MARCH 2017 - AudioFile
Sean Barrett’s performance of these 67 essays written by Henning Mankell between his diagnosis with lung cancer and his death faithfully encapsulates the Swedish author’s sense of seriousness and social justice. Mankell ranges across his life, letting us glimpse childhood memories, his satisfaction with running a theater in Mozambique, embarrassment at asking a teenager dying of AIDS if she was afraid of death, and grave concern about the storage of nuclear waste in Finland for 100,000 years. Barrett’s voice and tone expertly incorporate a vague sense of being European and of language translation. His timing and rhythm are so perfect that we can hear the melancholy and joy that shape Mankell’s reflections. Mankell fears being dead for a long time. We, at least, have the large body of work he left behind to enjoy. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 11/14/2016
This final volume from Mankell—the Swedish dramatist, theater director, and creator of the bestselling Kurt Wallander novels (and many other books)—includes 67 short essays written in the last two years of his life; he was diagnosed with lung cancer at age 65 and died in 2015. His intelligent eye focuses on predictable topics such as chemotherapy, but he also reflects on art that moves him (a deeply human interpretation of Géricault’s La Méduse, for example), the environment, and social justice, which is the major theme of his life’s work (he calls the developed world’s refusal to eliminate abject poverty “criminal”). He explains that he wrote about crime “because it illustrates more clearly than anything else the contrasts that form the basis of human life.” Just as morality is a major theme, so is mortality. In the essay that gives the book its title, Mankell writes of a childhood fear of “death by quicksand,” and how his cancer rekindled “that same feeling of terror.” But a few weeks after his diagnosis, he realizes that death need not induce panic or resignation, and he notes near the end of this elegant, unflinching volume, “I live in anticipation of new uplifting experiences.” (Jan.)
From the Publisher
Surely one of the most moving and intriguing farewell notes ever written.... Intensely beautiful in its spirit.” —Alexander McCall Smith, New Statesman
“An extraordinary book.... Profoundly moving.” —The Guardian
“Quicksand defines life not by its ending but by the creative and humanitarian content that filled—and fulfilled—Mankell’s life.... The essays sharpen with resounding poignancy.” —Financial Times
“An extremely moving swansong.... The reader realizes that Mankell has never really been driven by anger but by the tiny, fragile hope that his words and deeds will help in the fight for a fairer world.” —The Independent (London)
“[An] absorbing addition to the work of Sweden’s most internationally famous writer since August Strindberg.... Quicksand, a hybrid of essay and memoir, reflects knowledgeably on art, religion, childhood, and the ‘final insensibility’ that is our dying. Rarely has a writer contemplated the mystery of the end of life with such a wide-ranging curiosity.” —London Evening Standard
“Uplifting and, as a memoir, as unusual a creation as [Mankell’s] Nordic detective, Kurt Wallander.” —GQ (London)
“Elegant, unflinching.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Library Journal
02/15/2017
Swedish writer Mankell, best known for the "Kurt Wallander" mysteries, was diagnosed with cancer in January 2014. Although recovery seemed unlikely, he spent the following two years in chemotherapy. During that time he wrote this book, a reflection on his life from childhood up to shortly before his death in October 2015. Mankell's attention was also tuned toward past civilizations. He connects cave paintings, statues, and other pieces of culture left behind to present-day society as well as his personal life. Then he looks forward, pondering what we will leave behind and what future civilizations will assume about us. At times, Mankell is pessimistic about the future of humanity and afraid that all future civilizations will have to know us by is nuclear waste, but he is never despairing and always appreciative of the life he lived. VERDICT This book is a compelling attempt to leave behind something for future civilizations to stumble upon, to piece together what it meant to be a human in the 21st century. For public libraries; any reader of contemporary literature will find something to delight in here.—Timothy Berge, SUNY Oswego Lib.
MARCH 2017 - AudioFile
Sean Barrett’s performance of these 67 essays written by Henning Mankell between his diagnosis with lung cancer and his death faithfully encapsulates the Swedish author’s sense of seriousness and social justice. Mankell ranges across his life, letting us glimpse childhood memories, his satisfaction with running a theater in Mozambique, embarrassment at asking a teenager dying of AIDS if she was afraid of death, and grave concern about the storage of nuclear waste in Finland for 100,000 years. Barrett’s voice and tone expertly incorporate a vague sense of being European and of language translation. His timing and rhythm are so perfect that we can hear the melancholy and joy that shape Mankell’s reflections. Mankell fears being dead for a long time. We, at least, have the large body of work he left behind to enjoy. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2016-11-01
Diagnosed with the cancer that would take his life in 2015, the creator of the Kurt Wallander mysteries (An Event in Autumn, 2014, etc.) casts an impassioned eye on life and death.Readers looking for either a narrative autobiography or a memoir of the Swedish novelist's last illness will need to adjust their expectations. What Mankell offers instead is a commonplace book in which memories of things he's seen or felt over the past 60 years inspire fiercely philosophical ruminations. Mankell retrospectively decides to date the onset of his fatal illness, which he likens to a pit of quicksand, to a car crash he walked away from a week before he first noticed the pain in his neck that sent him to the doctor. He likens cancer therapists to the fraudulent psychic Uri Geller. He recalls examples of appalling cruelty he saw in Budapest and Maputo. He speculates about the biological foundations for the different reasons men and women get jealous, and he confesses how troubled he is "that I shall be dead for so long." Although Mankell's reflections are deeply personal, readers will learn little about the details of his life because he remains resolutely extroverted, a keen observer of the world whose illness encourages him to take the long view. He describes the future ice ages climate scientists have predicted for 10,000 years, 20,000 years, and 60,000 years from now and repeatedly returns to the dim prospects for the Earth and its people, who have come to depend on the integrity of systems to dispose of nuclear waste that is expected to remain dangerously radioactive for 1,000 centuries. "I have written about crime because it illustrates more clearly than anything else the contrasts that form the basis of human life," writes Mankell. After digesting these piercing intimations of mortality, readers will suspect that some subjects illustrate those contrasts even more clearly.
