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| Review and interviews for Chronicler of
the Winds |
| Posted 18 April 2006 |
 A
good review and two interviews with Henning Mankell have followed
the publication of Chronicler of the Winds and
his recent public appearance
in London.First off, the Independent features an interview
with Mankell titled
Chronicle of a death foretold. Here's a snippet:
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This is a novel from his "other
life", in Africa. In 1987, the 39-year-old Mankell, who
had already written and directed plays in Sweden but had
spent much time in Guinea-Bissau and Zambia, was invited
to run the Teatro Avenida in Maputo, Mozambique. This was,
and remains, the city's only professional theatre, and he's
still involved with it. Street children continuously surrounded
the theatre, and they made a tremendous impression on him.
He tells me that "I used to see a boy of seven years old,
together with his 14-old brother, whom he was taking care
of. And once when I was talking to him, I had the strange
feeling that I was with someone not seven but 70. Normally
street children are shown in terms of the tragedy of their
lives - which is true - but there's also another dimension:
their wisdom, dignity and enormous capacity for survival.
"One of the reasons that the street children suffer so
much is that they're never allowed to be children," he explains.
"They have to grow up so quickly, so by the time they're
ten years old they have experienced so many things that,
in their senses, they are really old. I think it's frightening,
horrifying to look a street child in the eyes, and you can
see, my God, this child is bitter!"
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The
full interview is available at the Independent Online web site.
Next there's a
another interview with Mankell from Andrew Billen for The Times.
It focuses on Chronicler of the Winds as well as Mankell's
childhood and the Wallander series:
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The urchins in Chronicler are
so individually realised that I ask if he built relationships
with street children. "There was a group of, I think, seven
or eight street children that were sort of working very
close to where I lived.
"Out of these seven children, four are now dead by various
reasons: malaria, diarrhoea, one was killed in a car accident.
They'd used a lot of drugs so they lived short and hard
lives. And it took, I think, over a year before they started
to tell me the truth. Before they just told me lies about
what they thought I wanted to hear so I would give them
money." |
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Visit the Times Online website for the full two-page interview,
titled
Blowing hot and cold.
The Guardian has
a review of Chronicler of the Winds from Joanna Kavenna:
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Africa is the spectre haunting
Scandinavia. The Scandinavian countries, Norway particularly,
are active as mediators and generous donors to international
development schemes, yet the problems of Africa defy their
most benevolent enterprises. For writers such as Per Petterson,
Jan Kjerstad and Henning Mankell, Africa is the antithesis
of Scandinavian ease and affluence, a question demanding
an answer. Petterson has described the continent as a place
where one is purged of illusions. |
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Continue on to the Guardian web site to read more of
Slaughter of the innocent.
Finally, the 1998 film made from the Chronicler of the Winds
is
available on DVD in Sweden with the original Portuguese dialog
and both Swedish and English subtitles. Several reviews of this
film are listed on our
Chronicler
of the Winds page.
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