Suddenly That Summer
‘The Cold Song,’ by Linn Ullmann
Although a vicious crime serves as the grain of sand around which this pearl of a novel is formed, Linn Ullmann’s “The Cold Song” is not a crime story. Little concerned with villain, motives or detection of evidence, it doesn’t aim for a solution, for redemption or justice. And with a first chapter that begins, “Milla, or what was left of her, was found by Simen and two of his friends when they were digging for buried treasure in the woods,” it hardly seeks to maintain suspense about the identity or fate of the victim. Yet the novel — Ullmann’s fifth, translated from Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland — is steeped in dread the way a fruitcake is steeped in rum: Every page, every line, seems to glisten with vapors of sumptuous, intoxicating unease.