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Jesper Humlin is a poet of middling acclaim who is saddled by his underwhelming book sales, an exasperated girlfriend, a demanding mother, and a rapidly fading tan. His boy-wonder stockbroker has squandered Humlin’s investments, and his editor, who says he must write a crime novel to survive, begins to pitch and promote the nonexistent book despite Humlin’s emphatic refusals. Then, when he travels to Gothenburg to give a reading, he finds himself thrust into an entirely different world, where names shift, stories overlap, and histories are both deeply secret and in profound need of retelling.
Leyla from Iran, Tanya from Russia, and Tea-Bag, who is from Africa but claims to be from Kurdistan (because Kurds might receive preferential treatment as refugees)—these are the shadow girls who become Humlin’s unlikely pupils in impromptu writing workshops. Though he had imagined their stories as fodder for his own book, soon their intertwining lives require him to play a much different role.
Offering both surprising humor and heartbreaking moments, The Shadow Girls is a triumph that will please longtime fans of Mankell as well as readers new to his work.
- Sales Rank: #334400 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-10-16
- Released on: 2012-10-16
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“At once darkly absurd, funny, passionate, wrenching and deeply socially aware. . . . [And] a heartfelt reminder of the many people whose struggles are never known.”
—The Plain Dealer
“Passionate and entertaining. . . . Mankell writes with both a social conscience and great humor.”
—The Daily Telegraph (London)
“A serious novel with a lot of heart.”
—Bookreporter
“Mankell is giving a voice to those who do not possess one.”
—The Independent (London)
“Henning Mankell works . . . astounding magic. . . . He brings us the distinctive but overlapping voices of three perceptive young women who, once their harrowing, poetic floods of pain are released, can never again be ignored.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books
About the Author
Henning Mankell’s novels have been translated into forty languages and have sold more than forty million copies worldwide. He is the first winner of the Ripper Award (the new European prize for crime fiction) and has received the Glass Key and Golden Dagger Awards. He is also the winner of the German Tolerance Prize and has been nominated three times for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His Kurt Wallander mysteries have been adapted into a PBS television series starring Sir Kenneth Branagh. Mankell divides his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from Chapter One
CHAPTER ONE
it was one of the last days of the twentieth century.
The girl with the big smile was awakened by the sound of raindrops hitting the tent cover above her head. as long as she kept her eyes closed she could imagine that she was still back in the village by the cold, clear river that spilled down the side of the mountain. But as soon as she opened her eyes she was thrown out into an empty and unfathomable world, one in which nothing of her past remained except disjointed images of her escape. She lay still and slowly let herself float up into consciousness, trying not to leave her dreams without preparing herself. These first few minutes of the morning often determined the way her day would turn out. during the three months in the refugee camp she had developed a morning ritual that helped her avoid being overcome with sudden panic. The most important thing was not to rush up from her uncomfortable cot with the misguided notion that something momentous was about to occur. By now she knew that nothing ever happened here. This was the first lesson she learned after she had dragged herself onto the rocky european beach and been greeted by guard dogs and armed Spanish border guards.
Being a refugee meant being lonely. This was something that was true for them all, regardless of what country they had come from or what circumstances had forced them to flee. She didn’t expect her loneliness to leave her soon, in fact she had prepared herself to live with it for a long time.
As she lay with her eyes closed she searched for a foothold in the confusion of all that had happened since her arrival. She was being held in a refugee camp in southern Spain, lucky to be one of the few survivors from that mouldering ship from africa. She could still remember the air of expectation aboard. Freedom has a scent, she thought, which only grew more overpowering as land approached. Freedom, security, these were what they wanted. a life where fear, hunger, and hopelessness were not the only reality.
It had been a cargo-hold of hope, she thought; although it was perhaps more correct to call it a cargo-hold of illusions. everyone who had been waiting on the Moroccan beach that night and who had placed their lives in the hands of the ruthless human smugglers had been ferried over to the waiting ship. Sailors who were little more than shadows had forced them down into the cargo area, as if they were modern-day slaves.
But there had been no iron chains around their ankles. what had ensnared them were their dreams, their desperation, all the fear that had driven them to break up from various hells-on- earth in order to make their way to freedom. They had been so close to their goal when the ship hit a reef and the Greek sailors had left in lifeboats, leaving the people in the cargo hold to save themselves.
Europe let us down before we even arrived, she thought. i will never forget that, whatever happens to me in the future. She didn’t know how many people had drowned, nor would she ever find out. The cries for help still pulsated like a pain in her head. at first she had been surrounded by these cries, then one by one they had fallen silent. when she hit land she had praised her luck. She had survived; she had arrived. But for what? She had quickly tried to forget her dreams. Nothing had turned out as she had imagined.
A harsh spotlight had picked her out as she lay on the cold and wet Spanish beach. The dogs had run up to her and then the soldiers surrounded her with their shiny weapons. She had survived. But that was all. afterwards she had been placed in the refugee camp with its barracks and tents, leaky showers and dirty toilets. on the other side of the wire fence she could see the ocean that had released her, but nothing else, none of the future she had imagined.
The people in the refugee camp, so varied in their language, dress and terrible experiences – imparted through a look or sometimes words – had only this in common: nothing to look forward to. Some had been there for many years. No country was willing to admit them and all of their energies were devoted to avoiding being sent back. one day, as she had been waiting in line for her daily rations, she spoke with a young man from iran – or was it iraq? it was often hard to know where people came from since they invariably lied about it in the hope that it would make their applications for asylum more attractive. he said that the camp was simply a large death chamber, a holding place where the clock ticked on relentlessly towards death. She had immediately understood what he meant but tried to ignore the thought.
His eyes had been full of sorrow. They surprised her. Since she had grown to be a woman all she had seen in men’s eyes was a kind of hunger. But this thin man seemed not to have noticed her beauty nor her smile. This had frightened her. She could not stand the thought that men did not immediately desire her, nor that the long and desperate flight had been for nothing. She, like all the others who had been caught, lived in the hope that her ordeal would one day be over. Through some miracle someone would one day appear before her with a paper in his hand and a smile on his lips and say: welcome.
In order not to drive herself insane she had to be very patient. She understood that. and patience could only arise if she did not allow herself any expectations. Sometimes people in the camp committed suicide, or at least made serious attempts. They were the ones who were not strong enough to stifle their own expec- tations and the burden of thinking that their dreams would one day be realised finally overcame them.
Therefore, every morning when she woke up, she told herself that the best she could do was to rid herself of hope. That and never mentioning her true country of origin. The camp was always a hotbed of rumours about which countries offered the best chances for asylum applicants. it was as if the camp were a marketplace of countries where the possibilities for entry were recorded on a kind of stock market. No investments were ever long-lasting or secure.
A short while after she arrived, Bangladesh had been highest on the list. For some reason that they never understood, Germany was granting immediate asylum to all people who could prove that they came from Bangladesh. during an intense few days people of all complexions and appearances waited in line in front of the exhausted Spanish bureaucrats and argued with great fervour that they had suddenly realised they were from Bangladesh. in this way at least fourteen Chinese refugees from the hunan province made their way to Germany. a few days later Germany ‘closed’ Bangladesh, as they said in the camp. after three days of uncertainty a rumour was started that France was prepared to take a certain quota of Kurds.
She had been unsuccessful in her attempts to research where the Kurds actually came from or what they looked like. Nonetheless she stood in line with the others and when she at last stood in front of a red-eyed clerk with the name tag ‘Fernando’ she smiled her sweetest smile. Fernando simply shook his head.
‘Tell me what colour you are,’ he said.
She immediately sensed danger, but she had to say something. The Spanish didn’t like people who didn’t answer their questions. a lie was better than silence.
‘You are black,’ Fernando said in reply to his own question. ‘There are no black Kurds. Kurds look like me, not you.’
‘There are always exceptions. My father was not a Kurd, but my mother was.’
Fernando’s eyes seemed only to redden. She continued to smile. it was her strongest weapon, it always had been.
‘And what was your father doing in Kurdistan?’
‘Working.’
Fernando threw his pen down in triumph.
‘Ha! There is no Kurdistan. at least not in any official capacity. That is exactly the reason that Kurds are fleeing their country.’
'How can they leave a country that doesn’t exist?’
But Fernando lost patience with her. he waved her away.
‘i should report the fact that you have been lying,’ he said.
‘I’m not lying.’
She thought she could suddenly see a spark of interest in his eyes.
‘You are speaking the truth?’
‘Kurds don’t lie.’
The spark in Fernando’s eyes died away.
‘Go,’ he said. ‘it is the best thing you can do. what is your name?’
She decided in that moment to give herself an entirely new name. She looked quickly around the room and her gaze fell on the teacup on Fernando’s table.
‘Tea-Bag,’ she replied.
‘Tea-Bag?’
‘Tea-Bag.’
‘is that a Kurdish name?’
‘My mother liked english names.’
‘Is Tea-Bag even a name?’
‘it must be since that is what she called me.’
Fernando sighed and dismissed her with a tired wave. She left the room and did not let the smile leave her face until she was out in the yard and had found a place by the fence where she could be alone.
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing
By Tamis Renteria
Mankell is a good detective fiction writer, but this novel wanders and is frankly very boring. And I don't like the main character at all, whereas I love Kurt Wallender. I think I understand why he wanted to write this novel, to reveal the stories of some of these immigrant women and to show what's happening in Sweden that is tearing at the fabric of a once homogenous community, but because the main character is not particularly sympathetic, and because of the untidy, unfocused structure of the book, it just doesn't work. I was very disappointed.
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Social Criticism Wrapped in Absurdist Literature
By R. S. Wilkerson
It's an odd book. The purpose of this didactic work is to tell the story of illegal immigrants and thereby increase public awareness of their plight and perhaps of the restrictive immigration policies of European countries, Sweden in particular. I wonder why it took eleven years to be translated into English and published in the United States. We certainly have our own problems with the treatment of illegal immigrants. It's a well-crafted novel. Humlin, the central character, and those around him are made to appear ridiculous, totally preoccupied with their own petty problems and unaware of the plight of immigrants, whose goal is "to become visible" (p. 145), although to a certain extent, they are protected by their invisibility. The first portion of the novel deals with Humlin's own efforts - and the efforts of those around him - to gain greater visibility within the society of which they are a part. The vehicle suggested to gain visibility is to write a crime novel. Humlin's publisher suggests that he do so, although he refuses even as the company starts a publicity campaign about a novel which doesn't exist; his mother claims she is writing one; his rival claims to be writing one; his girlfriend claims to be writing a tell-all novel about their life together. Humlin is afraid that any of them might be more skilled than he, thus taking the spotlight, no matter how small, away from him and subjecting him to invisibility. It's absurdist literature at its best and funniest. The main theme is "there are few things that make any sense in this life"(p. 165), and Humlin's world becomes ever more absurd after his encounter with a world of which he was unaware - an underworld of people who "don't exist." The people in Humlin's normal world, of course, take their own existence for granted, in the same way that the illegal immigrants depend on their non-existence for survival. Both, however, seek to "become visible."
When Humlin becomes involved with some immigrant girls (one legal, two illegal) and their extended families, his perspective begins to change. "He then thought that Sweden had turned into a country he really knew very little about" (p. 175); indeed a friend tells him "'Life isn't what you think it is, Humlin . . . [you think] this is essentially a peaceful and harmonious country'" (p. 233). Writing a crime novel is the route to greater visibility (financial reward) envisioned by Humlin's associates. The girls want to learn to write so they can tell their stories, and Humlin coaxes each of them, partially through a "writing seminar" he conducts, to tell her story. The stories, the heart of the novel, however, are composites, many stories crammed into the tales of these girls. The reader senses that even with the stories told, all will return to the status quo. The girls disappear, leaving Humlin with only an idea to tell their stories, but it is one in which no one is interested and one in which he will soon lose interest because it is not a visible part of the world he inhabits. The immigrants are invisible to others.
Although absurdist literature, the plight of the girls is painful to the reader. Mankell's novel is an effective medium because it tries to compress many stories into one, demonstrating to the reader that "there are few things that make any sense in this life" (p. 115) and that the ultimate absurdity of the world of invisibility required of the immigrants is that " . . . it is harder to get rid of a person without papers than if one still had a name, an identity." To exist, one must not exist. Humlin never understands that they cannot exist publicly because that would call attention to them. This is Mankell's protest: they cannot become visible without risking deportation. Perhaps we can understand their plight by understanding our own efforts to become visible.
22 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Intriguing and unusually humorous
By Heather H. Harris
I have read all of Mankell, and this book is a delightful change. Half the plot is deadly serious, about human trafficking and illegal immigration of refugees....and the other is about the poet whose agent insists he write a crime novel (seemingly like every other Swedish writer), whose mother is impossibly manipulative, and whose girlfriend is learning from his mother. Relax and enjoy the surprise. Not nearly as dark as you're used to.
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