God’s Mercy is a captivating tale of life in northern Sweden in the early part of the 20th Century. Hillevia is a young, recently educated midwife who moves from Uppsala, a university town just north of Stockholm, to a forested area of northern Sweden called Blackwater in March 1916. It is amidst and inhabited by the Sami people, known to English speakers as Lapps. Life is not easy here. It is a land where there are eight seasons, each of which dictate the rhythm of survival and existence. Life here, Hillevia notes several years later, is “full of invisible agreements among the people,” agreements that are “in a language etched into the very earth.” The people live largely from working timber or herding reindeer. Not only do economic strata arise, so do language and cultural differences among the Norwegians, Swedes and Lapps, the last often viewed as inferior.

When Hillevia is called on for her first delivery, it is at the home of a poor family in a remote village. The family patriarch is less than pleased by or accommodating to Hillevia’s presence. She is a newcomer, an outsider, intruding upon those who are outsiders themselves. The experience and its aftermath change her and the life of a boy in the house, Elis. Elis runs away from his family. Hillevia is left questioning the nature and extent of God’s mercy.

The novel follows both Hillevia and Elis over the next several decades. There are two narrative perspectives for Hillevia’s story. One is hers, the other is Risten, a younger woman whose relationship to Hillevia is not clear until later in the novel. Hillevia comes to develop her own sense of place there, loving the area and its people, even marrying and having a family. Yet some still view her as an outsider, a transplant from a higher social and economic class who is not part of their sense of place. The concept not only is the stage on which the story is played out but helps portray the people and Hillevia.

Elis’ story, meanwhile, has echoes of a Dickens character, as he combats abuse, illness and poverty to become an artist. He, too, is an outsider but in the reverse of Hillevia’s. Despite his talent, he struggles for acceptance in the cities and among the urbane society to which his art introduce him. His character, though, does not feel as developed and real as Hillevia’s and he can come off as almost a tangential part of the story. Yet Eckman’s time developing Hillevia’s story and the sense of place that imbues it is time very well spent.

The book, translated by Linda Schenk, is the first in Ekman’s “Wolfskin” trilogy. The other two novels follow the destinies of the characters in God’s Mercy, and their descendants, through the end of the 20th Century. Ekman has been widely translated and Blackwater is the locale for and title of what is perhaps her best known novel in the U.S., a detective thriller. God’s Mercy is her first work in the European Women Writers Series published by the University of Nebraska Press and is certainly a worthy addition.

Kerstin Ekman, God’s Mercy

Kertész, an Auschwitz survivor, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, the first Hungarian author to do so. Originally published in Hungary in 1977, Detective Story is actually set in a fictitious Latin American country. Its appearance in the U.S. this year sadly reinforces it is still relevant.

Detective Story actually has three narrators. The main one is Antonio Rojas Martens, a career policeman who transfers into “the Corps,” a secret police outfit. His story, however, is introduced by a defense attorney representing Martens, who has admitted to and been convicted of various counts of murder after the regime he served has itself been overthrown. Essentially, Martens wants to explain his involvement with and what happened to “Federigo and Enrique Salinas, father and son, proprietors of the chain of department stores that are dotted all over our country, whose deaths so astounded people.” In so doing, Martens quotes extensively from Enrique’s diary, which was confiscated in a search of the Salinas home, making Enrique co-narrator of the memoir (although it beggars the imagination that Martens would have access to the diary while incarcerated.)

The country, led by “the Colonel,” has become a totalitarian society in which surveillance is endemic. “There are these police types everywhere, eavesdropping, sniffing around, and they think nobody is paying any attention to them,” Enrique notes in his diary. “They’re right, too, people don’t pay them any attention. All it has taken is a few months, and already they have grown accustomed to them.” For example, the Corps shoots 120 rolls of film when Enrique spends a bit of time at the beach with a group of college-aged acquaintances Martens calls “shaggy-haired weirdos.”

Enrique’s diary reveals that he is chafing under the government’s state of emergency, particularly since it has closed the universities. But other than what Orwell called “thoughtcrime,” Enrique has done nothing to attract the attention of the Corps, other than to be photographed with the presumably subversive “weirdos.” That matters not. “Any person who was in the records was going to end up a suspect sooner or later, no question,” Martens writes. Moreover, simply being in the records meant “Enrique was going to perpetrate something sooner or later. As far as we were concerned, his fate was sealed, even if he himself had not yet made up his mind.”

Thus, Kertész blends the Orwellian world with a Kafkaesque one. Whether Enrique or his father are guilty of treason or trying to overthrow the government is wholly irrelevant. They, like almost anyone else in the country, are powerless to change their destiny. Having been identified as a potential threat to “Homeland security” due only to association, Enrique and, in turn, his father are inexorably entangled in the jaws of the leviathan. Detective Story is, thus, like many detective novels. The story isn’t in the end result, it’s what brought the characters to that end.

At just more than 100 pages, this is more a novella than a novel. It is written in sparse, straightforward prose, something retained in Tim Wilkinson’s translation. In fact, Detective Story was on the longlist for the first annual Best Translated Book Award. Characters are portrayed more from a psychological standpoint than any other. Martens seeks to expiate his conscience, noting that although the Corps “brainwashed” him, it wasn’t enough. Yet he still invokes some bit of excuse, saying that as the “new boy” on his interrogation team, “I was aware that a different yardstick applied here at the Corps, but I thought there was at least a yardstick.”

Enrique’s conscience is similarly plagued by guilt, but guilt over the benefits his family’s status affords him and the perceived complacency of the citizenry, himself included. He expressly takes an existential view of the meaninglessness of life under the current regime and he burns to do something, anything, to bring value to his life. His father’s conscience, meanwhile, will suffer the repercussions of his own deceptions.

Thus, the power of Detective Story is not in its character description but showing how easily it is for evil to be viewed as a temporary necessity until it simply becomes accepted. As the defense attorney says in introducing the story, “Let me add, not in his defense but merely for the sake of the truth, that this horror story was written not by Martens alone but by reality, too.”

Imre Kertész, Detective Story

Every Man Dies Alone is far from the perfect novel. No one would expect it to be given the fact Fallada, the pseudonym for Rudolf Ditzen, wrote it in 24 days. From today’s perspective, his style tends to reflect the era in which the book was written. Additionally, he likes to wander a bit and uses coincidence as a plot mechanism perhaps a bit too much. Even with such flaws, the book deserves to be on plenty of this year’s “best of” lists.

Every Man Dies Alone is based on the true story of a married couple who dropped postcards containing anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler messages throughout Berlin during World War II. In fact, the book includes reproductions of the Gestapo file on that case, including photos of several of the cards. Here, the couple is Otto and Anna Quangel, whose campaign begins after their only son is killed in the Nazi victory over France in 1940. Otto is a taciturn, staid foreman in a factory that goes from producing furniture before the war to coffins as the war progresses. Anna is a homemaker who, despite her self-imposed subordination, is close to an equal partner in their crusade.

The book, translated by Michael Hofmann, essentially follows the investigation into their campaign and those — both noble and despicable — whose lives somehow intersect with their defiance. There’s plenty of people who are directly or indirectly swept up or affected by their actions. They include Eva Kluge, the postal worker who delivers their son’s death notice; other residents of their apartment building, from petty crook Emil Borkhausen to ardent and brutal Hitler Youth member Baldur Persickes to retired Judge Fromm. There’s also the fiancée of the Quangels’ son, the investigators, Anna’s brother and sister-in-law, and Enno Kluge, Eva’s ne’er-do-well, estranged husband who gets caught up in Emil Borkhausen’s mischief.

Although the fact Fallada approaches the story from the investigative standpoint might lead one to think it’s a thriller, it isn’t. Rather, this is a book about life in exceedingly difficult times and how people react both ethically and morally. Fallada, who died in 1947 just weeks before the book was published, gives us a story that examines and raises the question of the value and impact of resistance. Each ensuing chapter takes us through another step in the investigation or the events that unalterably impact the lives of each character, always crafted with an almost palpable sense of dread.

While I don’t usually put much stock in book blurbs, the statement on the front cover by Holocaust survivor and memoirist Primo Levi right on the mark: “”The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis.” That is particularly a huge statement given that Fallada is German. Yet that is perhaps what makes Every Man Dies Alone so powerful. It comes from someone who lived under the Nazi regime, who was familiar with the fear and surveillance, who was one of millions who, to at least some extent, went along to get along. But the book looks at the converse: what if you don’t go along.

It is not the story of a broad-based and wide-ranging resistance movement. It is not the story of a pattern or campaign of industrial or other sabotage. It is simply a story of individual conscience on the part of an older couple. “At least I stayed decent,” Otto Quangel says at one point. “I didn’t participate.” Theirs is a story of resistance undertaken without knowing whether it produces results. It is a story of the ramifications of even mild defiance in a society where the Hitler and the Nazis are “everything, and the people nothing.”

There is little doubt even such small acts of resistance are courageous. The more profound question is whether they ultimately have has any meaning after balancing the personal principles and redemption against the likely futility and body count. In exploring this dilemma, Every Man Dies Alone is a remarkable success.

Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone