Soap and sanitation are the nice things we can have.

44. The Wolf and the Watchman – Niklas Natt Och Dag

This book smells. That is, there are so many pungent, repulsive smells described that they are the first thing that comes to mind when I think about it and how I would definitely not have lived for very long with my frequent retching and asthma attacks triggered by strong smells in Stockholm in 1793. Holy shit. Pretty literally.

To help with those feelings of internal breathing struggling the smells inspired on their own, it also made me cough a lot with the descriptions of lawyer Cecil Winge’s fun with breathing. He has consumption and it is going terribly. No little cough of blood in a handkerchief for Cecil. However, despite the pitiful condition he’s in, Cecil wants to solve the murder of the mutilated torso dude they found in the sewage of the Larder before he no longer works with the police (or anyone else). Torso dude has nice hair, not much else.

The “main” two characters of Cecil and Mikel, the watchman who pulled torso dude out of the Larder and drinks too much in a reasonable response to the horrors of his life, are really only featured at the beginning and end. There are a couple of middle sections where we find out even more miserable things about how the torso dude came to be in the condition of eyeless, tongueless, limbless he was found and the story of Anna Stina, who totally gets stuck in a miserable life of destitution once her mother dies, so we do have a female perspective on all the misery too. What a relief.

I’m sure it doesn’t sound like I liked this book since I do react strongly to even the description of smells that would take me out, but I strangely did. Filth aside, well, we never really put the filth aside in this story, it was very readable and also miserable in a fun way at times. I appreciated that it was occasionally funny and weirdly tender as well. It’s very well written and it is possible to appreciate the descriptive scene setting even if it’s gross. Squalor is important too.

 

Most of the time I don’t let the guinea pig poop feature in the photos, but Horace is demonstrating the ubiquitous nature of poop in late 18th century Stockholm’s streets and lake areas and he’s very sweetly sleeping on his froggy to take the edge off.