Europeans generally like to read crime mystery novels. I remember that it was the height of summer last July, and my boss was going to take a vacation to the Côte d’Azur. Before leaving, he insisted that I recommend a “bloody and exciting” suspense novel to her so that she could enjoy reading while sunbathing on the beach. The one I recommended to her at the time was The Snowman by Norwegian author Jo Nesbø. Reading a story about a serial murderer in a boundless world of ice and snow in the environment of sunshine, beach, and coconut trees, when the body is extremely hot and unbearable, I feel a chill in my heart, which is very interesting to think about.
In the past two years of reading suspense novels, there are two writers who impressed me deeply. One is Gillian Flynn, who became popular with rocket speed after the work Gone Girl ("Gone Girl") was put on the screen by David Fincher, and the other is that the work "Snowman" will be released in October this year, and he is a legendary Norwegian himself. People Jo Nesbø. Both of them have the ability to simply use words to make people feel hairy, and the gloomy scenes, dark characters, and twists and turns of the plots in their works always make people wonder if the writers themselves are a potential threat to a harmonious society. After all, it is difficult for a happy writer to write a great tragedy, and a writer who can write a murder without any leakage is unlikely to be a teenager who likes to look up at the sky at a forty-five-degree angle.
In the writer's
life, some people live to reflect the mediocrity of most people. This kind of person looks better than you, has a higher IQ than you, has better grades than you, and has a better job than you. The worst thing is that people are much more interesting than you. This type of person is commonly known as a "bird man". Jo Nesbø is a typical example of this bird man.
According to information on Baidu Encyclopedia, Jo Nesbø is the best-selling author of Norwegian history, and each of his works is the No. 1 bestseller in Norway. Five of the top 20 books in the Norwegian library's lending rate list are his works.
The family is well-developed in sports: at the age of seventeen he joined Molde in the Norwegian Football League, and plans to go to England to play for Tottenham and become a professional player. Later, because of the rupture of the ligaments in both knees, he had to give up his football dream.
He has a good brain: when he was serving in the military, he first knew what self-discipline was, so he rose up, reviewed his high school courses by self-study, and then got his high school diploma with top grades, and applied for a major in economics and management at a Norwegian university. After graduating from university, he moved to Oslo to work in the financial industry.
He was an artistic germ: he started writing songs while working in finance, and formed a band called Di Derre with a jazz bassist. Two years later, the band had a recording contract, and their second album sold out in Norway for many years, with concert tickets sold out within hours. So Jo Nesbø became a pop star by surprise, but was working full-time on Norway's largest stock exchange while rushing.
The stories of other people's life are still full of twists and turns, and they are full of wonderful things: When the endless twists and turns began to doubt life, Jo Nesbø decided to take a long vacation for himself, so he flew to Australia with a notebook. It took him 30 hours to fly from Oslo to Sydney, and he used those 30 hours to write the synopsis of his first novel, Batman, and then spent seven weeks upside-down writing the first book of the Harry Hole series. Ben, and officially began his writing career.
In a nutshell, this kind of person needs to be beaten, very badly beaten.
(About the author's life comes from a self-report http://nesbo.de/files/pdf/jo_nesbo_autorenvita.pdf , it may be written by the author himself, German translation, full of satire and self-deprecating, if you are interested in Jo Nesbø, it is worth reading read.)
Genius? luck? Obsessive-compulsive?
If you only look at Jo Nesbø's resume, you will think that this is a genius, talented, can wear underwear, invulnerable, omnipotent, for the altar. But read his self-report carefully, you will find that this person, like us, lives in endless self-doubt and torture all the time. After the success of the first novel "Batman", Jo Nesbø often fell into a state of confusion, always feeling that success came too easily, and his conscience was uneasy. He mentioned several times in his self-report that his previous salary in the financial industry was unreasonably high, and the income after the novel sold well was so high that he could not spend it.
He would read the reviews of his work in the press and remember only the few voices of criticism. In the process of writing the Harry Hole series, he gradually added new narratives, added new characters, new backgrounds, new themes, then waited restlessly for comments, and then looped the entire creative process, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder general. When I was watching The Snowman, I was very impressed by a passage describing the way Harry Hole solved the case, because I felt that it was describing Jo Nesbø's own way of writing to some extent:
Harry did not believe in inspiration, divine insight or telepathy. But he did believe in luck. Not the luck you were born with, but the systematic luck you earned through hard work and spinning yourself such a fine-meshed net that at some point chance would play in your hands.
and Unlike the protagonists of many suspense novels and movies, Harry Hole's case-solving process does not rely on a momentary inspiration, such as divine help and sudden enlightenment, but is often a long and painful torment. He doesn't trust inspiration, he doesn't trust intuition. He believes in luck. But what he believes in is not unearned luck, but the belief that luck is when he has repeated the case thousands of times, traced every clue to the end, tortured himself to the point of exhaustion, and weaved himself into a net without omissions. And the turnaround will eventually have nowhere to escape and crash into his own hands.
While watching this paragraph, I thought of the preparatory process of casting a net before interpreting. Prepare professional vocabulary, supplement background knowledge, study the speaker's accent, speaking style, and do a lot of seemingly endless preparations, just hoping that in just a few hours or even minutes, I can catch you as much as possible something prepared. There are thousands of occupations in the world, and many of the reasons behind them are the same.
What separates the Harry Hole series from many other second-rate detective novels is its contradictory and charming protagonist, Harry Hole. Similar to Jo Nesbø, Harry is also a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder who seems to rely only on talent and instinct, but in fact drives himself to a desperate situation. In every paragraph and chapter of the book, Harry struggled with addictions he couldn't get rid of—drinking and crime-solving addictions. He has nothing to do with the traditional image of a handsome, slick and sleek detective. His image in the book is rough, even brutish. He is 1.92 meters tall and has a huge body. Because of his years of alcoholism and insomnia, his eyes are always congested, his clothes are sloppy, and he smells of alcohol and tobacco. It is often written in the novel that the witnesses do not believe he is a policeman. The first impression of a moving company owner in "The Snowman" is that he is no different from his movers. The Harry Hole in my head has always been something close to Rubeus Hagrid in the Harry Potter movies. Therefore, when the news that the film version of "Snowman" will play Harry Hole by Shark, I always feel that this is a decision based on market considerations - Shark is too handsome, and his temperament is too gentleman and elegant. But on the other hand, this casting really suffocated my curiosity about the effect of the finished product.
One of the inconsistencies in Harry Hole's character is the brutal violence of his appearance and the careful observation and calm thinking of his investigative judgments. Another more fundamental contradiction is reflected in the fact that on the one hand he is the guardian of social order and civic security, and on the other hand, he is an out-and-out marginal personality. He spared no expense to solve the case, but it seemed that it was not out of a sense of mission of moral responsibility, but just to satisfy his almost perverted addiction. What is even more dangerous is that although he is a policeman, he seems to be more connected in spirit to the criminals he is chasing. This kind of moment of confronting one's own dark side, walking on the edge of black and white and constantly striving to lean towards the white side, to me, makes this character more convincing than all the protagonists who were originally white and flawless.
Because I have only seen The Devil's Star, The Snowman and The Police in the Harry Hole series, all three of which are Jo Nesbø's works after adding multi-perspective narratives, so I can't fully analyze his work. writing style. Just from the three books I have read, his suspense novels have several obvious features.
One is the simultaneous advancement of multiple perspectives and multiple clues. When reading the story, readers should pay attention to the time, place and characters marked in each subsection, and infer the significance of each story line in the whole case by themselves. Some paragraphs are not inserted in chronological order, in order to create subversive dramatic effects at the end. Jo Nesbø buries enough threads to make dozens of second-rate detective and mystery novels along the way, which is my favorite aspect of his storytelling skills.
The second is the setting of the smoke bomb. Jo Nesbø will set up a lot of characters that look very suspicious. The police often catch a suspect who has concealed something and declare the case to be solved. However, as long as you look at the progress bar (I read the e-book), you will find that you have just read the book halfway through. It can be guessed that the author is just a false shot.
The third is the explosive look and feel of the inextricable integration into a final clue at the end, the case suddenly becomes clear, and the story suddenly climaxes. Often, this is also the time when the book is the most violent and tense. It doesn't matter if an arm is torn off or a finger is cut off. In general, the Harry Hole series of novels themselves have a strong sense of film, and the sense of conflict and drama is much stronger than that of the Millennium Trilogy series, which is also a best-selling suspense novel in Northern Europe (maybe because the plot is a little dull, Only one Hollywood remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was made in the series). I believe that as long as the screenwriters don’t rush to the streets, the actors are a little more powerful, and the editing is sharper, many of this series can be adapted into highly watchable movies. I hope this Snowman box office reputation will perform well, so that other stories in the series can be put on the big screen in the future.
I checked it, and it seems that the Harry Hole series of novels have not yet been introduced in China, and there is no Chinese translation (here I need to correct it, a few friends in the comments reminded me that several of the series have been translated into Chinese). So after writing so much, it is estimated that no one will have the patience to read the original foreign language. After watching the trailer of The Snowman movie version, it is estimated that it will be very bloody, so the probability of domestic release is not expected. But when there are movie resources on the Internet, you can watch it, and by the way, you can also appreciate the beauty of Mr. Fa Shark and his prestigious European No. 1 waist (if the plot of the original book is faithful, there may be several nude scenes in the movie ha ha ha), Why not do it.
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