After the Fire

Starred review from August 21, 2017
On a rocky, remote private island in a Swedish archipelago, 70-year-old Fredrik Welin wakes to a searing light. He stumbles outside, recovering only a raincoat and two left boots on the way, and watches helplessly as his house burns to its foundations. This final novel from Mankell (the Kurt Wallander series), posthumously published in a stunning English translation, questions what happens to a person who has lost everything—and who considers himself too old to rebuild. Fredrik hardly has time to grieve the memories that burned along with the house’s contents; when investigators arrive to inspect the smoking ruins, they discover clear signs of arson. Could it be insurance fraud? Or does the responsibility lie with one of Fredrik’s neighbors, whom he’s known for years and who showed up in their boats to battle the flames? And how will Fredrik’s daughter—pregnant and harboring secrets of her own—react to the loss of her inheritance? Mankell’s understated yet thrilling use of language brings both the rugged scenery and Fredrik’s deep-rooted loneliness to life. It’s a skillfully told, exquisitely structured story filled with sharp insights into human nature and unflinching examinations of the complex relationships to which people bind themselves in order to feel a little bit less alone.

August 15, 2017
Eight years after his barren but settled life was harrowed by a series of once-in-a-lifetime crises (Italian Shoes, 2009), ignominiously retired surgeon Fredrik Welin is beset by an even more traumatic event in this final novel by the creator of beloved police detective Kurt Wallander.Awakening one night to find his house on fire, Welin has just enough time to don two boots before fleeing the inferno. The home built by his grandparents is a dead loss, along with everything inside it; even the pair of boots he grabbed wasn't really a pair. Thinking of Louise, the daughter whose existence he never suspected until she was an adult, he reflects: "Did I want to rebuild the house or should I let Louise inherit the site of a fire?" That pivotal question is complicated by several other developments. Louise is a thief and perhaps a prostitute; she won't tell Welin who fathered her baby; she's arrested on a trip to Paris; and in the meantime, the local police have shown considerable interest in Welin as the leading suspect in what looks more and more like a case of arson. Even the new boots he orders turn out to be the wrong size. Only his growing friendship with journalist Lisa Modin seems to hold out any hope of renewal for Welin's frozen life. Yet here too the path is strewn with difficulties: Lisa is a generation younger than Welin, she has baggage of her own, and it's not at all obvious that she returns his romantic interest. No wonder Welin concludes, "There was no god in my caravan." Yet amid all his ruminations and flashbacks and flirtations with despair, Mankell shows his unlikely hero's indomitable will to survive and, if possible, to make the next chapter of his life an improvement on what's gone before. A bracing look at a twilight year in the life of an old man who, when confronted daily by perfectly good reasons for giving up altogether, doesn't so much rise above as plow stoically through them.

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Starred review from October 15, 2017
Seventy-year-old Fredrik Welin lives a solitary life in his grandparents' house on a remote island off the coast of Sweden. Then disaster strikes. Having lost his surgical license years earlier after a botched operation, he awakens to a raging fire in which he loses everything else, save a mismatched pair of Wellingtons and a buckle from his Italian shoes. When arson is determined to be the cause of the fire, Welin discovers that he is a suspect. As he considers this unjust suspicion and whether to rebuild his house, he is consoled by his burgeoning friendship with reporter Lisa Modin and a renewed relationship with his daughter, Louise, who is pregnant at the age of 40. Two local residents die, and two more houses burn in the same manner as his, as Welin ponders his past and expresses concerns about mortality in this sequel to Italian Shoes (2009). But this novel, the last written by Mankell (who died of cancer in 2015 at the age of 67), also brings resolution, dissipating concerns about death, and a welcome sense of tranquility. One hopes that the author, most revered for his Nordic mysteries but equally adept, as he shows here, at literary fiction, found the same peace he grants his legendary crime-fiction protagonist, Kurt Wallander. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This last novel is an appropriate coda for the opus of Mankell, most renowned for his Wallander mysteries but also known for literary and historical.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)