De Profundis

After the very very remarkable Italian shoes (candidate for our best-of 2010, remember) and Tea-Bag, here Depths, another novel of the Swedish Henning Mankell that was known especially by his thrillers.
Depths tells a very strange story on the eve of the 1914 war: that Captain Lars Tobiasson-Svartman of the Swedish navy. I quote in full since the surname Lars is keen to these two names joined: his mother (Tobias ...) is supposed to protect it from that of his father ...
Captain Lars shows a rather sympathetic character: he lies continuously, quick-tempered and can get to hit, or worse.
He lies to everyone: his wife, his mistress, his colleagues and the Admiralty. Difficult to focus on this funny guy. Finally, funny is a way of speaking.
A man stranded obsessive, obsessed by the distances it considers or measure accurately: it's hydrographer, charged with plotting secret routes in the Swedish archipelago in the Baltic for ships at the dawn of the Great War. Obsessed with the distances thus, beginning with those he cares to keep between him and the others ...
Our hydrographer is obsessed by the depths he guesses or measure sea to trace roads, obsessed to the point of sleeping with his teddy bear as a probe.
During these missions at sea or on the ice, Captain Lars will meet a woman half lost on a fisherman's island. It also falls obsessively in love he was its navy probe and eventually wandered into a lie lie between Stockholm and his wife this woman on her ice island.
An almost Kafkaesque story with, in the background, description of uncompromising Swedish Navy where, despite the declared neutrality, although officers are struggling to hide their sympathies for the fleet of Kaïser which will not fail to put the British mash these arrogant.
From all this we doubt that nothing good will come: some sink into madness, while others will sink into the depths of short icy waters and the world itself sink gradually into the horror of the years war.
Obviously some are obvious parallels between the naval officer and Lars Fredrik Welin surgeon Italian Shoes: two men lost on their island, carefully holding "others" off and only the ice and cold connect the world. ..
It still had found the novel much more successful shoes and especially more enjoyable to read, if only because it was a little less pessimistic than those dark depths.
For those who love the stories of sea, even frosted.