I finally got my revenge on Sweden. For most of my life I’ve been bombarded with newspapers and radio telling me how Sweden is so much much very much absolutely completely better than Britain at practically everything. Here’s some random quotes from the BBC news archive :“Sweden has probably the strongest freedom of information law anywhere in the world.”“Sweden has one of the best staffed health services in the world. But as a parent, Sweden seems the perfect place to have children.”“BBC's Joe Wilson on how Sweden became a top athletics nation. What can Sweden teach GB?”“Sweden says it aims to completely wean itself off oil within 15 years, without building new nuclear plants..”“In a survey of the 26 most industrialised countries, only Sweden came out better.” (Better at what? Oh… life…love…happiness…)“Sweden and Denmark show most clearly what spelling reform can do. Sweden has gradually given itself a fairly sound spelling system.” (Yes, spelling reform is important too! Admittedly this didn’t make me as furiously jealous as the other stuff. But still – Sweden. Again.)“If you want my answer, I think we should look at how they do it in Sweden. They have high taxation and a better standard of living which means everyone feels they should contribute”Blah blah blah. And Abba too! Is there no end to their tall blond pretty perfection and their warm fuzzy wraparound social democracy? But now, one grungy vampire tale Let the Right One In let’s me know in no uncertain terms that Swedes suffer too. Behind the perky teeth and healthy children and universal dentistry and free housing for all and trams and no nuclear waste and Mamma Mia there’s urban decay, neglected glue-sniffing kids, violence, drunkenness, wasted lives and compellingly unpleasant vampires. This is chicken soup for my soul, with swedes! And not only that, but as many persons have pointed out, this is a kind of anti-Twilight, given that the only sexually attractive vampire around is a 200 year old 12 year old girl and the only attracting going on is with an adult paedophile and a miserable lonely 12 year old boy. So stick that up your sacro-iliac, Bella and Edward! I fart in your general direction! This book gets major points for being so accurate about childhood terrors of the non-imaginary kind (bullying). In fact it's really about childhood neglect and the vampire stuff can be read as an extended poetic symbol. But the vampire stuff is also gory and it rocks, so you can have your sensitive cake and you can greedily gobble it up it too.Anyway, altogether, a maxillo-facial gothtastic read - 3.5 stars.*****Update : the film rocks too. It pulls a few punches and cuts out a major zombie theme but otherwise a does a great job. Rent it!Up-update - I was referring here to the movie Let the Right One In by Thomas Alfredson, made in Sweden in 2009 and not the Hollywood remake by Matt Reeves just released, which I haven't seen.Upupupupdate : I saw the American remake and that's great too - I wouldn't lie to you, I was very surprised. So - rent that one too!Upupupupupupdate : they're still at it! Now I'm being told that although Sweden gets a million tons of snow every day because of their extreme yet kindly efficiency no one ever falls down and no bus is ever late and no road is ever closed yet a couple of days of Swedish snow in Britain and all roads are impassable and all lorries immediately jack-knife and all schools immediately close.Bite them, Eli, bite them all! Don't leave a single Swede unbitten!
If I listed the things that scared me most, vampires running around looking for blood wouldn't rate in my top 10. They wouldn't rate in my top 50. That said, John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In (translated and distributed in the U.S. as Let Me In) unsettled me in multiple ways. I actually started reading it in 2012, then again in 2013, before finally making it through its house of horrors. And I'm sure glad that I did.The title is a play on the Morrissey tune "Let the Right One Slip In", but the story takes place in the winter of 1981 in a suburb outside Stockholm, Sweden called Blackeberg. Let that slip in for a moment. Lindqvist does a marvelous job setting the table in a neighborhood with no past, no future, where even the angles of the apartment buildings seem a little strange somehow. Oskar is a 12-year-old latchkey kid, raised by a single mother, with no siblings, no friends. He's tormented so relentlessly at school that he has trouble controlling his bladder. He shoplifts, and fills his head with morbid thoughts of taking revenge against his tormentors. While my school experience was nowhere near as hopeless, I related to Oskar's plight much more than I wanted to.In the dead of night, Oskar receives new neighbors, including a young girl about his own age who gives the name Eli. Meeting in the courtyard playground after dark, Eli talks like an adult, smells like an old bandage, seems impervious to the cold and solves a Rubik's Cube without effort. In no time, a teenager is found murdered in the forest, drained of blood, and Blackeberg's nightmare begins.Rather than crank out another tired tale of vampires, Lindqvist's narrative is about how we alienate each other and keep even loved ones at arm's length. Much more than the Swedish or U.S. film versions, the novel expands its scope to characters who were mere extras in the movies, or not included at all. Lindqvist has an ability to invest us in even minor characters introduced very quickly, for example, a bachelor driving home from a blind date that's gone very well for him, until he encounters something on a bridge.This is hardcore horror fiction. There were moments where I thought, "That's as fucked up a thing as any human could experience" only to have something even more dreadful happen next. Pedophilia, skin burns, razorblades, drowning, mean cats and being locked in a dark room freak me out and Lindqvist works them all into the story to maximum effect. There are horrors as potent as anything in Thomas Harris' Red Dragon or The Silence of the Lambs.Reviewers have cited a somewhat inconsistent and clunky English translation as posing pacing problems, but I was so absorbed in the characters -- particularly Eli, who would tear all of Stephenie Meyer's vampires limb from limb as a mercy killing -- that I barely noticed. My complaint was the last scene, which feels anti-climactic and poses more questions of logic than it answers.Lindqvist's footing doesn't seem as strong in his final paragraphs, but the rest of the novel is so emotionally visceral that five stars was never a question.
What do You think about Let The Right One In (2007)?
Deixa-me Entrar é um romance com vampiros mas, em termos comparativos com outras obras do género, está muito distante do rosado Crepúsculo de Stephenie Meyer, aproximando-se mais da negrura de Bram Stoker. Ou seja, apesar de as personagens principais serem adolescentes, não é uma história romântica e bonita que faça sonhar e desejar ser mordida por um belo e sedutor vampiro. Aqui os vampiros não mordem, mastigam...Passada na fria Suécia, esta é uma história muito violenta; não pelo vampirismo, mas porque nos confronta com temas muito reais e perturbadores: pedofilia, bullying, assassínio, famílias em rotura, e o extremo sofrimento fisico e psicológico que lhes está inerente.A estrutura e narrativa são perfeitas, com suspense e revelações nos momentos certos e um excelente equilíbrio entre diálogos e descrições, impossibilitando qualquer tentação de abandonar a leitura por muito desconforto que algumas passagens nos provoque.Li-o sem saber praticamente nada sobre o enredo e as personagens, e gostei que assim fosse, por isso calo-me aqui...Este romance serviu de inspiração para dois filmes: um norte-americano e outro sueco. Segundo me disseram, o primeiro é para evitar, o segundo é para ver.
—Teresa
As seen on The ReadventurerI can't even find the words to describe how much I LOVED this novel. But let me start by warning Twilight lovers that this book is not about sexy sparkly vampires and teenage love. If you are not ready to read about ugly realities of human life, do not open this book. It is not an easy book to read. The story is complex and involves many characters, whose presence sometimes is just momentary. The action moves from one character to another very quickly. But once you understand the pace and get used to foreign names, the story consumes you. I will not relay the plot here, if you want to know what exactly the book is about, there are many reviews here that describe the story well. What I am going to say is that this is simply the best vampire novel I've ever read. Yes, I am putting it higher even than legendary Bram Stoker's "Dracula." This story is so much more complex and interesting in a way that not only does it show vampires from the point of view of their victims, but it also shows the world through the eyes of the vampires. We find out how very often innocent people become those feared monsters, we go through the transformation with them, we feel their guilt and shame, we learn about their relationships with their "Guardians" (who sometimes are worse monsters than vampires themselves). But this book is not only about vampires, it explores the world of adolescent boys (the world I know nothing about). Surprisingly, I found out how important presence of a father in a boy's life. Without the guidance a love of a father, boys are lost to violence and abuse. With all the horridness described in this book, it is strangely full of love and tenderness, understanding and forgiveness. I highly recommend this book. You simply will not be able to walk away untouched by it.
—Tatiana
I read an interview with Stephenie Meyer, writer of the "Twilight" series, where she said something about how she had taken liberties with the classic vampire story because she was writing fiction and there are no hard-fast rules about what vampires can or cannot do. So she did things like make their skin glimmer in the sunlight. This is a laughable about of liberty -- not to mention creativity -- considering what John Ajvide Lindqvist has done with the vampire of his novel "Let The Right One In." Oskar is a loner, whose relationship with his classmates has him on the creepy serial killer fast track. Then he meets Eli, a waify, smelly girl who is seemingly his age who lives in his apartment complex, and they forge a tentative friendship. Typing Morse code messages on the shared wall of their bedrooms, naked spooning and solving Rubik's Cubes. Eli's fatherish sort of person is a pedophile, who kills people and drains their blood so Eli can eat lunch. Although sometimes she just goes out on her own, drops from a tree and mauls a victim herself. In a sort of nod to Melrose Place, the apartment complex also houses a drunk posse of friends -- one of whom Eli treats like a Snackable -- who are trying to make sense of the deaths while negotiating a deep fog of the drink. In some ways this book was a lot like the Tammy Hoag novel you buy spontaneously while waiting for some blue hair in front of you to organize her cat food coupons at the grocery store. Other times, particularly the parts involving Eli and Oskar, or even just Eli in kill-kill-kill mode, are really amazing in the way they show the hunger for simple needs like love and food. And then there are a handful of side plots that add to the bulk and maybe are necessary in order to give everyone a face and back story, but unnecessary because of the added bulk: Tommy, who lives in the complex, is struggling with accepting his mother's new boyfriend; One of Oskar's bullies wants to learn more about his father. A small section of the book is written from the perspective of a squirrel. There are battles against the undead that read like something out of a Batman script.Overall, this was an enjoyable read, more of a "huh" than a "meh" on my personal Richter Scale, but hardly anything that deserves an exclamation point. I liked these flawed and messy characters, who don't have an ounce of cliche. Although, I'm not sure how it got so long: my soft cover version has 471 pages.
—christa
