails among the disadvantaged with the governing between the aristocrats and the pendulum mentally to oscillate between the philosophical Jean-Jacques Rousseau —the that lee the main character, the lawyer-detective Winge—, and the disturbing marquis de Sade, whose shadow threatens him and turns him, unwittingly, into a wolf among wolves.
it Is, therefore, an attractive framework psychological the that offers 1793 (Salamander, in Spanish; The llop i the vigilant, the subtitle, in Bow, in Catalan), the first part of a trilogy, which will be translated in about thirty countries and have sold more than 300,000 copies just in Sweden, with the Natt och Dag (Stockholm,1979) won the prize for the best debut of the Academy’s Writers ‘ Police. Almost is the least that the attorney Cecil Winge (to the gates of death by a typhus rampant; cartesian; paradigm of the scientific modern times that are ahead) and his accidental assistant Mickel Cardell (veteran of the war against Russia, a perfect and an arm handed over for nothing to a country insensitive) to seek the identity of the murderer and the murdered. Or that walk to a good journey on the everyday life, from the palaces to the slums, the physically and spiritually embrutecida Stockholm, whose elites fear the echoes of the French Revolution; and thus the reader, a spy from the life in orphanages to brothels of luxury, spending for prisons female or cemeteries, where they accumulate corpses unburied by the thickness of the ice that covers the cemetery.
The battle of Natt och Dag is not in the plot detective but in the heads of the characters and of the society itself. Hence, the interest towards that Winge that eats up between reason and feeling. “It was my way to reflect the duality of the time, that he had one foot in the feudal and the other in the new ideas; the human being has always been debated between those two concepts; perhaps now reigns supreme over the second, and so we are going as a society”, spear. A leave of pessimism that translates into the work in the sense that the man is bad by nature, wink antithetical to the well-known maxim that Rousseau who both reads and cites Winge. “The man has always been a wolf to man; we are cannibals, and the Story reflects this; the Humanity, for me, it is evil”.
No one would say that things have not evolved to see the writer, dressed like a gentleman, briefcase in hand, through the alleys clean of Gamla Stan, the old town of Stockholm where it takes place mostly in the novel, crusade today by poor people and vehicles to refugee after expensive headphones. Well it might be him Winge, at least spiritually: next to a beautiful ring carries a ring of silver, of a width of anomalous, their hair go disheveled, the shaving of the face is imperfect, and their umbrella is about impossible violet tones. In any case, a Sweden formally very different, but still capable of the murder of a politician as Olof Palme (1986) or a more recent case of sexual abuse at the Swedish Academy that grants the Nobel. “Human nature has not changed so much; in Sweden, either: it happens that in the 60’s and 70’s of the last century came to a well-being such that the easiest way was from there to lose more than win, and so it has happened”.
Authors as the mythical marriage of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö or the criminologist Christoffer Carlsson have already written, in key police, this new social misery of the idyllic Sweden. “I’m not a great reader of novels, but they are authors very left-wing that idealized them the lower classes; I have a vision that is more black in the world: those who do not have are not better people; it only happens that, we do not have money, then they have no power; the poor are the same that the people of the middle class or high”. In the book there appears a strange order, that of the Euménides, whose well-heeled members just because they have a right to everything, boasting of the largest depravaciones. “As such never existed, but there were sects like at the time; for ambientarla I thought of Sodom and the Marquis de Sade, while orders of people pudorosa appear in the majority of novels black scandinavian of today”. The validity seems unquestionable: “The major capital cities do not feel they have limitations and crossing all lines of moral and ethical because they know they are untouchable; that is leading to a decline with a society of extreme brutal”. In the novel, a character censure is to criticize them when they are those who keep half of the hospices de Stockholm. The free gift which justifies, and washes consciences. “It is not very far away from what they do today to great wealth: they live in bubbles, moral and physical, and some times values blurs facilitate these visions of the world,” says Natt och Dag, in a yet another eerie parallel between what he narrates in his novel of the Sweden of the EIGHTEENTH and the present.
The greater part of the protagonists of 1793 is on a bye, either physical or spiritual, and many outcomes have as a catalyst a remorse. “When you’re at the end of the road there is an opportunity to redeem himself and all my characters have it; we all know it, and in a christian culture, that we have done something wrong and we feel better if at the end we can fix it.” What seems to be a current attitude? “I’m not religious nor nostalgic, but before the society was much more religious and had a few values that today we have replaced it by a materialism without modesty whatsoever: I had a self-control that is now unthinkable; I like my characters to have that option.”
The novel has many scenes of brutal, verging on an extreme violence, almost free. “I don’t do more than recreate a time; I’ve been very rigorous at all and I didn’t want to stop being in this; what Rousseau vs. Sade? No, here is not so obvious that pulse as in the second part, in 1794 [already appeared in Sweden; and carries written the seven chapters of the third]; here it’s more Sense and sensibility of Jane Austen”, refers to one who is surprised at this reaction from his readers “in these times of tv series so raw”. He curtió from a young age. “Small-I read many accounts of terror, I sought refuge in them in order to overcome my fears: from Poe and Lovecraft to Stephen King… but it was more when I started reading horrible things of truth, as what was Erich Maria Remarque in all quiet on the front”, he recites in the light of the fireplace in one of the underground vaulted Den Gyldene Freden, a tavern in 1722, which remains intact with its wooden floors and stone and candles as iluminacirn, and where Winge and Cardell satisfy his physical appetite.
In the propitious gloom, supports however the elegant writer of his admiration for the Umberto Eco of the name of the rose, but also by Ichi the killer by Hideo Yamamoto, a sleeve is bloody and cruel, but pespuntado, of course, by the regrets of the protagonist. Perhaps the fascination of Natt och Dag by the japanese culture (“their rituals and values fascinate me”, he confesses) is not so far from that feeling by the protocols that it has managed during more than eleven centuries his aristocratic family, of the most ancient in Sweden, with a coat of arms with the famous colors of foundation, yellow and blue and that the writer points out with his umbrella in the Riddarhuset, the Palace of the Nobility, where it looks next to 2.331 emblems more. “We had a great political weight, but there was a member that led to the defeat of the Swedish troops against the danes; a second, the count, had 10 daughters and lost the lineage, and a third one, the only, sanded all the fortune; now I lead a normal life and not, outside of a few episodes with which it enriched the characters, there is nothing in the book with which I redeem or verse regrets about my family; I’m a little bit on each one of the characters,” she confesses. But perhaps even more, though they don’t say, between Winge and the killer, the warden and the wolf.
