Kennedy's Brain

While Mr. Mankell's early works deserve highest praise, his latest offering reads and tastes more like a poor man's Le Carre cross-polienated with a hefty dose of lame conspiracy theory.
Notice to readers: I am a huge fan of Mankell's early crime fiction, thank you very much Sir, but I always disliked your latent 'political activism'.

OK,OK, most of the fans know that the pattern was set early on, once he figured out that Sweden can serve as a convenient background for all sorts of international wheeling and dealing (starting with a plot to assasinate South African leader). Sadly, Kennedy's Brain takes the reader well beyond the realms of writer's fertile imagination.

If things in Africa are as bad as Mr.Mankell would like us to think, than how comes that checking out the statistics at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population - , well, numbers don't really add up. The African population is not being wiped out as author claims in 'K'sB' but is actually expanding faster than on any other continent! Is this perhaps another 'vast conspiracy', so effective that demographics and population numbers from various sources are ALL FAKE? (apologies for the caps lock)

Or could it be that Mr.Mankell is yet another Western European on a guilt trip who likes his Kool Aid shaken, not stirred - 1/2 'White guilt' and 1/2 'PC Thinking'?

At the end of the day, our writer's progressive and compassionate homeland (Sweden) and its 'well-meaning Left Government' commited numerous atrocities against its own Swedish people as recently as 1980's:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Sweden

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dieteman/dieteman33.html

http://www.ncpa.org/pi/internat/pdinter/pdint178.html

"1926. The Swiss Pro Juventute Foundation begins, "in keeping with the theories of eugenics and progress," to take children away from Roma without their consent, to change their names, and to put them into foster homes. This program continues until 1973, and is not brought to light until the 1980s. Switzerland has apologized to the Roma, but adamantly refuses to allow them access to the records which will help them locate the children taken from them."

and so on....

...so I can't but ask myself, is there really a need for any of Mr.Mankell's ordinary Swedes - turn heroes to venture further away from their homeland with its rich history of minority abuse and eugenics experiments???

It's probably much easier to be passionate about the opressed in Africa than to face music at home and write about neighbours down the road whose too shy/or/too extrovert daughter at some point invited scrutiny from the local authorities....

So long Henning, call me once Kurt or his daughter start investigating your country's past.

Gripping, exotic but melodramatic page turner (0/1 people found this helpful)

So, this is a novel about a Swedish archaeologist called Louise Cantor, and her quest to find out why her (adult) son has died. It's apparently suicide, but of course Louise doesn't believe it and sets off on a quest to find out the truth that takes her from Greece to Sweden to Spain to Australia to Mozambique and a few other places besides. Louise's plane-hopping doesn't do much for her state of mind (or her carbon footprint, let's be honest) but it makes for a gripping tale, and one that's a bit ambitious in its scope.
The globetrotting makes the novel seem quite exotic, especially the African sections. Mankell works with a theatre group in Mozambique, so I guess he's qualified to write about the place. He makes it seem dark and dangerous, full of mystery and suspense. But then he does that with the sleepy little town of Ystad in the Wallander novels.
I enjoyed reading this very much, and it's certainly a great page turner. The main character of Louise is pretty well drawn (better done than Linda Wallander in `Before the Frost') as a distraught mother on a mission, so perhaps Mankell is learning how to portray women. Having said that, I found the character of Lucinda, the woman she meets in Mozambique, quite hard to believe. I always have issues with Mankell's dialogue and this novel is no exception - there are some dreadful bits of dialogue. Maybe it's the translator.
The novel as a whole is rather melodramatic too, which could put some readers off. It reminded me of `King Solomon's Mines' sometimes, and `The Island' at other times. If you made a movie of this book, it would probably be quite corny, and I wasn't too sure I bought the stuff about human experiments on Aids sufferers.
Even so, it's a good read, full of atmosphere, with a good, if not entirely believable, story that will keep you turning the pages.

voodoo- politics (0/1 people found this helpful)

Henning Mankell shows along his usual mystery books, an indubitable tropism toward social world problems and politics. You can like that, but I do not. I think excessive suspicion about world conspiracies can fall in a sort of voodoo- politics.
Fiction needs to sound real although it would be a bunch of lies. Mankell is a great voyager, he seems to live between Sweden and Mozambique, and the action happens mainly in this two countries so far one from another in all facets.
The plot is, Louise, a Swedish archeologist, returns to Sweden after a work in Greece and finds dead to Henrik, his young son in his apartment of Stockholm. Police says Henrik suffered AIDS and the death is a suicide, as there are a big dose of somniferous in the corpse.
But Louise don't believe the version of suicide and suspects he has been murdered. With some notes of Henrik and another details found in a PC, Louise goes to Australia, where lives his extravagant, wanderer ex husband, Aron. Aron masters personal computers and he clears some aspects of the life of his son. Henrik seemed to be very interested in the murder of president Kennedy and the disappearance of his brain, but this is mainly as a parable of the conspiracies of Western countries and his industries, over all, pharmaceutical. Louise travels to Mozambique when poverty and spreading of AIDS owing mainly to prostitution seems to have absorbed the entire life and work of his son. Louise learns all these contacting with a prostitute who was a friend of Henrik.
And so, we get to the bottom of the questions the author wants truly to expose. Vivisections and all class of atrocities are related, beginning in the decade of the 1950 under the rule of Belgium in Congo. Mankell dates by then the beginning of infection of the viruses of AIDS owing to experiments with chimpanzees and native people, and tells about a complot to spread AIDS to all Africa. European colonization wasn't a lovely episode, but it's difficult to believe in all these tremendous facts to taste this novel.

Henning Mankell - Kennedy's Brain (23/26 people found this helpful)

When archaeologist Louise Cantor's son, Henrik, is found dead in his bed in Stockholm, she refuses to accept the police's verdict of suicide. Of course, this is a mystery novel, so the reader, based on previous experience of such affairs, feels wise to side with her. Louise gives up her commitments to a dig in Greece, and embarks upon a messy, mother's-grief-fuelled quest to find out the truth. It's a quest that will lead her back to Henrik's enigmatic, almost hermetic father, to Spain, and then to the AIDs-riddled communities of Mozambique, where a mysterious benefactor is funding help efforts. On the way there, she must contend with the puzzle thrown up by Henrik's extensive clippings and investigations into the conspiracy concerning president Kennedy's missing brain.

Kennedy's Brain is a very odd chestnut. Louise's somewhat messy but nobly-motivated questing proves a good metaphor for the whole book, in fact: motivated by righteous anger but executed with a bit of a muddle.

Mankell has always had an eccentric style, and with the Wallander stories and his occasional standalones, he has always plotted so superbly and created such engaging characters that that eccentricity works well with those strengths. Here, though, something's off. The plotting is in fact a bit of a muddle, and the atmosphere doesn't quite work. Louise's intense grief is supposed to arouse, one supposes, empathy and drive, but instead it bogs things down. The constant protestations of grief get tiresome, and rather than create urgency they almost overwhelm to the point of catalepsy. The plot kicks along in starts, somewhat perfunctorily at times, not feeling particularly fleshed out in terms of what has actually happened. Yes, he perfectly creates the sense of some kind of malevolence, and eventually we find out what that is more specifically, but there's little detail. Especially concerning a character's disappearance which seems odd from the very page it happens: thrown in just to give Louise something more to puzzle over but which increasingly seems to go nowhere.

At one point, one character says of another: "he could sometimes be a bit high-flown, but he really meant it", and that also sums up this book very well. Occasionally the prose is high-flown (Mankell is a great one for planting melodramatic thoughts and scripting high-flown dialogue), some of the plotting is a little odd, and overall bits of it feel underdeveloped (while others are crafted in great detail), but when the pen is laid down, you know this was motivated by strong feeling, and has noble motives. Mankell really means this, and is really impassioned when he is able to hit upon the AIDs topic. The scenes at the hospice are among the best in the book. You know - if you didn't already - this is a topic close to Mankell's heart, but that it is so close means that bits of the book feel forced out so he can plot a novel round the issue.

The book has it's strengths: Louise is fascinating, when removed from her sadness, and Mankell's crusading is powerful, as is his evocation of place and atmosphere. But the mystery elements are sketched scantily, and overall it doesn't come together too well as a thriller. It's a noble but flawed book (and the title, which reflects an obsession of Henrik's, is irritatingly irrelevant, and that obsession, annoyingly, only symbolic) though I would say it is worth reading for its strengths, and the fact that it's Mankell.

Henning Mankell

Reader Reviews:

Check Africa's demographics first Mr. Mankell... (1/4 people found this helpful)

Gripping, exotic but melodramatic page turner (0/1 people found this helpful)

voodoo- politics (0/1 people found this helpful)

Henning Mankell - Kennedy's Brain (23/26 people found this helpful)

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