Investigation of a man without qualities

How do we Mediterranean people imagine Scandinavia? Livid, rather cold, rather tidy and confident.

Scandinavian novelists, very fashionable in recent years starting with Stieg Larson from the Millennium series, are progressively eroding these stereotypical images. Not that in the northern lands the sky is always blue or the sun shines even at Christmas - although climate change is making its effects felt even at those latitudes. But certainties and certainties, at least for the human soul, seem chimeras even in Viking land.

One more proof comes from the first novel published in Italy by the Swedish Tom Malmquist "The air around us" (NN Edizioni, 2022, pp. 304, also e-book), an interesting mix between detective story and sitting psychoanalytic.

In the book, excellently translated by Katia De Marco, it all begins when the protagonist, Tom Malmquist - the author's namesake and his alter ego - reads the news of the death of Mikael K., thirty years old, in a twenty-year-old newspaper. found lifeless in a cave on the outskirts of Stockholm. Murder or suicide? The newspaper does not clarify the dynamics of the facts and this intrigues Tom, who was little more than a boy at the time and who has a vague memory of those tragic events. He decides to find out more and begins to investigate the death and especially the life of Mikael.

The initial intention is to write a book, but the investigation forces the protagonist to go back in time, to the early nineties when he was a young man who had abandoned a promising career in hockey without a real reason, if not the lack of stimuli, enthusiasm, ambition. Furthermore, the further he goes into his investigation, the more disturbing similarities emerge between Tom and the victim.

The protagonist discovers in Mikael a man with few qualities, closed and prisoner of his own neuroses, fears and obsessions and realizes that he finds himself looking at himself, in a mirror that is certainly distorted and deformed, but not a liar and completely false. Tom realizes that he has never met Mikael in person, but that he somehow feels him living inside himself. He realizes that finding a meaning to the life and death of that unknown thirty-year-old forgotten by all can be the key to giving a new meaning to one's existence and embarking on a new beginning. The alternative is to let yourself go definitively, as it probably happened to Mikael M.

In short, a book that moves on several levels that of Malquist. It is certainly an original psychological thriller, but also a novel of late formation given the age of the protagonist, no longer a boy, but a forty-year-old who struggles to come to terms with the choices of life, the relationship with his partner and the next birth. of a son and a daughter.

A man who considers himself to be without qualities and who for this reason has never been able to risk fully and who has never demanded too much from existence. A man, however, who for once, at least once, does not want to miss his goal.