Olivier Truc's Forty Days Without Shadow came highly recommended, both by the forty or so literary awards that it has garnered, and also by trusted friends. It's a murder mystery — or rather a "police procedural" — and indeed it is a very good "read." It's set in the northern reaches of Scandinavia amidst tensions between the indigenous Lapps, or more properly Sami, and their Swedish and Norwegian oppressors. It's got everything: a brutal murder, a child molester; a budding but blighted romance between a veteran policeman and his beautiful novice partner; a tough wise old "native" who clings to the traditional ways; a search for an old gold mine; stolen Sami artifacts, and enough red herrings to furnish a medium-size Stockholm restaurant. And snow, lots of snow. Snowshoes, snowmobiles, snowstorms, snowdrifts.
And yet I had to discipline myself to keep on with the reading. Something, perhaps age, has blighted my appetite for fiction — not just genre fiction, like this mystery, but all fiction. Let me confess: to read stories, rather than to read history or biology or geology has come to seem frivolous. An indulgent waste of time when I could be learning something substantive.
I looked up some reviews of this novel. Let me quote one opinion: "the background information about the Sami lifestyle will slow down the action and readers may wish that Olivier Truc had left his documentary days behind." Interesting, but I had exactly the opposite reaction. What kept me intrigued and kept me plowing through the snowheaps was precisely the ethnographic and historical detail that the reviewer deplores. I wasn't just being "entertained"; I was learning something!
Five years ago, I reported on this very blague that in my youth I loved to read science fiction and fantasy, but that somewhere along the line, I lost my taste for such flights of imagination. (If anyone is interested, they can find the relevant paragraph here.) I would say that my condition has worsened — my resistance to fantasy has now spread to almost all fiction. Odd that I don't feel the same way about movies: I prefer fiction films, stories, to documentaries.
Darwin carried his Virgil and his Milton to Tierra del Fuego and claimed that the books sustained him throughout his Beagle days. But later, in his autobiography, he revealed that he no longer found any pleasure in poetry. I can't compare myself to Darwin in any way except that we both grew older. Yet I wonder whether an impatience with fiction and a loss of aesthetic sensibility isn't a characteristic of septuagenarians.
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