ENG 215 Module 7 Lecture Notes The Human Monster: John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Handling the Undead This lecture introduces you to the characters of the novel before you begin reading. Here, I wish to highlight some basic character traits and the purpose of each character to guide your reading. Please be attentive to your own expectations and see if you feel they are met by the end of the novel. John Ajvide Lindqvist Before discussing the characters, though, here is a brief biography of our author. John Ajvide Lindqvist is a contemporary Swedish author, born in 1968. After a career as a magician and stand-up comedian, he became a writer of horror stories. His books are published in 29 countries. He is best known for his vampire tale, Let Me In or Let the Right One In (depending on the translation), which was adapted to films in Sweden and the United States. Like Handling the Undead, Let Me In defies expectations of vampire fiction, creating a surprising amount of empathy for the novel’s vampire. Lindqvist’s work overall, then, tends to push readers to view circumstances in a different, even jarring, way. His work, therefore, raises important philosophical questions as well as entertains. He’s often referred to as the Swedish Stephen King. David and Eva David and Eva set the tone early on. The second chapter of the book, entitled “What have I done to deserve this?” starts with David, and the first word is “Death. .” alone in italics on the top of the page followed by two more mentions of death, yet another being “Death. .” capitalized in italics as its own paragraph. When Eva arrives home and asks what’s up, he replies, “Death, death, death.” As Eva and Magnus walk down the sidewalk away from him, David thinks, “What if I never saw them again. .” Before any hint of this being a novel about zombies, David is obsessing about death, worrying for no apparent reason about his wife and son dying. Is David suffering from a psychological disorder? Or is this perfectly normal behavior, perhaps thoughts we all think but don’t necessarily share? What is it about Eva and Magnus that would make David have these thoughts? As the novel progresses, David shows incredible love and devotion to his family. Eva is his reason for being, his foundation, so he fears losing her. It’s also important that we get this early glimpse into happy family life, so be attentive to that. Mahler and Anna Nothing is more painful than losing a child, and we see Mahler and Anna’s all- encompassing grief after six-year old Elias’s accidental death. Both seem to blame themselves and to share their grief with Mahler taking Anna meals to her apartment just across the courtyard from his. But they respond quite differently to Elias’s return, and you want to track this in your reading and think about why. There are important differences between them, of course. Anna is Elias’s mother, making for an incredible bond, whereas Mahler is his grandfather, important, surely, but perhaps not as central to Elias’s life. Mahler has been a driven career man his whole adult life, we learn at the expense of being as good a father to Anna as he may have been in her childhood. He appears to be a man of very good intentions who does not or cannot act on them as he would wish. Dinner Time When we first meet Mahler, he is going into Anna’s apartment and finds her curled up on Elias’s bed overwhelmed by grief. He calls her sweetheart and little one. “Mahler would have liked to lie down on the bed, against her back. Put his arms around her and been Daddy, and made everything hurtful go away. But he didn’t dare to. The bed slats would crack under his weight. So he simply sat there, looking at the Lego pieces that no one had built anything with for two months.” His physical girth does not allow him to cuddle his daughter, but instead of expressing his desire to do so, he simply says let’s eat, and when she won’t, he proceeds to overeat by himself. He is powerless in the face of his daughter’s grief. The World of Guilt As the novel progresses, we learn that father and daughter actually have a fraught relationship, in part because Mahler is judgmental of Anna. He believes she has made irresponsible choices all her life, not completing her education or having a stable career. “His relationship with Anna was marked by ambivalence. He thought that she should stop making excuses, pull herself together and do something. He also thought it was his fault that she had made excuses, and neither pulled nor did. Yes. He was entitled to think that it was his fault; she was not.” Mahler’s feelings toward his daughter colored his behavior toward Elias when he was alive, which he recognizes: “Perhaps he was trying to recapture what he had lost when Anna was little.” His feelings also will affect the interaction he has with the reliving Elias. Though he has good intentions and love for both, they are tainted by guilt and being judgmental. Elvy and Flora Elvy and Flora serve as foreshadowing of a coming problem. The two share what Elvy terms the “Sense,” the ability to pick up on the thoughts of others, a painful gift. Before Elvy tells her granddaughter that she shares her clairvoyance, Flora has turned to self- mutilation, cutting herself, in an attempt to cope. “Flora’s pain stemmed from the same source as Elvy’s at that age: she knew people too well. The Sense told her the exact state of mind of the people around her, and she could not accept their lies.” Elvy consoles her by explaining, “all of us lie in some way. It is a precondition for society to function.” In other words, community is dependent upon a certain amount of lying and hypocrisy, something we have all experienced in our daily lives where we have blunted the truth in order to avoid hurting feelings. Where Do We Go From Here Elvy tells Flora, “It’s purgatory, I know. But you have to get used to it if you want to live.” All of the characters feel the sense of electricity in the air in the novel’s opening, but, thanks to the Sense, Elvy and Flora come closest to understanding what is happening. They feel “an aura of foreboding” hanging over them and feel “as if a radio had spun through hundreds of frequencies, filling their heads with voices.” It’s a combination of the circumstances of Tore’s lingering death from Alzheimer’s and the Sense that make Tore’s return the least traumatic of any of the story lines. But remember that this pain experienced by Flora and Elvy also serves as an ominous foreshadowing of what is to come for all the characters in the novel. Parallel Story Lines By giving us parallel story lines, Lundqvist is able to explore the differing responses to an unexplainable event. All of the characters have lost family members and have the opportunity to see them again. In two of the three story lines, characters make decisions about what to do about their newly alive family member, one immediately wishing to have him removed and calling officials, one hiding the family member and attempting to care for him with no help. In the third storyline, we get no choice about where the undead will live, but we get to see how the loved one responds to his lack of choice and sense of powerlessness. That appears to be a common thread, the desire to do something, anything. For Elvy, it is to save the actual living--their souls. For Mahler, it’s in his attempts to “rehabilitate” Elias, the pleasure he receives from giving him a bath, the research he does. For David, it’s taking care of his son, watching out for his wife. This desire to do something takes us to another central question of the novel: Why do we fear death so much? Lundqvist uses the desire for action to answer that question: Death makes us feel powerless and helpless. It links all humans together and is a problem that can’t be solved. When it seemingly is solved through the reanimation of the dead, humans, ironically, continue powerless, not understanding what has happened or how to respond appropriately. .