Finnish writer Monika Fagerholm's followup to The American Girl evokes the sunless settings of other contemporary Scandinavian thrillers, but this enigmatic trove of disjointed scenes and images is more about creating a huge, eerie mind painting than it is about entertaining weekend readers at the beach. There is a murder mystery set in an unnamed Finnish coastal region at the center of The Glitter Scene, but it is background color to the brushstrokes of assaulting, affecting prose poetry that Fagerholm paints with here.
The story unfolds glacially, non sequiturs repeated over and over amid stream-of-consciousness dialogue from multiple characters until it all falls into surprising coherence hundreds of pages later. The central mystery: What happened in 1969 to Bjorn and the American girl? Did he became jealous of her friendship with his "cousin" Bengt, and push her to her death in Bule Marsh, then kill himself out of horror afterward? In 2006, Bengt's daughter, Johanna, is intrigued and horrified by her family's role in the local romantic death legend, but her flamboyant classmate, Ulla, taunts her with the tale. Each of these and other characters has ugly, violent secrets, and what is assumed at the beginning of the book becomes very different by the end.
Paired with the bleak, cold beauty of its setting, The Glitter Scene's misanthropy and convoluted narrative style make for challenging reading. But the artistry of so many words spinning like random snowflakes until they finally assemble themselves into a frightening snow sculpture is undeniable. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic