Fiction, Reviews

‘Some People Deserve to Die,’ by Colin Knight

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I think most readers will find few surprises in Colin Knight’s Some People Deserve to Die. It’s a fairly standard revenge story, but it’s told in a compelling way.

Alan Davies is discovered homeless on the streets of Toronto, strung out on booze, drugs, and guilt. After he dries out in a hospital, he discovers he’s actually fairly wealthy now. What he’ll do next is a no-brainer – he’ll get revenge on the people who ruined his life.

As a boy in a small town, Alan was a nerd, a target of bullies. One day those bullies tricked him into committing an act that left him permanently shamed. It didn’t help that his father had died that same year, and his sister had committed suicide. So he went on the road. His wanderings took him first to the South Pacific paradise of Vanuatu, where he got involved with the local drug trade and learned to be a thug. When that went sour, he fled to the North Atlantic to work on an offshore oil rig. Then he followed his drilling team to Nigeria, where they stepped into a hellish world of crime, corruption and bestial cruelty. That led him to a stint as a mercenary, and finally to a quest for oblivion on the streets of Toronto. Then, at last, to his neat, professional, ruthless revenge project. And a shocking discovery.

The revenge story is a difficult challenge for a Christian reviewer. Forgiveness doesn’t enter into this story, but things don’t work out quite as Alan planned, so forgiveness may be conspicuous by its absence. (Though I wasn’t quite sure how to think about the conclusion.) I knew what was coming pretty much all the way through, but the storytelling kept me fascinated (in spite of some typos).

Moderately recommended, if you have a strong stomach for violence and rough language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Assistant,’ by Kjell Ola Dahl

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It’s not often I finish reading a book with the feeling of, “Glad that’s over.” But that was my response to The Assistant, a stand-alone novel by Kjell Ola Dahl, one of the big guns of Scandinavian Noir.

There are two parallel narrative threads in this book. In 1924, a young man with the non-Norwegian name of Jack Rivers works as a driver for a bootlegger. Though a thrill-seeker and a bit of a rogue, Jack would rather be doing something legal. But there’s a depression on, and he takes what work he can get. Eventually he will be arrested by the incorruptible policeman Ludvig Paaske, who nevertheless takes a liking to him. Jack has a sense of honor and is faithful to his friends, something those friends do not reciprocate.

In 1938, Jack is out of prison, now working as an assistant for Paaske, who has become a private detective. Paaske is approached, in the classic Hard-boiled manner, by a beautiful woman who wants him to follow her husband. She suspects he’s being unfaithful.

Her husband, it turns out, is the bootlegger Jack used to work for, now a successful businessman and politician. And the wife is not being entirely honest. Both Jack and Paaske will have reunions with women they cared about in the past, and each will worry that the other is being manipulated. In addition, Nazi agents are involved.

The Assistant is a moodier and more thoughtful book than the average mystery. I suspect it might be more evocative in the original Norwegian. This translation seemed good to me at first, but seemed to deteriorate as it went along. Sometimes it was ploddingly literal (a vice hard to avoid, as I can say from experience). And sometimes it seemed like a rush job to me, the author having given up on finding the right words. The first time someone made coffee in a “pan,” I thought it was due to their poverty, but eventually I realized the translator must have blanked on the words “pot” and “kettle” all through. And the parliament is referred to as “Stortinget,” which is technically correct but won’t be familiar to many English-language readers.

I need to mention that a Labor Party speech gets fact-checked by Paaske at one point (that’s rare in a Norwegian book), and one character’s Christian piety is  treated with respect.

But I didn’t believe this story. It was operatic – the main characters make great, Quixotic gestures that seem both irrational and out of character. And the two different timelines share so much in location, characters and action that they were hard to keep straight.

Also, the ending just left me floundering.

I can’t really recommend The Assistant.

Music, Uncategorized

Victorious in Victoria

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I thought about taking a picture at the Nordic Music Festival in Victoria, Minn. this past Saturday. But it would have been pretty much like other pictures I’ve posted of the event in the past, made less interesting by the lack of my Viking tent. I’m still driving the loaner car, which isn’t big enough to carry the thing, and the guy who’s hauled my stuff for me to the last couple events wasn’t able to be there. So I showed up with my Viking clothes, my books for sale, a couple weapons, and my magnetic personality only.

And actually it worked out pretty well. There’s something to be said for minimalism, it seems.

The festival wasn’t held last summer, needless to say. Crowds were down this year compared to the past, but those who came had a good time. The weather was beautiful, a little warm but with a pleasant breeze. Everybody who made the trek seemed happy to be there, relieved to get a furlough from lockdown.

And I sold books. Very substantial sales. I’ve always marked this festival as one of those events where books didn’t move, but they moved this year. The main difference was that I was at the table under the canopy with all the other Vikings, rather than enthroned in solitary splendor with my tent, sunshade, and Viking chest.

Maybe I need to find ways to make myself more accessible.

The very thought gives me the willies.

Anyway, it was all a success, for me at least. Packing up was easy, and then I drove the half hour back home. And had a nasty shock.

I couldn’t find my house keys. I’ve never hooked them to the loaner car’s keys, because I’ve always told myself this arrangement wouldn’t last much longer (three months now and counting).

That didn’t mean I couldn’t get into my house. I have a spare key. You don’t get as old as I am, with the short-term memory I’ve got, without learning the uses of redundancy. But there’s an assortment of keys on that ring, and I wasn’t sure exactly what else I’d be losing access to.

It was getting dark by then, so I figured I’d put off searching the car until morning. Maybe the keys were in the car. Maybe they’d fallen into one of my boxes.

But what haunted me through the night was the growing conviction that the most likely scenario was that I’d dropped the keys, either into the grass on our camp site, or in the parking lot while packing my car.

Which would mean driving a half hour either way back to Victoria to hunt for them. Almost assuredly without success. Either they’d be lost in the grass, or somebody would have carried them off.

But in the morning, I checked the car again. And behold, they’d fallen into the crack between the driver’s seat and the console. (One of the disadvantages of wearing a pouch, as the Vikings did – the console forces the pouch to turn 90 degrees, making it easy for stuff to spill out.)

Great relief on my part. But oddly, throughout the day, I had attacks of the sudden conviction that there was something I was supposed to be worrying about. I’d turned on my WORRY switch, and it has no OFF position. You just have to wait for the fuse to burn out.

Music

‘Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee’

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One of the disadvantages of living in this current age of decline, it seems to me, is the shoddy quality of our suffering. Back in the Great Depression, which my parents remembered well, they at least came up with a few amusing songs to cheer them up. My favorite is the one above, “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” written by Irving Berlin for a musical comedy called “Face the Music,” which opened in 1932. It was sung in an automat (self-service restaurant) by a group of former society types, now down on their luck. The topical references should be fairly understandable to anyone who knows a modicum of American history. I refuse to believe we have any readers who won’t get them.

I wanted a nice live performance video to share with you, but couldn’t find one that satisfied my exacting requirements. So this one has a picture of the original record label.

You do know what a record was, don’t you?

Religion

Are We Safer Now Than 20 Years Ago?

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Twenty years ago on September 11, I worked in a cubicle-divided office, starting an uneventful day. One of us, I think my boss, must have checked the news or perhaps got word from family that there had been an attack at the World Trade Center in New York City. I don’t remember that we were aware of the first plane hitting the tower while it was still considered an accident.

We went into the conference room and watched the live broadcast of the burning buildings. I think the second plane hit the tower, but I did not see it. I think I was unable to accept what was happening. Someone said the building would fall or could fall, and I remember saying, “No, that couldn’t happen.” Then it did.

I want to say that the boss sent us all home, but I don’t remember. I don’t remember how the rest of the day went. My children weren’t old enough to know what airplanes or New York City were, and I don’t remember if my wife knew anything about it before I got home.

It’s been 20 years since terrorists attacked New York City with hijacked planes. World News Group’s podcast, The World and Everything in It, has been talking about 9/11 and the Taliban all week. I recommend listening to each one of their 30 minute podcasts. Here are some highlights.

Are we safer now than we were before? With Afghanistan back in the hands of the Taliban, has anything changed? Yes. Many things have changed. Afghanistan is not the same country it was 20 years ago. We’re already seeing resistance to Taliban rule. Though some of our officials repeatedly try failed policies, thankfully they are not in ultimate control.

I think you and I would agree this battle is not primarily man-to-man. It is part of an ongoing spiritual battle. And Christians have never been more or less safe in the hands of the Almighty.

Glory to the Father!
Glory to the Son!
Glory to the Holy Ghost!

As it was in the beginning is now and every shall be, world without end. Amen.

Uncategorized

‘The Most Reluctant Convert’

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I have paid insufficient attention to the upcoming movie, “The Most Reluctant Convert,” scheduled for release on November 3. Sadly, it looks like a limited engagement, but I suspect the DVD will be easily available. If it’s as good as the trailer makes it look, it might climb up beside the original BBC “Shadowlands” as my favorite Lewis movie (an admittedly small field to choose from, especially if you omit the Narnia films. Which I do, pretty much). Max McLean seems very good in the role.

Reviews

Netflix review: ‘The Valhalla Murders’

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I must have enjoyed Netflix’s The Valhalla Murders, which I discussed last night in somewhat acerbic terms. It’s actually pretty good of its kind, though probably not a good choice for our audience here.

This Icelandic production centers on Kata, a Reykjavik police detective, played by Nina Dögg Fillipusdottir. She is, as will surprise nobody, a Plucky Single Mother. However, she does vary from the standard template by being a rather bad mother in important respects. She also has the expected conflicts with her superiors at work, but, less expectedly, her main oppressor is another woman. When a couple of people are found murdered with multiple knife wounds, her superiors don’t think she and her team are up to the challenge. Serial murders are pretty rare in Iceland. So they decide to call in an expert from Norway.

This expert is Arnar, played by Björn Thors. He’s actually a Reykjavik native, but he broke sharply with his family some time back and had no wish to return. He comes in with a bad attitude, and only gradually warms to the rest of the team.

Meanwhile, as further murders occur, a commonality is found – all the victims were involved with a group home for boys, The Valhalla Home, located out in a rural area. Nobody wants to talk about what went on there, either the kids, now grown up, nor the staff. And if anyone shows signs of talking, they tend to turn up dead.

What I liked: Winter in Scandinavia (not least in Iceland) works extremely well for a noir mood on screen, and this production takes good advantage of that. You’ll probably want to put a sweater on while you’re watching. The acting was pretty good, and I’m still not sure whether the English dialogue was spoken or dubbed. If it was dubbed, it was very well done. (If you turn on the subtitles, you may note that at least one character has an entirely different name on the subtitles than is spoken on screen. That’s one reason I suspect the subtitlers worked from an early production script, before certain changes were made.)

But there were plenty of annoyances here for traditionalists like me. One of my standard complaints about today’s entertainment is a new kind of Victorianism. Every story must teach a moral, acceptable to approved contemporary values. That’s why there are so many tropes in shows today – the Plucky Single Mother, the Sensitive Gay Friend, the Wise Muslim Who Forms the Moral Center of the Narrative.

Well, we’ve got the PSM. The sensitive gay isn’t all that friendly, though. And there’s not a Muslim in sight (they’re kind of scarce in Iceland). However, the conservative evangelical church that turns up in the story is (predictably) as legalistic and repressed as the strictest jihadist madrassah.

So, all in all, I found The Valhalla Murders technically well done, but not something I could recommend to our readers. Individuals among you might enjoy it, though. Cautions for language, violence, and a homosexual scene.

Uncategorized

Playing Board Games as a Kid

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I’ve always enjoyed table top games, and my family were not gamers. We played games occasionally, and I think I largely encouraged what we played.

I could be wrong. On vacations, my extended family played Canasta, Spades, and “The Dictionary Game” long before it ever was published as Balderdash. Perhaps my older siblings brought some board games into the house, because we had an old edition of Parcheesi and an art masterpiece game long before I was old enough to show interest in them. In the early years, I was interested in PayDay, a silly, pun-filled game about making it to the end of the month. (I think that’s where I learned of the classic book Running to the Outhouse, by Will E. Makit.)

We played harder games in a gifted program in which I was placed for grades 4-6, games like Avalon Hill’s TUF, a dice game that asked you to make the longest working equation you could from the roll you made. You always had an equals sign and some kind of math symbol with the numbers, maybe eight dice total. It was hard. Other games I remember were Word Power and The Stock Market Game. Avalon Hill made great games back in the day. I wasn’t good at Word Power btw.

One of the project choices in that class was to design a game. I think I worked up two of them, neither entirely successful. One was an adventure. I vaguely recall a board that resembled a Narnian map with a sea serpent in watery sections. There was some kind of Sasquatch and a UFO too. Players could move in any direction on the grid in search of treasure, which was hidden by someone controlling the enemies.

The thing I remember most about this is working with my dad on how to design the game pieces. He cut up a broom handle to make each piece. The rounded tip of the handle was the UFO. Dad made smoothly sanded player pieces in different colors. I don’t remember how we handled the two monsters. I think the other kids liked it. It didn’t totally work as a game, but it was good project.

As a teenager, I wanted to play more complicated games but didn’t have a regular group to do it with. My sister married a guy who played chess with us often and enjoyed large games like Kingmaker, with a four-hour play time that probably begins after you study the rulebook for an hour or so. Diplomacy was another one we started and never finished (six-hour play time?!). I wasn’t good at these games. How could I be without playing a single full game?

I think I did play a single game of Squad Leader. That’s the kind of game my best friend in high school enjoyed. Military tactics was one of his strengths, and this was a complicated game that could be expanded into many more tiers of complication. He destroyed me. And I enjoyed it, I think.

Winning is not the main thing in a game. I want to enjoy the challenge of it, even if I lose, which is certainly a strength, seeing that I have had only marginal success in my life. Enjoying the challenge with some good people makes for a fun evening.

If you can tolerate it, I’ll write more about games in upcoming posts.

Uncategorized

Icelandic ways

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More translation work today, and that’s always good news. I generally work with something playing on the TV in the background (for fear that the full force of my intellect, if applied to the text undiluted, might burn out my computer ). Today I’ve been watching something a friend recommended, an Icelandic mystery series on Netflix. It’s called The Valhalla Murders.

Since I never worked on this project, I can comment freely. I won’t describe it in detail tonight – it’s no formula-breaker. At the center, as has become almost mandatory these days, is a Plucky Single Mother. It ain’t entertainment in the 2020s, unless you’ve got a PSM in there. Also a local boy who moved to Norway because he has Issues, and is not happy to have been ordered home to help the Reykjavik police – who aren’t that happy to have him in the first place. Nor in the second place, because when he shows up he’s Intriguingly Rude to everybody.

But what surprised me was the subtitles. I always turn the subtitles on with streamed movies nowadays, because I’m old and sometimes dialogue gets garbled (don’t tell me I’m going deaf, you whippersnapper).  You don’t have to use subtitles to watch it yourself, mind you, because it seems to have been double-filmed – the actors are speaking English in the English version. (Though some of it looks like it was overdubbed. Not uncommon even in English-language productions.)

But here’s why I’m confused. What I’ve learned through being a script translator is that the people who write subtitles NEVER look at our translated production scripts. Because of this, the subtitles tend to vary quite a bit from what we wrote (translation is more subjective than I care to admit). They usually seem to have been produced through transcription by someone watching the film. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But in this production, the subtitles vary extremely from what’s being said by the actors. It looks very much as if the subtitles were produced by following a production script in English, like the ones I and my co-workers do. But that those scripts weren’t used for filming the English version.

Maybe they do things differently in Iceland.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Woman Who Died a Lot,’ by Jasper Fforde

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Happy Labor Day, folks. Hope you had a good one.

It has been my fate in life to be one of those people who often observe their fellow men enjoying things that they don’t understand at all. Parties. All sports. Reality shows. Cheese. I’ve learned perforce the truth that my disinterest in a thing is a vote neither for nor against it.

I’d heard high praise of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. So when I got a bargain offer on The Woman Who Died a Lot, a recent entry, I figured I’d give it a try.

There were a lot of fun elements in this book. I did laugh fairly often.

And yet, I didn’t fall in love with it.

Perhaps I should have started with an earlier volume.

Thursday Next, as many of you know, I’m sure, lives in an alternate universe which diverged from ours (apparently) some time in the 18th or 19th Centuries. They live under a world government (not a despotism – nice trick, that) and she works as a special agent dealing with literary crimes. She has the ability to “read herself” into another dimension where the books we read, and their characters, are real. The stories abound in literary jokes, absurdities, and paradoxes.

But in this book, Thursday has had her wings clipped. Middle-aged now, she has suffered a leg injury that makes it impossible for her to make the physical moves necessary to change dimensions. Also, her whole department has been abolished since the discovery that time travel is impossible, which entirely undoes all the science they’ve been operating on up to now. This has left her oldest son Friday with the ultimate career frustration – instead of becoming head of the division and a hero, he’s scheduled to commit murder and go to prison. Also, God has announced plans to smite the city of Swindon (which, as far as I can figure out, does London’s job in this universe) for its sins, and Thursday’s genius daughter Tuesday – 16 years old – is obsessively occupied in trying to work out an algorithm to prevent it. And Thursday is finding synthetic clones of herself running around stealing her identity – literally.

These are only a few of the points in the super-complex plot of The Woman Who Died a Lot. To be honest, I found it hard to keep up. I felt insecure as a reader, not sure of the rules (no doubt a consequence of jumping into the series toward the end).

Also, how shall I put it? I have an old guy’s response to religious flippancy. In this universe, Thursday’s brother Joffey has converted the whole world to Theism through logic, establishing one universal church, which everyone joined voluntarily. But God doesn’t seem pleased, and has begun smiting places – His reasons are never entirely explained. Joffey’s church has become something like a collective bargaining organization, with God playing adversary.

Complicating it even more, Joffey is homosexual. I might be tempted to think that that’s what made God mad, but I doubt that’s Fforde’s intention.

Anyway, I did chuckle often reading The Woman Who Died a Lot. But I feel no desire to repeat the experience. Since lots of people like these books, your mileage is likely to vary.