你说我的运气怎么这么差，刚刚搬离DC没几天，前同事兼好友IRENA就打电话给我：HENNING MANKELL要来SILVER SPRING的AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE了，放映新作改编的电影同时卖书，仅此一场，你要不要来？
我们俩都是WALLANDER系列小说迷，MANKELL的小说英译本我们基本上都读过了。他是我的偶像，他的风格是我喜欢的类型。我梦想有一天能写出跟WALLANDER一样真实的人物。有机会见偶像，我当然点头说好，我准时到。
礼拜六中午，我开车两个钟头半从新家回到“阔别”一周的马里兰。在影院门口，主持此事的MIKE JECK对大家说MANKELL先生在放映庭门口卖书签名，想买的请早。IRENA和她的亲戚去买饮料，我自己先过去看他一眼。
MANKELL看上去跟他的照片一模一样，乱糟糟的花白头发，黑色的厚外套，不修边幅，不苟言笑。他坐在一张桌子后面，旁边是一个收钱的小伙子。并没有人排队，也没有人抢着要跟他握手签名。
我慢慢地蹭过去，拿起一本书翻开看看，标价二十五块。我的钱包里只有二十，一时踌躇不决。MANKELL发话了：“咋了?”
我结结巴巴地答道：“我的钱不够，等我去找朋友借。”
他说：“我借给你，不过你要还我的。”
我以为他跟我开玩笑，说这怎么成。他却立马掏出钱包，抽出一张二十块的票子给我。我彻底迷糊了，迟疑着接过来，心里只想着赶快找到IRENA，问她借钱来还MANKELL。买书问作者借钱，这成什么话?
我们正推让着，旁边一个声音问发生了什么事。身后排队的一个中年男人说：MANKELL先生给她钱买书呢，真是好DEAL，口气好象我得了多大便宜似的。我的脸红起来，赶紧掏出自己的二十块，一起递过去。收钱的小伙却还给我一张纸币，说：只需要二十就够了。原来是减价的。我如释重负地把二十块还给MANKELL，他仍然十分严肃地说道：“这不是我那张钱。”
众笑。
我松口气，接口道："反正他收的钱最后也是到你手里的。"
然后MANKELL问我叫什么名字，好给我签名。我说JUN，不带E的，并在一片纸上写下来。他说敖，我认识一个韩国人也叫这名。我说这是中文音译来的。他问中文是什么意思。我答：HANDSOME。
后面那个中年男人又插嘴了：是英俊那个还是马车那个？然后很自鸣得意地笑了。MANKELL 反驳道：你看看她，有可能是马车么？
好狗不挡路，我实在不好意思继续霸住作者不放，只匆匆说了一句：我喜欢你的书，就到门口找IRENA排队去了。这时前面一场片子结束，人人红肿着眼睛出来。我奇道：他们看的是什么片子，怎么都成这样了？
答：卢旺达旅馆。
等了一会儿，回头往MANKELL 处望去，见他正跟几个有派头的中年白人男性握手说话，大概是AFI领导或本地文艺名人。我很想跟他聊聊，却又想不出说什么。你还住在莫桑比克么？你的书卖得好吗？你对本地印象如何？多么无聊的问题，我根本也不是真想知道。或者问：你的人生观世界观是怎样的？你对社会现状有何感慨？这些问题不必提了，他早就在书里坦言一切，我对他的思想性情态度，从书里已经了解得一清二楚。可是他是我的偶像，就站在离我几尺之外处，不上去多攀谈几句多么遗憾。我眼睛里看着他站起来活动腿脚，身边无一人，就不知不觉地向他走过去了。。。
“啊，JUN。”他看见我，叫出我的名字，“有什么问题吗？”
“嗯，”我张口结舌地道，“你还会继续写这个系列吗？”
“会罢，至少还要写一阵子。”他说。我离他极近，脸正对着他的胸口。他一双锋利的眼睛看着我，几乎有点凶巴巴的，可是我觉得正象站在一个老朋友面前一样。
“那么警探LINDMANN呢？”我想起他的新书“RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER“里面的主角，“他会自成一系列吗？你会再写他的故事吗？”
他耸耸肩膀，“我也不知道。天晓得。以后看情况。”
我问他最近有无在写新书。他说六月份会出版一本叫肯尼迪的脑子的书，然后解释说肯尼迪被刺杀后，脑子忽然不见了，他认为这件事很有意思。“脑子是很。。。”他支吾了一些词不达意的话，“你不觉得很有象征性么？”
我一脸懵懂。他拍拍我的胳膊说等你看了书就知道了，挤挤眼转身走开了。
回去排队，IRENA问我跟他说了些什么，我说鬼知道，什么丢失的肯尼迪的脑子云云。但是我的印象是他的新书并不是讲KURT WALLANDER追回肯尼迪脑子的故事。
电影开始前，主持人MICHAEL JECK先介绍作者。MANKELL说，电影跟书很不一样但是演得很好。里面的女演员在 泰国渡假时正遇上海啸(大家都倒抽一口冷气)，幸而没事，让他更感到生命的脆弱。还说：“当我开始写这本书时，刚好在911发生之前没多久，关于恐怖主义的题材，我想说的是，恐怖主义并非简单的现象，恐怖分子常常有复杂的背景和理由。”然后声明自己要去吃晚饭了，你们慢慢看，就要开溜。一女观众急忙喊：你还回来么。他主持人赶紧声明MANKELL先生会回来回答大家问题，别担心。
即使从电影里也可以看出，这个故事是从LINDA，KURT WALLANDER的女儿的角度来讲的。我对片子不太感冒，主要是因为他们换了演WALLANDER的演员。我特别喜欢过去系列剧里ROLF LARSGARD演的WALLANDER，又高又胖，笨手笨脚，完全跟书里的描写严丝合缝，而且全身散发着ordinary melancholy，现在这个WALLANDER又矮又瘦，一脸的城里人的精明相，完全不象想象中的乡下警官。
调查开始没多久，就出现了一个新人物，被派到YSTAD增援的新警探，一上来就同LINDA起了误会。我想，大概是她将来的浪漫对象。结果他一开口自我介绍：STEFAN LINDMANN。我惊得差点儿从椅子上掉下来，肚子里仰天长笑--这个老狐狸又耍了我一次。还说没准儿，这就把LINDMANN派到WALLANDER这里来了，两个故事合二为一了。不过这个演LINDMANN 的演员长得有点太漂亮，太帅了，跟周围的环境有些不协调。
电影放完了，MANKELL果然回来了。主持人说，我本来打算请作者先生坐谈的，他却坚持站着在台上走来走去。于是台上两个头发花白，黑衣黑鞋的中年男人开始了对话，并夹杂着观众的问题。
我再次感到无话可问的尴尬。大家提出的问题有些风马牛不相及，例如影片的风格，另一些根本来自没读过小说的人，纯属浪费时间。不过也知道了一些细小的事实。原来MANKELL仍然在莫桑比克住，并且在那里的话剧院导演舞台剧。他说自己也考虑过拍电影，但是觉得没这精力时间去搞，还是决定专心写小说搞舞台剧。
难怪他的小说文字很有视觉性和电影的节奏。在某些地方MANKELL跟GRAHAM GREENE相似，他俩的小说都很容易改编成电影，画面在文字中明明白白地，毫不花哨地写出来了，没有一个多余的形容词；但是即使忠实地拍出来，也完全没有小说的味道了，还是得读原作。
有个观众问：WALLANDER不是有个拉脱维亚的女友么？到哪里去了？
MANKELL答道：正巧前几天我还遇到那个演员呢，她也问我她的角色何时再出现。你们都不明白，她回不来了，WALLANDER总是搞不好跟女人的关系，因为他还热烈地爱着他的前妻呢，虽然他们已经离婚十年了。他是个非常passionate的人啊。我听了他的说法觉得有点不尽不实，似乎没这么简单。WALLANDER很想找个新女友，不过他有点自卑，有点缺乏安全感。
对于凡是关于诠释小说内容意义的问题，MANKELL或者顾左右而言他，或者胡乱诌几句，总之拒绝正面回答。有人问：你开头说这个故事讲恐怖分子的复杂性，可是电影里面似乎没怎么说啊，里面的善恶不是挺黑白分明的吗？他答道：你看，里面的恐怖分子全是当地人，没有一个穆斯林。这不是讲世上的恐怖分子并非都是伊斯兰极端分子。观众对此解释一头雾水，我想，他在说些什么啊，根本扯不上嘛。他的眼里有点狡猾的神情，让我疑心答案就在书里。还有人问开头烧天鹅的镜头有什么象征意义，到最后也没解释。MANKELL说，呃，反正有意义，你自己爱怎么想就怎么想吧。
我犹豫半天，终于举起手来。MANKELL 指着我说：JUN，是吧？(我脱了外套，大概看上去有点不同) 你还没问够么？
众人又笑。IRENA在一旁捅捅我(“哎，他记得你的名字耶。”) 我掩饰着不好意思，干咳一声，发问道：在你的WALLANDER系列里，有种对现代社会的失望，对现状的不满。你对我们这个世界的前途持悲观态度么？
其实这个问题也是没话找话，我早已知道他的真实想法。
他说：是，我对世界的现状愤怒和不满。这么多烂摊子，其实解决方法很简单，给孩子们教育，让他们读书。只要教会他们认识ABC，让他们自己能学习思考，啥问题都能解决了。但是不我不是悲观主义者，我不认为我们没有希望。
有人问WALLANDER这么真实，是不是有他自己的影子。MANKELL狡猾地答道：我跟WALLANDER如果在现实生活中遇上了，肯定不会成为好朋友，他对女人太没一手了。(我心想，我没问你现任太太是第四任还是第五任，算你运气。) 但是他承认写WALLANDER的时候特意在真实感上下了功夫。“你见过有几个大侦探得糖尿病？这就是我追求的效果。”有一次，在瑞典全民投票决定是否加入欧盟之前，一个书迷遇见他，问：WALLANDER准备怎么投这一票。MANKELL说他开头一愣，没想到人们这么把他的人物当真，想了想后答道：我想他会投跟我相反的一票。然后，他说，我趁他还没回过神来的之前赶紧开溜了。他仍然是一本正经地说些出人意料的话，我想起过去看的那些瑞典挪威的喜剧，也都是这类板着脸的自嘲，低调的笑话，这就是北欧式的幽默吧？
这本书是从LINDA WALLANDER的角度写的。一个中年白人老顽固写另一个中年白人老顽固比较容易，写个年轻女警可就没那么简单了。MANKELL 说为了写这本书，他特地找了个女警察，请她记日记给自己看，记了一年半的素材。
散场时，我正犹豫着要不要最后再去骚扰MANKELL 一次，让他永远记住我，忽然被人大力拍我肩膀。原来是好几年前在我们公司做网页主管的，是个瑞典人；他旁边站着金发碧眼的太太，两个人都无比正常乐观，是社会栋梁型的小家庭，主流得不得了的一对，天晓得为什么他那时还挺欣赏我的，这么久了还记得我。我跟他们寒暄几句，开玩笑道今晚全城的瑞典人都跑这儿来了。
这时眼角看到MANKELL 跟几个人往后门去了，才想到如果真要他记得我，不如干脆借了他二十块钱，套出他的通讯地址来，以后给他写信才管用呢。我暗自笑笑：如果我比现在年轻十岁，一定会跑上去对他说，我爱WALLANDER，我想写象你那种风格的小说，我崇拜你。但是我已经不是单纯的热血青年了，对他，对任何偶像，都能把他们当作凡人看待，越是把人看得透彻，越不能再有那种热烈的崇敬和仰慕，虽然代替的是另一种尽在不言中的理解。从执着到淡然，不是由主观意志左右的过程。最后的感想是：的确，世界上没有比虚构的小说更能揭露一个人(作者)的本性和心理的东西了。
(完)
追星记2
转一篇报道。原来他太太是BERMAN的女儿。
washingtonpost.com
Winter Lit
For Novelist Henning Mankell, 'The End' Is Just the Beginning
By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 28, 2005; Page C01
He writes darkly, Henning Mankell. Of ice-cold Scandinavia, family woes, irritable bowels. And man's ever-creative inhumanity. Near the beginning of his new novel "Before the Frost," for instance, a sinister man douses several white swans with gasoline and then sets them on fire.
It is an arresting scene in an arresting story by an arresting writer you have probably never heard of.
Why isn't Swedish writer Mankell better known in the United States? After all, he has written 40 books that have been published in more than 35 countries and sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. He has outsold Harry Potter in Germany, his American publisher, the New Press, likes to point out. His recurring detective, Kurt Wallander, is quirky, wise, flawed, a lover of music and eventually successful in solving tough cases. It may be because Mankell's books are cheerless things.
"Americans seem to have a problem," writes a reviewer in Publishers Weekly, "with the austere qualities of his prose and his heroes, and the rather bleak atmosphere that pervades much of his work."
He has not had a title on the Washington Post or New York Times bestseller lists.
But there is a deeper mystery behind Mankell. Though he leads an intriguing and meaningful life, he somehow continues to understand, and probe, the underside of everyday living -- in an elegant and artful way. There is a sadness about him; he is able to look loneliness square in the eye. The result is writing that walks a line between ephemeral and everlasting.
"Mankell is that unusual thing: a European thriller writer whose work holds up as literature," Sarah Lyall writes in the New York Times.
On a recent weekend, Mankell is in Washington to promote the just-published American edition of "Before the Frost" and a special screening of a Swedish movie based on the novel. Dressed all in black -- shoes, pants, shirt, jacket -- with dark eyebrows and a mop of gray-whitish hair, Mankell, 57, looks like a winter storm. He holds a news conference at the Swedish Embassy, introduces his film at the American Film Institute theater in Silver Spring and reads at Politics & Prose.
"I think he's a wonderful writer," says Kathy Sykes, 45, who works for the EPA. She is standing in line to see the movie at the AFI Silver. She has read all nine of Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels. The new book features Wallander's daughter, Linda, who has just graduated from the police academy.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with focusing on the fact that bad things do happen in this world," Sykes adds.
Mankell is a man of this world. He lives and writes in Sweden for two-thirds of the year. For the other third, he lives in Mozambique, where he has been artistic director of a theater in that Portuguese-speaking country for 20 years. He writes movie treatments and newspaper columns. He speaks English, dreams in Portuguese and writes in Swedish. He sees AIDS victims on the streets of Maputo and homeless vagabonds in the doorways of Washington.
But his personal dreariness may spring from an even deeper well. And it is only through conversation and questions and answers that Mankell's nesting-doll life begins to open up a bit.
He has been married four times and has four sons. His present wife, Eva, is the daughter of Swedish film legend Ingmar Bergman. He grimaces when asked more about his family life. "I don't talk about my private life," he says. He grimaces, in fact, when asked about many things.
At the news conference he is introduced by Swedish cultural counselor Peter Wahlqvist. He'll answer your questions, Wahlqvist tells the 60 or so people who are in the room, but he won't talk about his private life.
"Are you a pessimist?" someone asks.
"We live in a terrible world," Mankell says, grimacing.
The Wallander novels are set in the countryside of Sweden. "Twenty years ago," Mankell says, "something changed. Crime moved into rural areas."
His portly old detective wrestles with vanishing manners and changing mores. There is as much action in the heads of his characters as there is at the police stations and crime scenes. "I'm not very interested in action itself," Mankell says. "Thinking, contemplating, the real drama is inside the heart."
In "Before the Frost" a religious cult plans terrorist attacks and, as in other Mankell books, there is much death. At one juncture, Wallander walks among a stand of trees and tells his daughter: "I came here a week or so after your grandfather died. I felt as if I had completely lost my footing in life. You were much stronger than I was. I was sitting down at the station trying to figure out a brutal assault case. Ironically it was a young man who had half-killed his father with a sledgehammer. The boy lied about everything and suddenly I couldn't take it anymore. I halted the interrogation and came here, and that's when I felt that these trees had become gravestones for all the people I knew who had died. That I should come here to visit with them, not where they are actually buried. Whenever I'm here I feel a calm I don't feel anywhere else. I can hug the dead here without them seeing me."
Crime, Mankell says, "gives us a mirror to talk about humanity's contradictions -- man and man, man and society, man and society and dreams."
A high school dropout, Mankell can be preachy -- a didactic autodidact. Crime literature, he says, "is one of the oldest genres." It predates Edgar Allan Poe. The ancient Greeks wrote about murder and mystery and mayhem. So have other writers through the centuries. The best crime story ever written, he says, was "Macbeth" -- about a woman who urges her husband to murder someone for political gain.
And he can turn philosophical. "I don't believe we are born evil," he says. "There are only evil circumstances."
In his books, and in person, Mankell rails against those circumstances. "The ABCs book is probably the most political and dangerous book in the world," he says. "Some people want to keep others from learning to read and write."
He wags his finger. "Do you know how much it would cost to put an ABC book in the hands of every child? The same as what Europe spends on food for cats and dogs." He rants some more.
In his books, the moral lessons are more subtle.
"I like the way he deals with social issues," says Linda Laymon, a Bethesda property manager who is at the movie premiere. "They are woven into the story."
Pick up a Mankell and you know immediately that he is a practitioner of the popular postmodern No Style style -- that is, short sentences with few modifiers and almost no flourish. He writes spare sentences. But he is also a master, as Laymon says, of pinpointing societal problems and exploring them, sometimes in graphic detail. Wallander is an old fat guy who is beset by adult diabetes and other chronic and corrosive maladies, which the reader hears all about. Wallander does not shy away from life's sicknesses and sadnesses.
The character, says Ebba Segerberg, who translated "Before the Frost" into English, "is so ordinary, really, but he gets under your skin."
Mankell is quick to point out that he and Wallander don't have a whole lot in common. "We both like Italian opera," Mankell says. "We work a lot. But he's not the kind of man I would be friends with."
Mankell has quirks of his own. When he comes to New York, he likes to stay in a particular room at the Drake Hotel. If the room is not available, he will wait a week until it is. What he likes most about the room: There are no neighbors.
He has been to Washington twice before, but on this day he wants to see two landmarks he has never seen: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Watergate hotel and office complex. As he walks near the Lincoln Memorial, he asks questions about America, about its abundance and its poverty. He stands with his back against the chill wind and stares toward the east.
Then he begins to talk a little -- just a little -- about his family. And, in a weird coincidence, the bleak midwinter sun breaks through the clouds overhead.
The Mankells, he says, come from a long line of French musicians. His father, a judge, broke from tradition.
When Henning was young, his mother ran away. "There was not another man," Mankell says. "She just left."
The judge raised Mankell and two other children. There is a sister, who is a librarian, and a brother, who is a musician, with Mankell in the middle. "I didn't meet my mother until I was 15," he says. By then, there wasn't much to say.
Talking about his mother, his family, is difficult for Mankell. His face reddens; he clears his throat a lot. It could be the winter wind.
Mankell learned right and wrong from the judge, he says, and "a fierce sense of the seriousness of the system of justice." You can feel that passion in his pages. The family lived in the northern village of Sveg. Mankell's father served all of Harjedalen province -- population 2,000. In 24 years on the bench, the judge presided over no murder cases and only one manslaughter trial. Mostly folks ended up in court for hunting out of season and having children out of wedlock. There were lots of paternity suits, Mankell says.
The judge also taught his son that "in order to do anything, you have to understand the person." And Mankell was able to see that many human stories have beginnings, middles and ends.
When he was 16, Mankell dropped out of high school and eventually settled in Paris. By the time he was 20, he was writing plays. His literary career took off. His favorite playwrights are August Strindberg and Tennessee Williams. In a few weeks, Mankell will leave for Mozambique and his theater.
He doesn't watch television. He doesn't like to sit and drink coffee and waste time. He says that he and Eva do have friends over for dinner now and then. His specialty is sweet-and-sour tomato soup. "The secret," he says, "is the lemon."
For a brooder, Mankell stays busy. "This is not true, but I like to think it's true," he says. "In the Amazon forest there is a bird that flies all the time. It must fly or it will die. I am like that bird."
He wants to be buried where he dies -- in Sweden or Africa, it doesn't matter.
Until then he plans to write. He believes his Wallander novels will become more widely read in America. "It's like an express train in some countries," he says, "and a slow train in others."
Translator Segerberg agrees. From Germany she writes in an e-mail, "My impression is that he is getting more popular in the U.S., but remains more exotic there."
He's just finishing a new thriller, "Kennedy's Brain," about the global AIDS crisis. In future works, he will explore the relationship between Kurt Wallander and his daughter.
He also writes children's books. In one, he says, a cat disappears and never comes back. The book differs from most children's books about vanishing cats. Ordinarily, the pets return and there is a happy ending.
Not in Mankell's dark, out-of-the-ordinary story. When the book was published in Sweden, he says, "it created a scandal." Some critics thought Mankell's view of this planet as an uncertain vessel, full of loneliness and loss, may have crept into the tale a little too much.
None of his children's books, it turns out, have been translated for Americans.
& 2005 The Washington Post Company