“Iceland is too small to contain such a sick individual, capable of doing that to a random victim.” The words that the coroner addresses to Detective Huldar, responsible for the investigation that stars ‘The Scream’, may serve to limit the … horror that the reality of the country can endure, but not to limit the imagination of Yrsa Sigurdardóttir (Reykjavík, 1963), who inaugurated with this title in 2014 the literary series ‘The Cases of Freyja’, a child psychologist destined to find herself immersed in intrigue more somber and bring objective success to its creator, if the measure is the millions of readers (more than five) and the number of translations achieved (more than thirty).
However, things change if we choose literature as a scale: “How much” literature is there in ‘The Scream’? It is indisputable that suspense, understood as an indispensable element in any good story, is present in the development of the novel, especially in its starting point, which takes us back to the eighties of the 20th century to present the dramatic situation of three very young siblings, two boys and a girl, who are separated to be put up for adoption.
-
Author
Yrsa Sigurdardóttir -
Editorial
Destination -
Year
2025 -
Pages
528 -
Price
22.90 euros
Sigurdardóttir’s ability to instill concern and gloom over this maneuver by the Administration is outstanding, as is the pace with which he paces the description of the first murder, which we will witness immediately afterwards and in a more current time. But from here things change and the Icelandic author encourages us with her proposal to consider a division within criminal fiction, which translates into two very different types of readers: on the one hand, we find stories like ‘The Scream’, where the fundamental thing, beyond the sentimental subplots that surround the mystery, is to achieve verisimilitude from the accumulation of technical details and police intricacies; On the other hand, we have criminal fiction that relies on a literary vision of tragedy and unknowns, and uses them to feed on them, putting them at its service.
Bittersweet flavor, if more care had been taken with the shape it would have gone from commercial to outstanding
In the first case, in which this novel is framed, the objective is not to “make” good literature, but to capture the attention of a type of reader who seeks to know an environment, that of theto violence, crime and its management, which, in general, is forbidden to him in his daily life; a reader who does not even seek the balance of the text—absent in ‘The Scream’, which often drags on in technical conversations and excessively detailed descriptions—nor the testing of language.
For the rest, noir addicts will identify numerous references in Sigurdardóttir’s work—from Friedrich Dürrenmatt to John Verdon—that work and contribute to turning the story into a solvent alternative, although they leave a bittersweet taste in the mouth and a doubt in the person who finishes it: the idea that, if they had taken a little more care with the form of the story, it would have was able to go from commercial and correct to outstanding.
#Scream #Yrsa #Sigardóttir #title #Freyja #Cases
