Stolen

I did love the Millennium Trilogy when it was big, but haven't generally found myself otherwise drawn to Scandinavian literature. This book is in some ways representative of why that is: prose that feels flat, characters with limited emotional range, a certain kind of bleakness. I never know where to assess “blame” when I don't care for the writing style of a translated work, but I didn't find it compelling at all. The story itself also never really came together for me. A little girl, Elsa, who is Sàmi, witnesses a neighbor killing one of the family's reindeer one night, and the man threatens Elsa to remain silent. The family is part of a reindeer herding collective in their village in the traditional Sàpmi homeland of their people, and this killing is part of the overall hostility of their Swedish neighbors to the Sàmi and their way of life. The book follows the immediate aftermath of the reindeer poaching, and then switches perspective to ten years later, when Elsa is an adult who has returned to the village because she wants to continue her family's tradition as her life's work. The neighbor is still around, still threatening, still a problem. The story itself feels like it's checking off a list of issues the Sàmi face: despair/mental health challenges (particularly for the young men), police refusing to treat crimes against them with any real seriousness, tension from Swedes who believe that they receive undeserved benefits, climate change, the history of “nomad” schools which sought to forcibly integrate the indigenous population by cutting them off from their own families, languages, and traditions, tourists who treat them as living museum exhibits, as well as xenophobia and sexism within the Sàmi community itself. But that's what it feels like: box-checking. Elsa herself was also difficult character for me as a narrative center: as an adult, particularly, she's rigid and often self-righteous in a way that makes it hard to really connect with her. A nonfiction essay collection might have been the better route to take here.