The Summer of Kim Novak
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It’s going to be a rough summer
Sweden in the ’60s. Erik and his friend Edmund spend their vacation by a forest lake daydreaming about Ewa, a young substitute teacher with an uncanny resemblance to the actress Kim Novak. The boys are having the time of their lives until a shocking discovery disrupts their world. Twenty-five years later, Erik comes across a newspaper article about unsolved crimes and is overwhelmed by memories and questions from that summer of his youth. What actually happened back then? The Summer of Kim Novak has all the tension and mystery of Nesser’s worldfamous thrillers, combined with a coming-of-age tale of remarkable psychological precision.
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Praise for Håkan Nesser
“Nesser has a penetrating eye for the skull beneath the skin.”
New York Times
“A deft anatomist of character.”
O, The Oprah Magazine
“Nesser is one of the best of the Nordic Noir writers, unafraid of moral ambiguity and excellent at building a brooding atmosphere.”
The Guardian
“One of the foremost Swedish crime authors.”
The Times
“Håkan Nesser brings a light touch to tales of appalling crime.”
Daily Telegraph
“Not only a brilliant thriller, but also a sensitive and atmospheric portrayal of a coming-of-age adventure.”
Frankfurter Neue Presse
“Not all Scandinavian crime fiction is gory and gloomy; it can also be lyrical and delicate, soaked in sunshine and surrounded by beautiful welcoming nature, yet with a touch of suspense gently simmering underneath the idyllic surface. Especially when it’s written by Håkan Nesser, one of the Swedish masters of Nordic Noir.”
Crime Review
“The Summer of Kim Novak is a haunting and evocative novel, beautifully written to draw you into another place and time—a true coming-of-age tale with added mystery.”
Liz Loves Books
“Nesser captures the awkwardness of adolescence beautifully.”
A Life in Books
“Swedish kids have it good: this beautiful book is in their curriculum!”
Brigitte
“Nesser writes very emphatically, very clearly, and even wittily. A first-class thriller.”
Frankfurter Rundschau
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HÅKAN NESSER worked as a secondary school teacher in Uppsala before becoming a writer full-time. One of Sweden’s most beloved authors, his crime novels have been extremely successful in both his home country and internationally, and have resulted in several films. Nesser was the first author to be awarded the prize for Best Swedish Crime Novel three times, and is the only writer ever to win the Danish Palle Rosenkrantz Prize twice. He was also awarded the European Crime Fiction Star Award in 2010. Nesser’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have sold over twenty million copies worldwide.
SASKIA VOGEL was born and raised in Los Angeles and now lives in its sister city, Berlin, where she works as a writer and Swedish-to-English literary translator. Her translations include All Monsters Must Die: An Excursion to North Korea by Magnus Bärtås and Fredrik Ekman, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? by Katrine Marҫal, and works of fiction by Rut Hillarp and Lina Wolff, among others. She has recently published her first novel.
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AUTHOR
“Around 1962 I concluded that Kim Novak was TPW. The Perfect Woman. I was around twelve at the time and also came to the conclusion that love was not an easy thing to digest. Especially when the age and geographical distance issue was considered. I was a boy in Kumla, an insignificant small town in the middle of Sweden, and Ms. Novak was a mature woman, God knows where. Hollywood, most likely.
Then a gruesome murder took place, in the vicinity of that insignificant small town on the borders of nowhere. It had no connection to Kim Novak whatsoever, except in the mind of the young boy who was me. I had nightmares as a result. The gruesome murderer was out to kill TPW, I was a detective out to save her. It recurred, that dream,over a year or so, and was then replaced by other dreams.
One night thirty-five years later, however, it returned. The murderer, Kim Novak, myself; same dream, same situation. By then I was a full-time writer. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. You have to write what you have to write.”
TRANSLATOR
“One of the pleasures of translating this book was working with dialect and voice. I enjoyed tracing threads of migration and culture between Sweden and the US, and finding a vernacular that felt true to the feeling of rural mid-twentieth-century Sweden that Nesser evokes. My favorite parts of the book are where Nesser lets us spend time with Edmund and Erik at play—their adventures on the lake, their word games, the way their friendship grows, and, once they’ve built trust and intimacy, what can go unsaid between them and what that silence can hold.”
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Håkan Nesser
The Summer of Kim Novak
Translated from the Swedish
by Saskia Vogel
WORLD EDITIONS
New York, London, Amsterdam
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Published in the USA in 2020 by World Editions LLC, New York
Published in the UK in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London
World Editions
New York/London/Amsterdam
Copyright © Håkan Nesser, 1998
English translation copyright © Saskia Vogel, 2018
Cover image © Herr Carlsson/Hollandse Hoogte
Author’s portrait © Caroline Andersson
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed therein are those of the characters and should not be confused with those of the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available
ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-019-1
ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-061-0
First published as Kim Novak badade aldrig i Genesarets sjö by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, Sweden 1998.
Published in the English language by arrangement with Bonnier Rights, Stockholm, Sweden.
The cost of this translation was defrayed by a subsidy from the Swedish Arts Council, gratefully acknowledged
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Book Club Discussion Guides are available on our website.
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In memory of Gunnar
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I
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1
I’m going to tell you about a tragic and terrible event that marked my life—let’s call it “the Incident.” That fateful event is the reason I remember the summer of 1962 more clearly than any other summer of my youth. It has cast a dark shadow over so much. Me and Edmund. My poor parents, my brother … that entire chapter of my life. My memories of that town out on the plain—the people, our experiences, and the particulars of our lives—would have been lost to the well of time had it not been for that grisly act. The Incident. But of course, there is more to this story.
Where to begin? I’ve wrestled with this question, weighed up
my options, gone back and forth. Eventually I got tired of following the loose threads of the many possible beginnings and decided to start this story on an average weekday, at home in our kitchen on Idrottsgatan. Just my father and me, one balmy evening in May 1962. There you have it.
“There are no two ways about it, we’re looking at a rough summer,” my father said.
He swilled the burnt gravy into the sink and coughed. His back was hunched. He wasn’t one for gloom and doom, so I knew that this was serious.
“I’m stuffed,” I lied, and rolled the undercooked potatoes to the meat side of the plate to make it look as though I’d at least eaten half. He came over to the kitchen table and stared at my leftovers. Sadness flickered across his face. There was no hiding things from Dad, but still he took the plate and scraped the remains into the bucket under the sink without comment.
“Like I said, a rough summer,” he repeated, his crooked back turned toward me.
“It is what it is,” I replied. Those words were his cure-all, and my way of showing him that I wanted to be supportive. That we were in this together and that I had in fact picked up a thing or two over the years.
“Truer words were never spoken,” he said. “Man proposes but God disposes.”
“You bet,” I replied.
Because it was a mild May evening, I went to Benny’s after dinner. Benny was in the bathroom, as usual, so I ended up visiting with his melancholic mom in the kitchen.
“How’s your mother?” she asked.
“We’re looking at a rough summer,” I said.
She nodded and took her handkerchief from her apron pocket and blew her nose. Benny’s mom suffered from allergies throughout the summer. They said it was hay fever. Looking back, she seemed to have “hay fever” all year round.
“That’s what my dad said,” I added.
“There you have it,” she said. “Only time will tell.”
It was around then that I’d started noticing how adults spoke. It wasn’t just my dad. Using this kind of language was a way of showing that you weren’t wet behind the ears anymore. Since my mother had gotten so sick she’d landed in hospital, I’d been taking note of the most important expressions and using them accordingly.
It is what it is.
Same old, same old.
It could’ve been worse.
Life’s a mystery.
Or even “Keep your head in the clouds, and your feet on the ground,” as Cross-Eyed Karlesson at the corner market remarked a hundred times a day.
Or, as Mrs. Barkman said: “Only time will tell.”
Benny was also a Barkman. Benny Jesias Conny Barkman. A guy might think this was a funny set of names, but I never heard him complain.
“We find many names for those we love,” his mom would say, with a grin that exposed gums the color of liverwurst.
And then Benny would tell her to “can it.”
Even though I had one foot in the adult world, I couldn’t help but wonder why people didn’t just keep quiet when they had nothing to say. Like Mrs. Barkman—and Cross-Eyed Karlesson. Sometimes when it was busy in the shop, the man didn’t stop to breathe when talking to his customers, and truth be told, the sound of it was awful.
When she’d taken the handkerchief from her nose, Mrs. Barkman asked, “How’s she doing?”
“Same old, same old,” I said, and shrugged. “Not so good, I reckon.”
Mrs. Barkman wrung her hands in her lap and her eyes filled with tears, but it was probably just the hay fever. She was a big woman who always wore floral dresses, and my father said she was a touch simple. I had no idea what he meant by that and I didn’t really care to find out either. I wanted to talk to Benny, not his weepy-eyed mom.
“He takes a lot of dumps,” I said, in an attempt to seem grown-up and to keep the conversation going.
“He has a nervous stomach,” she said. “He gets it from his dad.”
A nervous stomach? It was the stupidest thing I’d heard that day. Stomachs couldn’t be nervous, could they? I chalked it up to her being simple and left it at that.
“Is she still in hospital?”
I nodded. There was no point in talking to her anymore.
“Have you been to visit her?”
I nodded again. Of course I had. What kind of person did she think I was? It had been a week since my last visit, but, you know, it was what it was. The important thing was that my dad was at the hospital almost every day. Even someone like Mrs. Barkman should know this about us.
“You know what they say,” she said. “We all have our crosses to bear.”
She sighed and blew her nose. The toilet flushed and Benny came running out.
“Hi, Erik,” he said. “It’s like a horse took a dump in there. Let’s get out of here and raise hell.”
“Benny,” his mum said wanly. “Language.”
“Oh crap. Right,” said Benny.
Nobody swore as much as Benny did. Not on our street. Not in our school. Probably not even in the whole town. When we were in third grade, or maybe fourth, a finicky teacher with an underbite arrived at school. All the way from Gothenburg. They said she had a natural gift for teaching, and her main subject was Religious Education. After hearing Benny curse a blue streak for a few days, she decided to sort him out. She was given permission by the headmaster, Mr. Stigman, and our class teacher, Mr. Wermelin, to work on Benny’s speech twice a week. I think they started in September and carried on throughout the fall. Around Christmas, Benny developed a stutter so severe no one could understand him. Come spring, the teacher from Gothenburg was fired, Benny started swearing again, and by summer vacation he was back to his old self.
On the May evening my father said we were looking at a rough summer, Benny and I went out to sit inside the cement pipe. At least that’s what we did to begin with. The cement pipe was a point of departure for whatever the evening had in store. It lay in a dry ditch fifty meters into the forest, and God knows how it ended up there. It was about one and a half meters in diameter, and just as deep. Because it was tilted on its side, it made a good hideout if you wanted to be left alone. Or needed shelter from the rain. Or were hatching plans and sneaking a few John Silvers that you forced some squirt to buy for you, so you didn’t have to show your face at Karlesson’s shop, or that you’d bought yourself as a last resort.
On this particular evening we had a couple of cigarettes stashed in a can under a tree-root right beside the pipe. Benny dug them out. We smoked with our usual reverence. Then we debated what sounded better: smokes or weeds. And the right way to hold a cigarette: thumb–index finger or index finger–middle finger. We didn’t settle on anything that day either.
Then Benny asked about my mother.
“Your mom,” he said. “Christ, is she going to …?”
I nodded.
“Think so,” I said. “Dad says so. The doctors say so.”
Benny searched his vocabulary.
“That’s some tough luck,” he finally said.
I shrugged. Benny had been close to an aunt who had died, so I knew that he knew what he was talking about.
As for me, I had no idea what it was like.
Dead?
When I thought about it—and I’d thought about it often that cold, comfortless spring—all I knew was that it was the strangest word in the whole language.
Dead?
Inconceivable. The worst part was that my dad seemed to have as weak a grip on the concept as I did. I could tell by his face that one time—the only time—I asked what it actually meant. What it actually meant to be dead.
“Hmm, well,” he’d muttered, still staring at the TV with the sound turned down. “No one knows, but we’ll all find out in time.”
“A rough summer,” Benny repeated pensively. “For Christ’s sake, Erik, you’ll have to write to me.
I’m going to be up in Malmberget until school starts, but if you need any advice, you can count on me.”
There was a lull in our conversation, as if an angel has passed by. I felt it as clearly as anything, and I knew that Benny had felt it, too, because he cleared his throat and solemnly repeated his offer.
“Aw Christ, Erik. Drop me a line and tell me how you’re doing.”
We shared the last wrinkled cigarette too. I think I did in fact write a letter to Benny; sometime in July maybe, when everything was at its worst, but I can’t really recall. What I do know is that I never heard back from him.
He wasn’t one for pen and paper, that Benny Barkman. No, sir.
In the early 1960s, my dad worked at the jail. It was a taxing job, especially for someone as sensitive as he was, but he never talked about it, just like he never talked about anything unpleasant.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and all that. But still.
He’d arrived in the town on the plain in the 1930s, in the middle of the Depression; met my mother and got her pregnant around the time the world lost its mind for the second time that century. My brother Henry was born on June 1, 1940. Three days later, after taking leave from his post up in Lapland, my father arrived at the bedside of his wife and child, bearing freshly picked lilies of the valley and forty cans of military-issue liverwurst.
So the story goes.
He never went back up north. After his first son was born, he managed to get out of his military service for the rest of the war. He blamed his back, I think. He found a job in one of the town’s shoe factories, where the army’s winter boots were made. So, in a way, he was still doing his duty. A few years after the end of the Second World War, our family moved into the Idrottsgatan apartment.
As for me, I was born eight years and eight days after my brother, and I grew up with the feeling that our age difference was much greater than the one between him and our parents. However, by the time the early sixties rolled around I’d begun to see that this was somewhat of a misconception. Perhaps my mother’s cancer had helped clarify things.