The locked room

It’s the middle of my spring break.

The pace at which I’ve been writing isn’t bad.

But, oh! To keep up this pace through the end of March! And, if necessary, the beginning of April!

[Sigh.]

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I’m also nearing the end of The Locked Room by Sjöwall & Wahlöö, which is about a “locked room” murder and a bank robbery. (I already finished The Locked Room by Paul Auster. How different Auster’s solitary existentialists from the social pawns of Sjöwall & Wahlöö!)

Sjöwall & Wahlöö are laying out their hippie credentials even more nakedly than before. Their protagonist, Chief Detective Inspector Martin Beck, is about to have a love affair with a hippie woman.

Their Sweden, meanwhile, continues to be a capitalist hell-hole with a socialist veneer. Landlords and factory owners ascend ever higher upon the backs of laborers. Bureaucrats run the social services so as to inflate unimportant statistics, while their rank-and-file workers, ill-treated and underpaid, quit the service professions and are replaced by nitwits – the only people that those professions have become able to recruit. (This is in the early 1970s.)

The series is getting a little preachy. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong.

It’s all grimly humorous. And there’s a great little joke about how a group of police, armed with guns, tear gas, and an attack dog, burst into an unlocked room.

February fragments

Four weeks after having sprained my ankle, I walk much better; but my ankle still hurts all day long.

Karin drives me to work each morning, what with my being injured; and when my shift ends, I walk home the scenic way, upon a riverside path that’s much less icy than my usual route.

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I’ve been trudging through Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. I just finished Ghosts, the second installment. Some fifteen years ago, I read the first book, City of Glass, and vowed not to again; well, now I have. The second time was better. I suppose it was effective training to have read, in the interim, novels like Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84 in which the characters stay holed up for long periods with their thoughts. But in those novels, the long, inactive waits are punctuated with tasteful elevator music and wistful sippings of Cutty Sark. In Auster’s books, the waiting turns the protagonists into bums. Anyway, my objective is to get through the third book in Auster’s trilogy, The Locked Room, so that I can then read Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s Locked Room and write down the same title twice consecutively in my reading journal.

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The kitties have been chasing each other around the apartment all the last hour. Jasper trapped Ziva behind the couch for a while, but Karin coaxed him away.