Mari Jungstedt: Unseen

Another excellent author in the vibrant Swedish crime-fiction scene, Mari Jungstedt has written an involving and suspenseful novel based on the island of Gotland, near Stockholm. UNSEEN opens with a description of a dinner party at the house of a young professional couple, Helena and Per, where things get a bit out of hand. The next morning, Helena goes for a walk on the misty beach and is later found murdered, together with her faithful dog.

The subsequent police investigation is headed by Inspector Anders Knutas, a sensitive, middle-aged man who is irritated by the intrusion of the media into the case, who have discovered and want to reveal salacious details. Reminiscent of the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell, Knutas and his close-knit team solidly look into all leads, investigating the dead woman’s friends and family, in the process revealing much about the lifestyles and history of Gotlanders.

A strength of this author is the way she depicts family relationships: the portraits she provides of the dead women’s lives (yes, there are more victims after the first) and Knutas’s warm relationship with his wife, are intimate and insightful.

Two investigations are running in parallel: in one, the police attempt to track down the murderer, as Knutas and his team comes under increasing pressure from local politicians keen not to lose the island’s main industry, its holiday trade; and in the other, TV journalist Johan Berg rushes to fulfil his editor’s demands to fill the news schedules with new titbits about the case. In the process, he learns as much if not more than the police themselves, and an uneasy truce develops between him and Knutas. Eventually, Johan becomes too close to one of the witnesses, as events escalate to a climax.

The author manages to pull off a difficult challenge, in making us understand, if not sympathise with, the villain of the piece. This is one of those books where there are occasional interludes into his thought processes, a device that has become cliched in this type of fiction, but here is used with assurance to gradually reveal more information and to build up to a credible motive. In the end, the police turn out to have been rather slow to have picked up on some leads that in retrospect seem quite obvious, which leads to a nail-biting climax on the tiny northern island of Faro, famous as the home of film director Ingmar Bergman.

Négar Djavadi: Disoriental

In a fertility clinic waiting room in Paris, Kimiâ, a single woman seated between couples, recounts her family history. She promises at the beginning to follow “the natural fits and starts” of memory, and her narrative jumps across a time scale from her grandmother’s birth in a late 19th-century harem at the foot of the Alborz mountains in northern Iran, through Kimiâ’s Tehran childhood, to her present incarnation as a 25-year-old French-Iranian punk fan.

Sexuality is the least of Kimiâ’s problems, as first the Shah’s police and then the mullahs target her parents

Disoriental, Négar Djavadi’s sophisticated debut novel, is brilliantly translated by Tina Kover and teems with fully realised characters. Kimiâ’s immediate relatives – her parents Darius and Sara (both political activists), her big sisters, and uncles numbered one to six – are the most closely observed.

Djavadi’s beguiling tale-telling, cynical and lyrical by turns, extends to an account of Iranian history. Imperialist assaults, coups, revolts and waves of repression take place against the unchanging backdrop of a “phallocratic society”. Before Khomeini and compulsory veiling, there was Shah Reza Pahlavi, the “pauper-turned-king” who “used a special militia to tear the veils from women’s heads”.

Kimiâ (“alchemy”) grows up a tomboy in a country that doesn’t recognise the concept. Nor – though it tolerates transgender people – does official Iran accept the existence of homosexuality. President Ahmadinejad is quoted: “We don’t have this phenomenon.”

But for now sexuality is the least of Kimiâ’s problems, as first the Shah’s police and then the mullahs target her parents. The family escapes to Paris, but there is no happy ending. Kimiâ’s father is broken in exile, avoiding the metro escalator because it’s “for them” (the French). Djavadi treats the immigrant condition with intelligence and compassion, exploring how, in order to integrate into a culture, “you have to disintegrate first”.

It’s also possible to migrate without ever leaving home. The Islamic Revolution proves the point by changing street names, “confusing and blurring landmarks and memories”. As the prose zooms in and out from domestic detail to the global and universal, Kimiâ in the waiting room realises finally that all of us are travellers, exiled from our first home through the uterine canal – “that dark hyphen between the past and the future which, once crossed, closes again and condemns you to wander”.

Spiced with foreshadowings, packed with big issues from Aids to the rise of the far right, and tempered by strategic reticence, this novel compels the reader’s attention as consistently as it entertains.