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Library | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... Dallas Public Library | LARGE PRINT - NESBØ | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | LP Fic Nesbo, J. 2015 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
From the internationally acclaimed author of the Harry Hole novels--a fast, tight, darkly lyrical stand-alone novel that has at its center the perfectly sympathetic antihero: an Oslo contract killer who draws us into an unexpected meditation on death and love. This is the story of Olav: an extremely talented "fixer" for one of Oslo's most powerful crime bosses. But Olav is also an unusually complicated fixer. He has a capacity for love that is as far-reaching as is his gift for murder. He is our straightforward, calm-in-the-face-of-crisis narrator with a storyteller's hypnotic knack for fantasy. He has an "innate talent for subordination" but running through his veins is a "virus" born of the power over life and death. And while his latest job puts him at the pinnacle of his trade, it may be mutating into his greatest mistake.
Author Notes
Jo Nesbø was born on March 29, 1960 in Molde, Norway. He graduated from the Norwegian School of Economics with a degree in economics and business administration. He worked as a freelance journalist and a stockbroker before he began his writing career. He is the author of The Harry Hole series and The Doctor Proctor series. The 2011 film Headhunters is based on his novel Hodejegerne (The Headhunters). In 2017 he made The New York Times Best Seller List with his title, The Thirst. He is also the main vocalist and songwriter for the Norwegian rock band Di Derre.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
MEET OLAV JOHANSEN, the antihero of Jo Nesbo's latest thriller, "Blood on Snow." Olav is a departure from Nesbo's familiar Harry Hole, the dogged Norwegian police inspector who has selflessly tracked down killers through 10 international best sellers. Olav isn't a good guy; he's a bad guy. Sort of. At the moment he's a contract killer with a big problem, having spectacularly botched a job that leaves his intended victim alive, and his boss's son dead. Not so much a bungler as a man with a vestigial conscience and an unfortunate tendency to jump to conclusions, Olav judges his character as that of "the sort of person who's just looking for someone to submit to." Or someone to dispatch: Watching blood sink into snow, Olav thinks, with a reptilian sang-froid, of "a king's robe, all purple and lined with ermine," and prefers "to prolong the magical moment when I, and I alone, had power over life and death" by, say, slowly "fixing" a man with a stake. Aside from a taste for murder, Olav lacks criminal skills - he begins his story with an accounting of the "four things I can't be used for." This use of the passive voice isn't accidental; it reminds us here, as it does elsewhere, of Olav's weakness. Because Olav can't drive inconspicuously, or explain the suspicion his driving arouses in police officers, he's useless behind the wheel of a getaway car. He gave up robbery when an old man "fell to pieces" after he pointed a shotgun at him, leaving him guilty enough to follow his victim into the hospital to check on his condition - safe enough, as he was wearing a Santa mask when pointing the gun. Drugs are out. Even if users "only have themselves to blame," Olav's "weak, sensitive nature" makes him prey to addiction; he "can't do math either," a problem for a drug peddler or debt collector. And prostitution requires a pimp to physically abuse women, which Olav cannot abide. "Something to do with my mother, maybe, what do I know?" Olav frequently dismisses himself as a man without the knowledge or education his observations betray, protesting too often - four times in the first, short chapter. Widely read, citing from the likes of George Eliot and Victor Hugo, he demonstrates a tendency to philosophize. He's a vivid stylist: "Two shots. White feathers leaped from his brown jacket, dancing in the air like snow." On the matter of blood falling on snow, he explains that "the shape of the crystals and the dryness of the snow ... make the hemoglobin in the blood retain that deep red color." In an attempt to describe the look on his lover's face, he alludes to Darwin's six universal facial expressions. When he speaks of making love: "It's not out of modesty that I choose this romantic, chaste euphemism instead of a more direct, instrumental word." Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that he's talking about sex with his boss's wife. In either case, Olav's diction illustrates a level of sophistication that precludes his remarking, for example, "There was no mistakin' the way his body was shakin'." As written, "mistaking" and "shaking" retain their g's - their correct form. Olav isn't the emblematic hit man, who is, generally speaking, not among those who concern themselves with grammatical stumbles. Educated, identified by a professor as a student with unusual talent, Olav comes from a blue-collar background that has fueled a leap away from his blighted origins into literature. His determination to separate his identity from those of his drinking, brawling parents makes him a man intently focused on syntax and pronunciation: the last person to drop a g. But, as read by Patti Smith, the audiobook of "Blood on Snow" invisibly revises the portrait of Olav that Nesbo renders on the page. This particular pairing of writer and reader makes it clear that the casting and direction of an audiobook potentially transform the text. Smith's gravelly, androgynous voice and flat tone are immediately recognizable. She's a practiced narrator, having provided the voice-over for a documentary about Robert Mapplethorpe. Her tone and pace are consistent; she calibrates emotion deftly, conveying authorial intent. But is her voice, rather than that of an anonymous reader, the right one for Nesbo's book? Pronunciation changes words, and in this case the diction slips are not only discordant; when they occur, they both halt the reader and erode his or her trust in the narrator. Olav is not typical; to listen to him speak like a hard-boiled hit man is to experience a flattened version of Nesbo's three-dimensional protagonist. It pushes his novel toward genre noir. What would it be like to hear Tom Waits read "To the Lighthouse"? What if we could summon Janis Joplin back from the dead to contribute her voice to "Eat, Pray, Love"? The endless possibilities of mismatches - Peter Lorre lulling the children to sleep with "Goodnight Moon"? - are amusing. They also underscore how words spoken aloud can transform and potentially undermine what a writer puts on the page. "Blood on Snow" ends with a grace that Smith's pronunciation doesn't compromise. Unfortunately, from a few sentences back, "yella" for "yellow" and "pleece" for "police" still echo. KATHRYN HARRISON'S most recent book is "Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured."