Book Club: "The Chestnut Man" by Søren Sveistrup
“The Chestnut Man” by Søren Sveistrup
Trigger warnings: murder, sexual violence, violence, sexual violence towards children, child abuse, Danish misogyny, kidnapping
Rating: a cumulative 4 — 4.25 from Shannon, 3.75 from Moira and Elizabeth
Last Sunday night, we convened a fairly epic video chat. (Note for next month: we will impose a time limit because this was an extensive conversation – we’re still learning).
Moira was drinking wine out of coupe glass, Elizabeth was trying some really bougie cider, and Shannon had some red wine, too. What follows is a slightly edited version of our conversation. Settle in – maybe with a beverage yourself – and read our thoughts on “The Chestnut Man” by Søren Sveistrup. It goes without saying that spoilers abound, as does friendly chatter and some mild cursing.
Elizabeth: Okay. “Chestnut Man.”
Shannon: I read this book like a month ago, and you both finished today, so that's cool.
Elizabeth: I meant to read it earlier in the month, I just kept putting it off.
Shannon: I guess: did we even like it? I liked it a lot.
Moira: I liked it. I didn't love it. It was very slow at the beginning, even though it like starts with murders. It strikes me as very masculine, like the whole thing. I didn't feel like a huge connection to anyone and so, and I think that's why it took me so long to really get into it.
Shannon: I liked the main character. I didn’t like the the situation she was in, where the deck was stacked against her. I liked her, but I thought there was something, I kept thinking there was going to be something weird with who she kept calling Grandfather.
Moira: Interesting. I didn't have that impulse.
Elizabeth: I thought it was weird that she had a daughter that only seemed like kind of an inconvenience to her life? And then it was like, we’re not related, this guy just watches my kid? I’m going to need a little a little bit more information. Yeah. But I also think like kids aren't in comedians. So you just paid, pardon it.
Moira: Have you seen his show “The Killing”? (EE: No, Shannon: No) The characters are very similar, especially like the main character being a single mom and being about to move jobs. That's the whole premise of the killing. Like she's about to change jobs and then this huge murder case comes through. It's so similar, and I think it was so successful with “The Killing” that why change it?
Shannon: Um, so nuts. I learned a lot about chestnuts.
Elizabeth: I didn’t know that that Chestnut dolls were a thing. I feel like that must be a Scandinavian thing? Honestly, this book made me glad I don't live in Denmark because like I felt like the entire book was like a little abrupt, like the way that they speak, the way that they respond.
Moira: Yeah, it reminds me of Jo Nesbo books. It’s like that Hemingway machine gun sentence structure.
Shannon: I don't know. I liked something about it. I felt like, and again, I read this a month ago and I didn't really refresh my memory like I should have, but I just felt like it kept the pace. The writing helps quicken the pace because the pace of the book actually was not fast.
Elizabeth: I felt like it took me like 10 days to get through the first 150 pages. I was like, Shannon really liked this book, why is it taking me so long?
Moira: It took me probably four days to get through the first 150 pages and I just ended up picking up another book and reading it. Cause I was like, Oh, “I have time this weekend.” I wasn't super feeling it for that time, but then something like clicked and it, it really did for me.
Elizabeth: I actually made a note that it was like page 198 or something when I got invested in the story. Let me see what happened on page 198. Well, page 198 is when Hess finds the pedophile dungeon. Until that point, I was just kind of like, “well, I'm going to read this, but I'm not really seeing what Shannon liked about it.” I mean, honestly, I was like, “am I going to have to be at book club and be like, shrug emoji?”
Shannon: It sounds like I liked it the best. I don't know. I read it on vacation, and I read it for fun, not knowing it was going to be our book club read. I thought it was an interesting novel.
[chatter about wine delivery, our soon to be launched feature #cheesefulloflit, gentlemen friends making appearances, and EE’s adorable niece as baby shark]
Elizabeth, trying to get us back on track: Moira, you said you kind of guessed the ending
Moira: Yes. The second that they said that Rosa was a foster child, I was like, here’s what I think this is. It wasn’t entirely accurate, but it was like halfway.
Shannon: I had some things similar too, but every time I read a book like this, I basically try to come up with scenarios for anyone to be the bad guy. I'm like, “it could be this person because X, Y and Z, or it could be that person because X, Y, and Z.” It's probably the not the best way to read it.
Elizabeth: No, I think that's a really valid way to do it. I thought I was going to be her advisor because he seemed really creepy.
Shannon: I thought it was going to be Grandfather because he was just weird. It felt like we never met him, and he was just a stranger watching the kid. I mean that was like the more obvious red herring because it was like, who the fuck is this dude that she is leaving her child with?
Moira: There were so many names that I had a hard time. The guy that did it, he was the head of the crime lab? He’s the one that figured out the fingerprint thing – well, I guess it makes it easier to figure it out if you staged it.
Elizabeth: It made me think about nature versus nurture because it sounds like he was like just truly a psychopath, and he would have been regardless of the foster family situation. [Vigorous head shaking from the other two] You don’t think he was born nuts? He was an 11-year-old that just murdered a family of five people.
Shannon: No, I know, but also think about what they saw there -- what brought them there? His twin didn’t turn out well.
Elizabeth: Didn’t they say she was bi-polar?
Moira: He doesn’t understand mental illness. The twin sister wasn’t bipolar. The random nurse was bipolar. I think nature in almost any circumstance is less than a quarter.
Shannon: The twin was just seemed like she was letting life just happen to her. She was the way she was because she had been so abused. I think, she just shut down and would do whatever her brother said just because…
Elizabeth: I think she was like obviously scarred and her brother again had some tendencies of being a psychopath, and he definitely took advantage of that.
Shannon: But I think it can come out in like different ways. Like, yeah, I think that he was probably predisposed to be like that, but if he hadn't been in that (childhood) situation, maybe he wouldn't be a murderer? Maybe he would just be like a fucking psycho to date. You know what I mean? Like I think people come out in different ways depending on the nurture.
Elizabeth: I don't know, there was just a lot, like I knew it was going to be a violent book. Like, don't get me wrong, but like so much, like...
Moira: Gratuitous violence! Actually, that was my point that I forgot that I felt that from the beginning there was so much gratuitous violence that it pulled me out of it rather than then investing me in it. I read plenty of violent things obviously, but it was so gory that it was ineffective. It's like “Saw” for me. I love scary movies, but “Saw” isn't appealing to me because at that point the gore seems like in order to take it in I just have to find it silly rather than actually comprehend the like grotesqueness of it. And, so it doesn't scare me.
Elizabeth: Same! I don’t know if you ever saw the movie “The Watchmen” but it was the same thing, like where they cut off somebody's head and blood just like spurts in fountains into the air. That's how I felt when they were cutting off Rosa's hand. Like it became comical to me because it's you get the description of him in the blue gloves and the forensic suit. It didn’t help that didn't feel connected to Rosa either. Like obviously those are fictional characters, I don’t love reading about people getting tortured but like I didn't really feel like we knew her.
Shannon: Yeah, I felt far more connected to [Rosa’s] husband who would have those bouts where he was just so grief-stricken. I know the book picked up a year after Kristine disappeared, but he got to be so emotional. Wasn’t Rosa one of the few women in the ministry, so she was probably trying to make it seem like she had it all together?
Elizabeth: She was, she was just going back to work for like the first time after Kristine disappeared.
Moira: Am I understanding that in Norway you’re able to take the year off when something like that happens? Come on, in the U.S., you get two weeks before you have to be back in the child death provision. You get two weeks unpaid actually, you have to pay back the money you made before we'll be prorating your vacation time.
Elizabeth: I definitely think it was a case of stiff upper lip, but that made me not particularly like her. Yeah, it's horrific who they give somebody like strapped to a gurney, getting their whole hand cut off. Like I am not a sociopath, I am not the fucking Chestnut Man. But it's also so ridiculous. If it had it been Thulin, I would have been more stressed because I felt like I knew her better.
Moira: I don't feel like we knew anyone, I feel like the person we got the best insight into is Hess. Um, but I do think that for me the best chapter is where you find out how Rosa sold out her foster siblings. I thought that was excellent. That was the chapter that made me be like, “Oh holy shit.” Like this is something that a child would clearly do, not understanding the consequences of it, and then that's something you would feel guilt about the rest of your life. To me, that was the best writing in the book.
Elizabeth: Do you think it was the guilt over that is like kind of what steered her like toward this career path?
Shannon: Yeah, that's definitely what was implied. She’s like, I'm a foster, I was a foster kid. I totally get it.
Moira: Did it turn out that Genz found all of the women because he wrote all of the letters? Or did he find them because of the hospital records, frame them and the go after them?
Elizabeth: I think he found them – he knew that the guy who confessed to Kristine’s murder had hacked the system to see the crime scene photos to masturbate to? Also a totally normal hobby.
Shannon: Yeah, he just confessed because he was an admirer of the Chestnut Man. And liked to find dead women to masturbate to.
Elizabeth: I didn’t like that’s how the book ended – like, going out into the world, and seeing a single mom, and being like, oh, I’ve found a way to entertain myself. I don’t need that.
Moira: Yeah, there are creeps everywhere; that didn’t stop just because they got the Chestnut Man. I don’t find it totally plausible either, that he’d move from just being a creep to killing people. I don’t need a random sexual predator, but it did feel like the author was setting it up for a sequel now that Genz is dead.
Shannon: I don’t need everything to have a sequel.
Elizabeth: Honestly? When I read it the first time, I didn’t realize that Genz had impaled himself on the chestnut tree. That seemed a little too on the nose for me. I read it, and he died in front of Hess, and I didn’t realize he died whilst impaled. That seems more like made for TV, not made for a book kind of thing.
Shannon: Yes, that’s when you can definitely tell he’s a TV writer. I had that thought multiple times, and it did occur to me multiple times that like, “Oh, this would make so much more sense if I could see this on screen,” or “like that's actually a really great scene for a movie.” If this were a television show, it'd be way easier to keep track of all these characters that we’re not really emotionally invested in.
Elizabeth: I know like the Danish Scandinavian writing style is very, I would say spare, like not a lot of extra descriptors or anything like that. Now that you say that, it reads like episodic TV.
Moira: I'm glad I finished it, but had I picked it up on my own, I don't think I would have gotten through the beginning. Since I felt like I had to, I forced myself to get past that like 200 page hump. I then would have finished it definitely. But if I had just picked it up and like read 20 pages, I don't think I would've finished it.
Elizabeth: I liked it, I just didn’t feel moved by it. And this was a book where a lot of emotional things happened – this book has lots of deaths, lots of dismemberments, and I’m not emotionally upset by it. I just kind of read it, and I went “okay.” Not particularly like, “oh my God, this character I really like, he’s cut her hand off, the monster!”
Shannon: We didn’t get to know the characters, but I felt like this book wasn’t about the people, it was about the string of murders, not the victims, per se. They were all so different, and they could have been anyone.
Elizabeth: It’s a bit of a cliché that both Hess and Thulin are troubled genius detectives. I wish we had found out more about their backstories – how did his wife die? Who is Thulin’s co-parent?
Moira: Abortion is definitely less common in Scandinavia - I do feel like more people have children in non-serious relationships over there because the social services are so much better, and I kind of love that.
[yada yada yada about bureaucratic red tape, Moira’s depressed cha cha, and crimes following you across state lines. Oh, and you should listen to the Glamour podcast “Broken Harts” so we can talk about it.]
Elizabeth: So how did you feel about the end of the book?
Shannon: They went to wherever Genz had been fostered on the farm, and I have no scale of how big Denmark is, but everything seems to be close to Copenhagen. He grabbed Rosa and he cut off her hand.
Elizabeth: And then there was the ridiculous car thing – he was there and then he was in the tree?
Moira: The mental image of someone being ejected from a car, flying through the air, and landing on the branch of a tree was pretty fucking fun.
Elizabeth: I have no clue what a chestnut looks like tbh.
[frantic googling of chestnut dolls commences from all three of us]
Shannon: Oh god. I wish I had looked them up before I read this book. They are not just nuts with matches as arms, they are terrifying. Oh, apparently, Chestnut Man has been picked up by a Netflix team?
Moira: Holy shit, that’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. Why do they let children make these dolls? What did I tell you there? It's already been picked up by Netflix team. That's what I thought. I'm here for that.
Shannon: I just felt like it all came together very quickly after that. Like it was like boom, boom, boom, Germany! Wow, let’s wrap that up quickly. So the other stuff is that the Kristine thing is a little bit too Elizabeth Smart for me, there's no way that she recovered immediately.
Elizabeth: Same with Gustav being very about getting kidnapped and left in the woods with some murdered people. Like is that like some Danish fortitude that I don't understand?
Moira: They are more emotionally strong and aggressive. You have to be to make it through winter. Although their winters aren't even that cold. It's just dark and then well, and sunlight for 23 hours a day in the summer. That would make anyone crazy. Yes, I saw Midsommar. I know they're all psycho killers. Um, even though that was Sweden, that's close. I didn't find it that sad. I've had like more emotional reaction to someone getting my coffee order wrong.
Shannon: I've been there. Someone called me Janine at Starbucks two weeks ago. They always just put that I am Janine. My name is not Janine, but thank you.
Elizabeth: Well like how do they get Janine?
[this was something you would only find amusing if you knew us in real life. Just trust me here]
Moira: So things that you found particularly effective in the book? I thought the premise of having these negligent parents punished in the outsized way for what they had done was pretty effective. Like, clearly something a sick person does to compensate for something done to them. Although I did find it pretty gross that they punished the first victim for her fiancé’s crimes.
Elizabeth: Well that was what I was about to say. That from the psychology of Genz, the man was the one that hurt his sister, and the woman just facilitated it by holding the video camera. But he focused on punishing the women, which is like obviously his misogyny is not the most terrible part of his behavior. But I did find it interesting that he fixated on Rosa and then the three female victims, even though they may not necessarily have been the most at fault.
Moira: Like this man sees women as they're supposed to be protectors, and if they aren't doing their job as a maternal protective person, then their fault is greater because men are dirty and disgusting and do things.
Shannon: Yeah. Well it was interesting that the first, not counting Rosa and Kristine, but the first victim, her fiancé or whoever was the one who was a pedophile. The second one, the husband was beating the kids. The third one, she was a single mom. It did seem like she was a little negligent but like not like “deserves to be brutally murdered negligent.” No. It wasn't the clearest pattern actually looking at the behavior of the women.
Elizabeth: I actually thought about that and there were like some very sexist comments about Thulin in the book. It kind of made me feel a little bit icky. Admittedly this month I've read “Catch and Kill,” and I’ve read “Know My Name.” I feel like I’m very “rah rah, I hate men” at the moment. I’ve gone Full Shannon.
[laughter, nature of European curse words]
Elizabeth: Neither of them are the bad guy in this situation. But I was like, why are we like giving Hess a pass and all she's doing is like doing her job, but male coworkers hate her?
Shannon: I thought it was just pointing out the misogyny.
Elizabeth: I don't think the author is a misogynist, but I did find it interesting that like, it was all these female victims, and I never watched “The Killing,” so I'm not sure if that's inherent throughout.
[We don’t want to get into it here because there are no spoilers, and Moira ruined the end of Twin Peaks]
Moira: I don't think necessarily that's his default, but I just also have this thing with the entertainment value of chopping up women's bodies is such a gross common horror trope. And like, why is it that dismembering a woman is more appealing than a man? And it's a really gross dynamic that I don't like.
Elizabeth: I'd actually find it more sharpening if it was a male murderer murdering deadbeat men. Like I'd be like that to be our new hero.
Shannon: Yeah, this isn’t really my area – I don’t watch horror movies, and I read thrillers but not as many as you, Momo, and I’m just not as attuned to it. But, yes, I agree. It is definitely a trope, but since I haven’t read as much, it didn’t jump out to me.
Elizabeth: I really just thought it was interesting that it appeared that he had been most brutalized by the male figures in his life as his victim and chose women as his victims.
Shannon: Why would he even know to take it out on Rosa?
Moira: He overheard it or something. II feel she mentioned that like they were in the hall or she saw a figure in the hall when she was telling the story and they're taking the siblings away.
Shannon: Because it seemed like Rosa was the one that he was really trying to get back at. He was trying to prove that whatever version of Copenhagen child services couldn't do their jobs properly. It just seemed like the entire plot was getting back at her and that the mothers were collateral damage, so to speak.
Moira: I liked the subplot with the nurse and her baby daddy. It was just too convenient, I feel like. So at no point did I believe they did it. I guess it wasn't effective in being in terms of being a red herring. But I did just find it interesting.
Shannon: The fact that they were so wrecked by their baby taken away was a lot. But it appeared to be good for the baby that the kid was removed? They weren’t good parents.
[at this point, Elizabeth went on a tangent about foster rates in the U.S. versus Denmark that turned into the advantages of the parliamentary system when it comes to making social changes and you should be glad you missed that tbh]
Shannon: When she found the hands in the fridge, it was like, “Oh, it's fake. Obviously someone put it in.” I should have started to suspect Genz because until that point, I didn’t suspect it. I try to come up with different scenarios, where it could be Rosa’s assistant, it could be Grandfather. I was trying to come up with someone like Nylander, so I wasn’t super super surprised, but I liked the way that it unfolded and I didn’t see until we found that Rosa was a foster child.
Elizabeth: As I said, I liked it a lot. I had to rate it, you know, I rate by like genre, so I'd rate it against other thrillers I have read, I'd say 3.75.
Moira: I was literally about to say 3.75.
Shannon: I liked it. I’d say 4.25.
Moira: I liked it. I didn't love it. If it did not take me 200 pages to get into it, I think I would have liked it.
Elizabeth: I'd give it a better rating if, if it had grabbed me from the get-go.
[Shannon showed that she’s a true monster and ordered delivery at 9:30 on a Sunday night. Moira and Elizabeth were appropriately aghast]
Elizabeth: Roundly, we would give it a four as our average?
Moira: Also, now that I’ve seen what a chestnut man looks like, I’m making them for you as your Christmas present. Covering it in glitter.
Elizabeth: I wasn’t expecting it to look four acorns with matches sticking out of it like that was what it was in my head. Is that actually what it is? I do wish I looked it up to confirm how fucking creepy it was. Think about seeing hundreds of those in a room with murdered people
Shannon: I also thought it was very creepy. They were like, Oh yeah, she sells them in a roadside stall. I was like, is that a thing for children in Denmark? Absolutely. Lemonade stands for creepy dolls.
Moira: Why is this a thing in Scandinavia – like a generational thing? Like, things are so dark there that they have to make dolls out of nuts and matches?
Shannon: I have a small apartment, I don't need clutter.
Elizabeth: You do know that I'm now going locate chestnuts and then hide Chestnut Man doll in your apartment over the weekend.
Moira: I did like the image of him lighting the Chestnut Man on fire and throwing it into the basement. It would have been a lovely TV moment, too.
Elizabeth: Wow, we have gone on some weird tangents. I don’t think we’re going to be getting an author comment on this one. Don’t forget, we still need to pick a book for November.
…and that’s where we will end it. Yes, we did make a choice for November, and it will be announced over on Instagram soon. Hope you enjoyed the inaugural meeting of the She’s Full of Lit Book Club!
