Maardam

We all have dark secrets. I, for one, have many. In the early 2000s, I lived in a mid-size Swedish town with too much time to read second-rate novels at night. Naturally, I stumbled upon Håkan Nesser and over an autumn I finished all his crime stories about the retired Chief Inspector Van Veeteren. These stories, set in the fictional city of Maardam which is an eclectic mix of the Netherlands, Poland, Germany and Scandinavia, had a certain resonance with my own post-adolescent existence of transcendental daydreaming and Mitteleuropa nostalgia.

Ten years later the night train Malmö – Berlin is no more, I have lived on four different continents and I never have any time to read novels. But tomorrow morning, I am flying down to the Netherlands for a piece of Maardam and some time with old friends.