Another Time, Another Life: The Story of a Crime
Written by Leif G. W. Persson
Narrated by Erik Davies
3.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
In 1975, six young people stormed the West German embassy in Stockholm, taking the entire staff hostage. They demanded the immediate release of members of the Baader-Meinhof group being held as prisoners in West Germany, but twelve hours into the siege, the embassy was blown up, two hostages were dead, and many others were injured, including the captors. Thus begins Leif G.W. Persson's Another Time, Another Life.
The story, based on real events linked to the still-unsolved assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, picks up in 1989, as the seemingly unrelated stabbing death of a civil servant is investigated by officers Bo Jarnebring and Anna Holt. Under the supervision of their cantankerous, prejudiced, and corrupt superior, Evert Bäckström, the case gets surreptitiously swept under the rug, and the victim is tied to a string of sex-related crimes, despite evidence to the contrary.
Another ten years pass before the confounding truth about the murder victim is unearthed. Just as Lars Martin Johansson, a friend of Jarnebring's, begins his tenure as the head of the Swedish Security Police, he inherits two files from his predecessor, one of which is on the murder victim-who turns out to have been a collaborator in the 1975 embassy takeover. Revealed now are not only the identities of the other collaborators but also the identity of the murderer: an intelligent, capable lawyer a heartbeat away from the top position in Sweden's Ministry of Defense. With masterfully interlaced plotlines pulled from the darkest corners of political power and corruption, Another Time, Another Life bristles with wit, insight, and intensity.
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Reviews for Another Time, Another Life
70 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting, but not quite as layered & complex as I had expected from reading Between Summers longing...
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book takes us from the (factually real) bombing of the West German embassy in Stockholm in 1975 to a (fictional) murder investigation in 1989, and finally to a revisiting of that murder in 1999 when a link to the 1975 event suggests itself. The book, in making use of a real life event from 1975, and later documenting the establishment of the swedish secret security service in order to contextualise to some degree the fictional story, blends the real with the fictional in a way that serves to emphasise (as I see it) Persson's desire to have his works act as a form of commentary on aspects of Swedish society. Therefore there is much more to his books than just the fictional storyline, and the reader needs to be aware of this in order to fully understand what is going on and what the author is attempting. It ought to be said too that the author's expertise as a criminologist, his advisory role to the Swedish Justice ministry and his standing in that respect, lends some weight and authenticity to the book. The book offers plenty of insight into police behaviour and into the various police characters involved in the different events and time frames, with the sexism and bigotry present to some degree in the previous book even more obvious in this. That said, there is a mix of sympathetic police characters and some less than so. This book is a mix of police procedural, political satire and psychological study, and of added interest maybe to the reader with an interest in the murkier side of politics and the establishment. It should be said too that the pace is slow, but that is Persson's style. The one place where I started to lose interest,ironically enough, was towards the middle of the book when, after the 1989 murder investigation, the author goes about describing events around the fall of the Berlin wall, the rush to get hands on former East German intelligence and the establishment of the Swedish secret police. A second reading and I would be better prepared for this venture into documentary and away from the core storyline for an albeit brief time. This book for me was a big improvement on his first (Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End), but its lack of pace and ventures into documentary meant for me it fell just short of 4 stars (out of five). 3.5 stars from me.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The synopsis above gives you a pretty good plot outline without giving everything away. So it remains for me to tell you what I thought of it. ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER LIFE is #2 in a trilogy of police procedurals featuring detectives Bo Jarnebring and Lars Johansson. It is currently the only one of the trilogy to be translated into English.To be honest it took me quite a while to get used to what appeared to be the author's sardonic tone. He seemed to have a very poor opinion of both the Swedish police and the secret police, the quality of their personnel and their investigative capabilities. Persson also explores the forms that corruption can take. Sometimes I found his cynicism unpleasant to the point of being distracting.At times I felt lost in the descriptions of political events from 1975 onwards in Sweden in particular although I already had some general knowledge of them. The connections between the events of 1975, 1989 and 1999 weren't obvious at the beginning and made for quite a complicated plot.Persson explores some interesting philosophical ideas too - among them that justice is not always best served by carrying out the letter of the law. Retribution can come in other forms and can even be self-administered.Will I read another? I found the characters of Lars Johansson and Bo Jarnebring intriguing, and so I probably will, should another become available in English.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Combining slapstick humor at the expense of lazy cops; international intrigue and espionage at the highest levels of government; and a dose of serious political commentary, the moral of Leif Persson's novel is simple. As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Persson is a psychological profiler and adviser to the Swedish Ministry of Justice, and therefore has had intimate knowledge of the kinds of high crimes and low comedy that he writes about. And there are pointers in the book to how he views the creative process. The protagonist, Johansson is a crusty, brilliant policeman. When Mattei, a brilliant police researcher reports that she could "write a whole novel" about the suspect, Johansson muses that if she ever published a book about the case, he would put her into jail. And Mattei tells a colleague, "I don't know how to explain it, but to me it's often been the case that a really good novel has more to say about what we're really like as human beings than the gloomy accounts of people and their lives that we compile here."
"On the subject of the imagination, thought Johansson, it's probably only when that takes over that even a reasonably good story takes off and the people really come to life. What was true and what was false was actually a rather overvalued distinction. Wasn't it the case that the really great truths, the eternal truths, could only be given life and substance by means of the human imagination?"In the end we can't know how much of the book is drawn from history and case files, and how much is reality, thinly disguised as fiction. Perssson is on a level with other masters of crime fiction who combine story telling with social commentary, including: Xialong, Mankell, Larsson, Sjowall & Wahloo.