PIA JUUL — THE MURDER OF HALLAND

*insert joke about vaping* Okay, now that that’s out of the way, here’s what I think of a crime novel from “Denmark’s foremost literary author” (according to the jacket copy). It’s odd and brisk. It’s about the particular way death makes people nuts. 

After the murder of her husband the protagonist feels free to act impulsively, kissing neighbors, walking out of paid speaking gigs, and I like her for this, though most of the people in her life seem to judge her for not mourning… actively? Conventionally? Mourning has turned this person into a weirdo. Or maybe she was always strange — hard to say. The Murder of Halland is not a very long novel and we don’t get all the facts. 

If I have one criticism it’s that this novel engages with crime novels (as a genre and as an idea) in a way that seems effortful. By the end it was clear to me that the ‘case,’ such as it is, will not be solved, and that this was a statement on the part of the author that life itself is a series of unsolved cases, and… you get the gist: it’s a crime novel that treats crime as a catalyst to existential musing in a pretty meta-textual way (our protagonist is also an author). This literary mode has, at some point, grown stale for me.