Läckberg/Crary/TheFollowing

Today I started reading Camilla Läckberg’s 2003 novel The Ice Princess (originally published as Isprinsessan). http://www.camillalackberg.com/the-ice-princess-2 This novel is a fast read, so I’m going to discuss it in increments of 100 pages. The Ice Princess is set in Fjällbacka, a small town in Southern Sweden (and also Läckberg’s birthplace). Its protagonist is Erica Falck, a writer who has returned to Fjällbacka after her parents’ sudden death to sort through their belongings and decide what to do with their family home. While in Fjällbacka, Alex, Erica’s childhood friend, is found murdered and Erica finds herself becoming more and more involved and engrossed in the search for the killer. You can see why Läckberg is sometimes called the Swedish Agatha Christie. The small-town setting, along with a focus on the intense passions that occur within the most ordinary families are familiar Christie territory, but Läckberg invests much more time in character development than Christie ever did. In particular, we learn a great deal about Erica and what she wants out of life and this aspect of the book (in particular, her growing relationship with Patrik, another childhood friend who is now a police officer) is treated with both sympathy and humor. In this sense, there’s just as much P.D. James in Läckberg as there is Christie, and fans of the Henning Mankell/Stieg Larsson school of Swedish crime fiction might be disappointed by the great emphasis on the domestic and the psychological in this book.

I also finished Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. In this final section, Crary continues his pessimistic account of the relationship between technology and 24/7 culture by concentrating on television and claiming, among other things, that it plays a major role in skyrocketing rates of autism among children. A more promising and interesting part of his argument comes when Crary argues for the continued relevance of the concept of reification, arguing that “there is no evading the extent to which the internet and digital communications have been the engine of the relentless financialization and commodification of more and more regions of individual and social life.” This thread of his argument leads Crary to a valuable reassessment of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, and in particular that book’s emphasis on the importance of “shared goals and projects,” because “what one wants most can never be achieved individually, but only by the common praxis of a group, even if the group or community thus formed is historically impermanent.” As this observation occurs toward the end of the book, it seems that the stage is set for a clarion call, or at least the imagining of the kinds of groups and communities that we should be building. It is underwhelming, albeit logical, when Crary instead returns to the subject of sleep, arguing that “the restorative inertness of sleep counters the deathliness of all the accumulation, financialization, and waste that have devastated anything once held in common.” As accurate as this assessment of sleep may be, it is hard to see it as a productive response to all the social and political ills we group under the name of neoliberalism.

In the fifth and sixth episodes of The Following, the frequent references to the work of Poe start to fall off (thank goodness) and are replaced by greater attention to the development of the plot and the characters. This would be a good thing if the plot and characters were any good, but sadly this is not the case. As the scale and complexity of Joe Carroll’s cult following expands exponentially, for example, it becomes used more and more as a ‘get out of jail free’ card plot-wise. In other words, whenever the plot seems to arrive at a dead-end, or even a pause, simply reveal that another apparently trustworthy individual is a cult member and hey presto! the plot heads off in a ‘promising’ new direction. To make matters worse, James Purefoy as Joe Carroll is becoming more and more unbearable. Rather than charismatic and charming, he instead seems patronizing and boring. I’ll forgive just about anything in a fictional serial killer, except dullness. Cast-wise, just about the only bright spot in the show is Valorie Curry as Emma Hill. She acts circles around everyone else in the show and is the only character close to being an individual rather than a sketch for a character type. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpByR0IxxS8