Rounding out October's vampire reading -- not that I need a seasonal excuse to read vampire novels -- I stepped up from the tedious Stoker pastiche and the enjoyable but lightweight mystery to John Ajvide Lindqvist's impressive Let Me In (2004; English translation by Ebba Seberberg for St. Martin's Press, 2007). This is the book on which the film Let The Right One In
, which I discussed a few months ago after seeing it at Balticon, was based. I got the book soon afterward, but it's taken me quite awhile to get around to reading it. Happily, it was well worth the wait.
This should shock anyone who knows me: see the movie before reading the novel. It's not that one is better or worse than the other; it's one of the best book-to-film translations I've ever seen and does an admirable job of trimming down a hefty 400-plus page novel into a bleak, blood-splashed movie while touching on all of the important story elements. Only the goriest and most horrific subplot is eliminated, and I'm actually just as glad not to have seen one particular scene in that subplot on the screen. But the movie is enchantingly ambiguous in several ways which are eventually explained in the book. Some of these clarifications were mildly unwelcome to me; I preferred to speculate. I don't want to go into detail because, book or film, the ambiguities are too important to spoil.
So...this is the peculiar love story of twelve-year-old bullying victim Oskar and the mysterious girl(?) Eli, who -- and this line is indeed in the book -- has been twelve for a very long time. A little over two centuries, in fact. Eli is a vampire, though not undead; the distinction is important in the novel. As I did when discussing the film, I'm going to use the female pronoun for Eli, though the gender issue is definitely a lot more complicated than that. She has her Renfield-equivalent caretaker, a pedophile who is pleased to find an object of obsession that has the body of a child but the strength of character of an adult. "Squeal like a pig" is also textual, part of the ongoing abuse of Oskar by a group of schoolboys against whom Eli finally inspires him to strike back. The book is considerably more explicit about sex, violence, and other body-fluid-emitting activities than the relatively restrained movie.
The story balances the generic bleakness of suburban life in the cold and snow of Scandinavia with hot, messy splashes of anger, alcoholism, and gruesome violence, switching the story's focus among Oskar; his disaffected, glue-sniffing neighbor Tommy; a group of local alcoholics who hang out at a Chinese restaurant; Eli's pedophile; a local policeman; and eventually Eli herself. Eli's attempt to take a relatively moral approach to her survival is balanced against the horrors that even that restrained approach necessitates. This is not a romantic picture of vampirism; I was at once sympathetic to and repulsed by Eli. In her first appearances, she is beautiful but disgusting: unbathed, with blood matted in her hair, she literally stinks, and is not especially concerned about it until she notices its effect on Oskar. Her transformation into a vampire, partially explained in flashback, was horrific rather than erotic. No sparkly teenaged boys here. This is one of those very good books that doesn't leave you feeling very good at all.
My only nit-pick on the writing is that in some stretches of dialogue it could be hard to follow who is speaking; I was occasionally reduced to counting the alternation of speakers to figure out who said something. There were also a couple of weird errors which could be either authorial or translation-related: Eli at one point manages to stand on the ground and then jump down to the ground, and a sundress abruptly acquires sleeves. I found these briefly jarring, but not enough to affect my enjoyment of the story.
Let Me In is not for the squeamish, but I recommend it on sheer quality.
Shopping links for book and film:
it's one of the best book-to-film translations I've ever seen
One of the best such translations I've come across was Stephen King's The Dead Zone although, as was the case for you here, I had seen the movie first, which starred Christopher Walken as Johnny. It went to the core of the story.
Posted by: Serge | November 01, 2009 at 10:15 AM
I was really really impressed by the movie.
The one long continuous underwater shot near the end of the movie (you know what I'm talking about) is a brilliant piece of cinematography.
The movie also shows you exactly what Eli is, but in a blink-and-you-missed-it way; I'm not sure I would have got it if I'd seen it in a theater where I could not rewind and frame-forward to be sure I'd just seen what I'd seen.
I'm planning to read the book as soon as I can get to it. I know pretty much what to expect from the AV Club discussion of it; I have a high tolerance for grim, gruesome, and warped if it's well done.
Posted by: Clifton | November 08, 2009 at 02:48 AM
Clifton,
Right with you on all of this. I saw the film in a semipublic showing (at a convention) so I couldn't pause at that crucial moment; I may even have blinked. The book is quite explicit on the what and the how of it, though it does take its time before getting the information out. I'm glad I saw the film first.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | November 08, 2009 at 07:08 AM