Paddle At Your Own Risk

In a recent “New Yorker” analysis critic Peter Segal concludes, “The crime tale has become to Scandinavia what the sonnet was to Elizabethan England: its trademark form.” I’m not sure I’m ready to dub Vidar Sundstol William Shakespeare’s heir, but in “The Land of Dreams”, he serves up a thoughtful thriller. Winner of the Riverton Prize for best Norwegian crime novel of 2008, “Dreams” is now in English, published by University of Minnesota Press. As the story opens, local conservation officer Lance Hansen angles his state issue pick-up truck into what he expects to be another uneventful day along the shores of Lake Superior on Minnesota’s northeast coast in Cook County. In fact, when he meets a new colleague, Hansen tells him he’s lately been all about the usual. “’Brawls and boozing at a couple campgrounds,’” is the best he can do, though he believes “his job was far more preferable to walking a beat in some place like Duluth or Minneapolis.” But when an illegal tent pops up near the mouth of the Cross River, Lance investigates. Only five pages in, and the simple tent check reveals the brutal murder of a visiting Norwegian canoeist, upending the sleepy tourist community in the heat of the summer season. Because the murder took place on federal land, and the victim is Scandinavian, the FBI weighs in, inviting celebrated Norwegian homicide detective Eirik Nyland to assist. Nyland’s detached expertise serves a perceptible counterpoint to Lance’s local leeriness after his logger brother Andy pops up repeatedly in the investigation. “Until he turned thirty-seven, Lance Hansen was more interested in the past than the future,” we learn, as the story runs deeper than Lance, “’our local genealogist,’” when he chases not one mystery but two. Roots running generations deep anchor Hansen family lore to Thormond Olson. Emigrating from the old country at the end of the 19th century, Olson, Lance’s great, great grandfather, trudged many a snowy mile, surviving a shocking cold before washing up in Cook County. Thormond’s legend, however, veers uncomfortably close to the disappearance of Swamper Caribou, a local Ojibwe trapper swallowed by the vast wilderness. And though Lance cannot separate the two mysteries, current and former, he wants to run quickly from what might scar him and his. In his “New Yorker” piece, Segal also explains how in Scandinavia, “The crime novel (is) an effective vehicle for the expression of fears and resentment.” Sundstol goes further, using his novel to render social commentary, albeit made easier because he’s focusing on American culture here, not his own. Of the general disinterest surrounding Swamper Caribou’s disappearance, readers learn, “A missing Indian was simply not something that required attention…there was nothing to be done about it.” This is because, “Many white Americans respect the Indian cultures, but it’s a form of respect that involves no…risk.” Some of the writing here comes off as wooden, though largely in dialogue, underscoring the challenges of translating regional idioms. The supporting characters, however, including the doughy Sheriff Eggum and Lance’s peripatetic brother, ring believably enough. Vidar Sundstol might not be Shakespeare, but in “The Land of Dreams,” the first installment in his “Minnesota” trilogy, he demonstrates why Scandinavian storytellers continue to captivate readers.