Faceless Killers, by Henning Mankell

A gloomy and moody Scandinavian landscape. Small towns and farms in January with the wind blowing, the snow falling and the temperature uncomfortably low. The open stretch of land east of Copenhagen in southern Sweden is the setting for this murder mystery. I was motivated to read it because I found the mood in The Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo (see earlier entry) compelling and that tale, too, had that dark, moody feel to it. Something I equate to how I feel when I read something set in the Caucasus or Carpathian mountains. The Mysteries of Udolfo, for example, though I don’t recall where that takes place (or Dracula, for that matter). This story opens with a murder out on a farm. It is a long police procedural. Leads, follow-up of those leads, stakeouts, dead ends, long periods of time with nothing new happening and then new leads. Occasions of violence and personal backstories are sufficient to round out the tale. But they don’t interfere with the thrust of the narrative. It’s slow going, a bit, in the beginning. And the prose reflects that as well with its mostly simple, narrative, structure. Much of that is because the area and the time in which the tale is set is also slow going – life out there seems to be partially arrested by the bleakness of the landscape and the endless wind sweeping in from the sea. That marriage of narrative tone and physical setting only became apparent to me late in the story and as I reflect back on the work now. The solution to the murder also resonated with me – an indictment on the tangle of social and political structure; a tremor of existentialism in the way it played out. Nice read!

e: The Story of a Number, by Eli Maor

e is a transcendental number approximately equal to 2.718. It is the limit of (1+1/n)^n as n goes to infinity. If you have forgotten your math or were never inclined to learn it, you nevertheless will find this book a manageable albeit often intellectually challenging read. It charts a course through early mathematics. I did not know, or forgot, that the Greeks did not deal with 0 or negative numbers. Their entire system of mathematics was based on geometric proofs and you cannot have a line with 0 or, worse, a negative length. Never mind irrational numbers. Maor brings us through the first documentation of logarithmic functions and the calculus (Newton vs. Leibniz). Much of modern mathematics is built on a foundation of the idea of limits or, more particularly, solving series whose limit is infinity (like the one above). This number, e, is found everywhere and Maor takes us to many of those places. It is not only a mathematical construct, it is grounded in the physical world, not unlike pi. You see it in the designs of seashells, architecture and the banking industry. But more, the book reads not as a mathematical text although there is a bunch of that in there – it is a history book. And, for me, it frames the physical and philosophical world in a different way. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a long time; I’m glad that I finally read it.