The Brothers By Asko Sahlberg Translated from Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah 122 pages Peirene Press February 2012
. . . I sensed that motherhood was terrible, perhaps sweet at times, but above all terrible. Not because one human child would be more horrendous than another, nor is it so that offspring cannot bring joy when little and be useful when grown up, but because motherhood makes it possible for future generations to be rocked by dark tragedies. (46)
Asko Sahlberg (1964-) is one of Finland's most famous living authors. He published his first novel in 2000 and has received numerous awards. He currently lives in Sweden.
Published in 2010, He (The Brothers, translated by mother-daughter team Emily and Fleur Jeremiah) is Sahlberg's ninth work. Henrik and Erik are two brothers born to an old family of Finnish landowners. While Erik stayed behind, the restless and ambitious Henrik fled to the glittering cities of Russia to be seduced by the wealth and power of empire. In the Russo-Swedish War of 1788-1790 he fought for Russia, while Erik enlisted himself and his downtrodden cousin Mauri to fight for Sweden. It is now 1809 and Henrik has returned to the old farmstead, instigating a chain of events that threaten to expose long-buried secrets and finally upend an unstable status quo.
The story is told through several first-person narrators, including not only Erik and Henrik but also their mother, Erik's wife Anna, Mauri, an old farmhand, and occasional one-shots such as a maid and a city bureaucrat. Peirene publisher Meike Ziervogel compares it to As I Lay Dying and it is easy to see why. One of my English professors described Faulkner's novel as Cubist, with each of the narrators reflecting a different facet of the story, akin to a Picasso painting revealing all angles at once. In The Brothers this form allows the various secrets to be revealed to the reader but not the other characters, allowing for an omniscient view and numerous twists. I was also reminded of Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard, with its faded aristocrats forced from their traditional complacency where they least expect it. Altogether, the combination of a slowly unfolding plot and dark but subdued prose is a tightly-wound tale whose intensity is in its brevity. Recommended.
. . . She thought of the neighbors, could see the stairwell in her mind's eye. That stark, unpleasant light when she emerged from the lift. When she came home tonight she'd had a momentary urge to creep up to Mrs. Malmer's door and listen. The memory almost made her smile. Was it something to do with her pregnancy? Anonymous phone calls. Mrs. Malmer's midnight masses. She was smiling now.
Åke Edwardson (1953-) of Gothenberg, Sweden has won three awards from the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers. The ten novels of his Chief Inspector Erik Winter series have been translated into twenty languages.
Despite my current celebration of the joys and freedom of summer, and not to mention my disdain for New York's harsh winters, I nevertheless found myself with a very wintery book. Sun and Shadow (Sol och skugga, translated by Laurie Thompson) was published in 1999 and is set in September through January of that same year. Anyone old enough will remember the excitement for the approaching millennium tinged with fear of a Y2K disaster. Although the latter is never mentioned, a sense of disquiet underlies the city of Göteborg (Gothenburg) that is further heightened by a horrifying double murder. A couple has been found dead in their apartment, their heads removed and switched, with the proverbial message in blood on the wall. Enter the appropriately-named Erik Winter, the youngest police chief in Sweden, currently dealing with his father's death and girlfriend Angela's pregnancy.
Sun and Shadow is distinctively northern in mood: cool and stark. Walking the line between contemporary and historical fiction, it has the feel of another era when the world stood waiting with both dread and anticipation. The murders and the ominous events surrounding them play off one another as a series of doubles: the Scandinavian cold and Spanish heat, Winter's hopefulness and another's despondence, family happiness and family dysfunction, birth and death. While daily life goes on, Göteborg has its seamy side as well: alcoholism, swingers, and expressions of violence in morbid fashion shoots and that characteristic Scandinavian metal, which by the way I love. The killer apparently has a fetish some obscure band described as "[sounding] like something from another world" with a drummer "having an epileptic fit" and a cement mixer thrown in. For maximum Scandinavian scary-beautiful, I'm thinking early Tristania.
Those wondering how a peaceful land like Scandinavia ever produced such music may also wonder at the explosion of Scandinavian crime/detective fiction (thanks in no small part to Stieg Larsson). Critics have pointed to the perceived failure of the welfare state and immigration as popular inspiration, evoking wealthy, progressive countries floating atop turbulent undercurrents. Despite its cast of middle-class native Swedes, Sun and Shadow reveals these tensions as well and may be considered a good example of its genre. A good snowy day book, but a literary one.
Yes, do. Try and calm yourself, and make your mind easy again, my frightened little singing-bird. Be at rest, and feel secure; I have broad wings to shelter you under. How warm and cosy our home is, Nora. Here is shelter for you; here I will protect you like a hunted dove that I have saved from a hawk's claws; I will bring peace to your poor beating heart.
Henrik Ibsen, Norweigan playwright, was friends with a couple named Laura and Victor Kieler. Laura had written a sequel to Ibsen's 1866 work Brand called Brand's Daughters: A Picture of Life, and she made Ibsen's acquaintance shortly afterward. Over the next five years they visited on and off. In 1876, however, Victor became ill with tuberculosis and the doctor recommended convalescence in a warm climate. Unbeknownst to her husband, Laura financed the trip through a loan on which she forged a signature. Victor was furious when he found out, demanding a divorce and taking the children with him. The emotional strain landed Laura in a public asylum, although she returned to her family after a month. Ibsen, who had declined to help Laura, was left feeling guilty about his role in the affair and the result was his landmark feminist play, A Doll House.
A dramatic backstory to be sure, but the play itself was kind of a let-down.
The problem with reading plays is that they're meant to be performed, not read. My disappointment with A Doll's House likely stems from this fact. Realist in style, it consists entirely of everyday dialogue with (to me) little aesthetic value. Still, it had its moments. Torvald's character is particularly interesting - as part of my job in a library Rare Books Department I cataloged a collection of poetry and correspondence from a local woman who lived in Ibsen's day. Her husband's letters address her exactly the same way Torvald speaks to Ibsen's heroine Nora. Anyway, turns out, according to third-party sources I discovered elsewhere, he had abandoned his first wife and child in another city to marry her without finalizing his divorce first! It's knowledge of real-life history like this that can add another dimension to your reading. Don't trust men who call you things like "my little squirrel" or really "my little" anything because that's belittlement and it means they don't take you seriously as an adult human being.
Also, the beginning of Act II, when Nora asks her children's nurse "how could you have the heart to put your own child out among strangers?" The response is that "I was obliged to, if I wanted to be little Nora's nurse." What Ibsen intended as commentary on social class is also, from an American perspective, commentary on racism as well. It's hard not to picture the nurse as a mammy - the black woman who raises the white folks' children instead of her own. Even without the added layer of racism, the exchange is loaded with implications of the word mother and what it signifies to different women. The Victorian "Angel of the House" was very much a bourgeois ideal that upheld the middle-class white woman as the arbiter of all things motherly at the expense of poor women and, in the United States, women of color as well. It's only a small part of the overall work but one that stood out to me.
But I'm afraid I don't have much else to say about this one. Henrick Ibsen is not TennesseeWilliams. As a reading experience, A Doll House just fell flat for me. Oh well, better luck next month
A Year of Feminist Classics is a project started by Amy, Ana, Emily Jane and Iris, four book bloggers who share an interest in the feminist movement and its history. The project will work a little like an informal reading group: for all of 2011, we will each month read what we consider to be a central feminist text, with one of us being in charge of the discussion. . .What we hope to achieve is to gain a better historical understanding of the struggle for gender equality, as well as a better awareness of how the issues discussed in these now classic texts are still relevant in our times. We welcome all voices and perspectives, and we would love it if you joined in and added your own.
". . . I thought once more how quickly the years had gone since the winter she moved into my apartment and broke my solitude. The years were like a train in the night that moves at such speed that the lighted windows flow together and you see nothing. I thought about how much of our time had been taken up with doing the same things every day, as the months passed and the children grew and we talked about all that had happened."
Copenhagen's Jens Christian Grøndahl is one of Europe's most popular contemporary authors. His novel Lucca was awarded the prestigious Golden Laurels Prize in 1999. Tavshed i Oktober (Silence in October, translated from Danish by Anne Born) was his 2001 American debut.
An art historian wakes up one morning to find Astrid, his wife of eighteen years, with a coat on and a suitcase in her hand. She turns and leaves without saying a word. Melancholy and meditative by nature, the narrator looks back on his life and ponders his relationships with his children, parents, friends, and old lovers. His memories form a series of stories, meandering back and forth in time as he tries to attend to his book on the New York School of painting. But his past haunts him, especially when his research takes him back to the city where he made his greatest mistake.
Silence in October is a quiet book. Grøndahl's poetic voice recalls the stark reverence of the art gallery and the subdued tones of the morning mist. Even the busiest of settings are muted and padded by the narrator's ruminations, further reinforcing the sense of him as an isolated individual despite his preoccupation with how other people have molded him. In Manhattan, for example, he "[stands] in the strangely cross-illuminated shadow at the bottom of the streets' deep shafts, confused and weightless with fatigue in the restless, unceasing stream of cars and faces, the same stream as always." Later in his hotel room, you can picture easily the fading urban evening through the window and the impersonal solitude of a room designed for transient strangers. In fact, the work of Edward Hopper comes to mind, a connection made by the narrator himself.
Silence in October is also a visual book. A recurring image is that of time flying by in a repetition of routine cycles which Astrid's abrupt departure brought to a halt. There is a tension between motion and stillness, between life and the frozen artifice of the painting or snapshot that allows for a depth of contemplation precluded by perpetual movement. "I cannot include everything," the narrator muses. "I have to select from among the images I have, I have to decide on a sequence, and thus my story will be quite different from the one she could tell, even though they are supposedly about the same subject." In that way the novel calls attention to itself as art and invites a postmodern examination of the boundaries between narrative and perception.
But.
What Hopper's paintings evoke was not meant to be extended this far.
To put it simply, this is not 296 pages of material. Literature, after all, is art in movement. Whereas the painter produces a singular object, the author must continue to engage the reader by building upon their original premise. For all the prose reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, a middle-aged man just constantly pondering his relationships is a poor match for this particular art form. Silence in October should have been a novella, not a full-length novel. The thoughtful art critic becomes a self-indulgent bourgeois intellectual whose problems seem to stem from his life being too comfortable. But where Grøndahl fails in form he succeeds in expression. Silence in October is beautiful book while the appeal of its art lasts and still quite worth the time, even if it's eventually abandoned.
"Women disappear all the time. Nobody misses them. Immigrants. Whores from Russia. Thousands of people pass through Sweden every year."
If you're not one of the 14 million+ who bought it at least one of its volumes, then you have most certainly seen these books in stores and being read by fellow passengers on the plane and subway. In a rare feat for translated fiction in the American market, Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (translated from Sweden by Reg Keeland) has achieved blockbuster status and there's really not much I can say about it that hasn't already been said.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is one of those books whose immense popularity occurs despite its actual writing. Unlike The Da Vinci Code and a certain SPARKLY!vampire series, Larsson's prose isn't really bad but it's nothing special either. With his detailed, extremely complex depictions of hardcore computer hacking, high-stakes financial maneuvering, and the inner workings of journalism, Larsson comes across more as one of those geeks who decided to put his in-demand expertise to creative use. Another inspiration was clearly his passion for feminism and leftist politics. The original Swedish title was Män Som Hatar Kvinnor, or Men Who Hate Women, which should give you an idea of Larsson's deft subtlety.
So did I like it?
Well to begin with, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is easily the fastest long book I've ever read, despite being swelled to nearly 600 pages by way too much extraneous information. (In the beginning, for example, there's a whole chapter detailing a business scam that has little to do with the rest of the plot.) The story blends family saga, crime fiction, psychological thriller, and the protest novel, and the plot twists are a huge improvement over the prose. In other words, as The New Yorker recently observed, Larsson is a surprisingly good storyteller.
For me, as an aficionado of translated literature, the most fascinating aspect of Dragon Tattoo was Sweden itself, seen by many Americans as this socialist Happyland. Stieg Larsson portrays it as a total Crapsaccharine World where abuse and corruption lurk beneath the veneer of a progressive society and journalists are too spineless to raise the alarm. While reading Palace Walk last month it was easy for me to say, "Oh, that was long ago in an alien culture." Here, there is no such detachment. Sweden was named the World's Best Country for Women by the World Economic Forum in 2005, the same year Män Som Hatar Kvinnor was first published. *epic wallbang splat*
The primary subject matter (sexual violence against women) is quite intense and I think I'll take a break before picking up The Girl Who Played with Fire. But judging from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the rest of the Millennium trilogy promises some real hard-hitting drama and I look forward to see where Larsson takes us next in the dark side of paradise.
Trigger warning for graphic depictions of rape, torture, and incest.
The Ambassador By Bragi Ólafsson Translated from Icelandic by Lytton Smith 298 pages Open Letter Press October 12, 2010
And after half an hour has passed, when he's finished the book and set it down on the nightstand, he promises himself that this is the last thriller he will read; from now on, he will write them. He wants to show the reader of this very book, a book he's already beginning to forget, that thrillers don't need a robbery or murder to hold your attention.They just need to creat some uncertainty about whether or not the protagonist will make his Big Decision.
Bragi Ólafsson is best known internationally as the bassist of the Sugarcubes, the Icelandic alternative rock band fronted by Björk from 1986 to 1992. Around the time of its formation, however, Ólafsson had already launched his writing career with the publication of Dragsúgur (Draught), a volume of poetry. Since then, he has found success in his native land as a playwright and novelist and was twice nominated for the Icelandic Literature Prize. The Ambassador is his second novel to be released in English by Open Letter Press, following The Pets in 2008.
Sturla Jón Jónsson is the superintendent for an apartment building in Reykjavík. He is also an accomplished poet whose recent book assertions has enjoyed critical success. Beyond that, he is an ordinary fiftyish divorcee with five children, an unstable alcoholic mother, and sardonic father with unfulfilled dreams of filmmaking. Sturla is very pleased, however, with the fine new coat he has purchased with the money from assertions. Its cost is the equivalent to the average Icelander's three-month salary, has seams guaranteed to last a lifetime, and is laminated like a book jacket. Sturla loves his new coat. He has also been invited to a poetry festival in Druskininkai, Lithuania, which fails to excite him. But he goes anyway, has a several minor misadventures, and is informed of a plagiarism charge lodged against him by a friend of his late cousin Jónas, who killed himself three decades ago at age twenty.
It is hard to explain how exactly this ends up being 298 pages of material. The Ambassador has no real plot and nothing more exciting than a Lithuanian strip club ever happens. Sturla leads a thoroughly dull life despite his acclaim as a poet, which begs the question of why someone would bother writing an entire novel about him.
In fact, that's sort of the point. The Ambassador is a satire of artistic pretensions. Sturla is initially disdainful of his craft and has declared to himself that assertions is the end of his poetry career. Back home in Iceland, he authors a scornful review of the festival before it has even begun - "a report from the future" that ends with the image of a "crazy rich rapper from Los Angeles" enlivening Druskininkai with his on-the-spot compositions about South Central. But rap, of course, is another form of poetry. The "gangsta" with gold chains becomes a reflection of Sturla's relationship to his art and perception of his fellow artists. It can be said that the whole world is poetry, and what we think of as a poem is merely the "emptiness and surface emotions that still life offers: more or less beautiful textures, at best, things better suited to being the subject of a watercolor on the wall of a room." This enterprise we call art is merely artifice, and any so-called "poetry festival" is a puffed-up farce patronized by self-aggrandizers lacking self-awareness.
That's how Sturla feels in the beginning, anyway. Why in the world does Cambridge Biographical Center want to include him in its "2,000 Outstanding Intellectuals of the 21st Century"? Still, for some reason people want to create, and seem to feel a camaraderie with their fellow creators: the coat salesman turns out to be an artist, a resident of his building is author of a short story, the Lithuanian taxi driver is also a poet, and a fat Russian businessman at the strip club claims to be working on a "decadent book" about oligarchs (but has yet to actually write anything). No, there is something more at the nucleus of art, something that still drives us to leave something of ourselves in its various forms.
It seems to be a straightforward narrative, yet The Ambassador is also a strangely compelling meditation on life, inspiration, creativity, and human relationships. As with The Pets, Ólafsson's humor tends towards absurdity and deadpan delivery and generally isn't the laugh-out-loud variety (although YMMV). I am still not sure what kept me reading but I am sufficiently confident that The Ambassador will have a similar effect on you as well. Surprisingly recommend-worthy.
Fresh off the press: my second published review for Seminary Co-op Bookstore's The Front Table! All about Monika Fagerholm's The American Girl, a Finnish novel written in Swedish and translated by Katarina E. Tucker. From Publisher's Weekly:
This third, unusual novel from Fagerholm (Wonderful Women by the Sea) is a hypnotic coming-of-age story that hinges on a dark but powerful bond between two Finnish girls growing up in the swamplands of outer Helsinki. Born to jet-setter parents, timid young Sandra finds strength by clinging to obstinate, wild-eyed Doris, who is no stranger to dysfunction herself: her mother has a hundred thousand excuses for beating her daughter. The two begin to obsess over an unsolved death that haunts the town. Making up games in abandoned pools, basements, and the muddy marshlands, the girls dress alike and begin to form solipsistic creeds, such as the belief that suffering has developed a hidden power in us that makes it so that we can see what no one else sees. The fractured work can by trying—there's no straight chronology, and sentences are frequently appealingly off-balance (kudos to Tucker for the slick translation)—but Fagerholm's esoteric prose and her omnipotent narrator's eye bring to life a world of ambient longings, cryptic memories, and ethereal figures.
It was every bit as good as it sounds.
And be sure to check out my review for Gert Jonke's The System of Vienna.
Also: pursuant to Richard's request, some more European metal for your enjoyment! The first is "Nemo" by Finland's Nightwish and the second is "July" by Sweden's Katatonia. (Alas, both bands sing in English.)
Stay tuned for my adventures in Disneyland! That place was very . . . surreal?
Oh, no. The Devil was probably not so convinced that he was going to lose his soul. But when she lay here before, crushed with sorrow over her sins, over the hardness of her heart, her impure life, and the blindness of her soul . . . then she had felt the saintly king take her in under his protective cloak. She had gripped his strong, warm hand; he had pointed out to her the light that is the source of all strength and holiness. Saint Olav turned her eyes toward Christ on the cross - see, Kristin: God's love.
I thought The Wife, Book 2 of Sigrid Undset's Nobel Prize-winning Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, ended at page 571 of my omnibus edition. But then I got to page 571 and realized it ended at page 701 . . . aw hell. So as it stands, I still have about 40 pages left. I'm at the part where Ereland's just been arrested for high treason. I will read the rest this December, along with The Cross, but I feel like I've covered quite enough for now.
So to start off, I bring you several passages from a modern work of historical fiction, Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus, as a point/counterpoint to Kristin Lavransdatter. Like KL, it is the story of an aristocratic woman who behaves illicitly and eventually becomes a nun.
What I do know, though, is that as I pulled up my gown and helped him find his way inside me he opened his eyes for the first time and for that brief instant we looked at each other, no longer able to pretend that what was happening was not happening. And there was in that look such intensity that I thought however wrong it might be it was not evil, and that while man might not be able to forgive us, it was surely possible that God might. And I still believe that, just as I believe that Erila was right that innocence was sometimes as dangerous as knowledge, though there are many who would say such thoughts simply prove the depth of my damnation.
She's married to a gay man; he's a poor unknown painter.
My Dear Alessandra,
By the time you read this we will be gone. And you, God willing, will be delivered of a healthy child. Tomaso is in need of me. The damage done to him is terrible, and with his beauty gone and his body broken, his need is even greater. I cannot rid myself of the accusation that my lust in some way created him, and so it is my duty to tend to the pain I have caused. My duty. And yes, still my desire. If you and I stayed together, I would feel that pain for the rest of my life and would be an embittered companion for you and the child.
Her brother Tomaso was tortured on the strappado by Savonarola's thugs for his sexuality. Her husband was his lover.
I have heard that some men like the idea of taking nuns. Of course, it is the grossest of crimes because it is adultery against God. I suppose for that reason alone one can see how those who live for sensation would find it most potent, which is why they usually have to be mad on war or drink before they can do it. But he was neither. He was mad on tenderness.
She's now a nun and is about to have great sex with the aforementioned painter. And will never feel guilty about it.
Before the manuscript left my hands I studied those crowded circles of [Dante's] hell. Suicide is indeed a grave sin, in some ways the gravest. But I find it almost comforting how Dante portrays it. The appropriate punishment for the appropriate sin: for those who would choose to leave the world before their appointed moment, hell has them bound back into it together. . . I have memorized the geography of Dante's hell well. The wood of the suicides is near to the burning ground of the sodomites. Sometimes they rush in, beating down the flames that ignite constantly all over their scarred bodies, and, as Dante would have it, on occasion there is time for them to stop and converse a little with other damned souls about art and literature and the sins for which we have all been condemned. I would like that.
For my October post, covering the first book of KL, I wrote about what I called the "anachronistic feminist": a female protagonist in historical fiction who displays remarkably modern attitudes towards sex, gender, race, social justice, and so forth. On the one hand, you can't really take them seriously as women living in a distant time and place - they feel more like the author imagining herself in a given historical epoch and describing what she, as a twenty- or twenty-first-century woman, would have thought and done. It's as though we can't take people from the past seriously as products of their own eras. If only they had stretched their minds a bit, they could have been as enlightened and liberated as we are!
And yet, the anachronistic feminist also reflects the author's genuine attempt to create a heroine the reader can sympathize with. The past is an alien place. But how far should the author go?
Much as I loved The Birth of Venus, I think it's a great example of this "anachronistic feminist" concept. Alessandra is a great character, but the way she deals with sex and religion feels way off for her time period. But because she does feel so modern, I liked her so much better than guilt-ridden, self-flagellating Kristin who cries herself into religious visions and faints after a conversation with a priest on sin and redemption. But Kristin (who is still no saint) probably represents her era much better than Alessandra represents hers.
It's the paradox of historical fiction.
Kristin feels very embedded in her time, I think, with all of Sigrid Undset's detailed descriptions of physical setting and her extensive knowledge of fourteenth-century Norwegian politics. Maybe Undset intended Kristin to be a role model and/or an author surrogate, but I found myself thinking about something I read once (in one of Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware books), about how culture influences how madness is expressed but does not create it. I'm not saying Kristin is mentally ill, but I do get the impression that most of her overwrought religiousity is the cultural wrappings of a genuine problem with narcissism or something to that effect. (Although if Undset did intend to create a character we should all look up to - FAIL.) And it's what makes her more believable than Alessandra, the liberated woman centuries ahead of her time. Undset is very precise in setting the scene and recreating the customs and thought processes of fourteenth-century Norway. And Kristin does not rise above. She's intimately tied to it all.
Yeah, she's annoying. Yes, she does go on and on about her horrible, horrible sin of consensual, monogamous heterosexual sex before marriage. But . . . she's real, and real people usually are flawed or messed up in some form or another. So far, the volumes of Kristin Lavransdatter aren't proving to be the best books I've ever read, but something has to be said for Undset's ability to create a character who actually lives in her own time period without overly romanticizing it or trying to change it. You know, I kinda like these books!
Other posts by Kristin Lavransdatter read-along participants:
According to Richard, after slogging through "the entertainment no man's land" of Kristin Lavransdatter, "a novel about fucking genocide of all things has provided quite the welcome distraction." (*sigh* Was it really that bad?) As for me, I LOVE Gothic/symphonic metal. But every once in a while, I have to shake things up. I usually do not listen to black metal, but Opera IX used to have a kickass female singer and I have to respect her as a female performer in a highly male-dominated genre. And I actually do like a couple of their songs. Unfortunately, she's not in this particular tune, but it's all about the destruction of Europe's goddess-centered pagan religions by the guilt, fear, and piety of medieval Christianity. In short: another counterpoint to Krisitin Lavransdatter! Try to enjoy! (Lyrics)
In his introduction to my edition of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter, Brad Leithauser brings up an interesting point:
In the annals of literary "fallen women," Kristin Lavransdatter, that twentieth-century/fourteenth-century literary figure, occupies a curious and fascinating place. After they fell, a number of Kristin's nineteenth-century counterparts were whisked offstage, often to meet a premature end. In the latter part of the twentieth century, many of Kristin's successors were sexual adventuresses whose exploits were pure and liberated triumphs. Writing in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Undset chose a middle path for her heroine. Kristin never doubts that she has covertly sinned, and the pain of her deceptions remains a lifelong affliction. Even so, her unshakable guilt in no way paralyzes her and she carries on with her life.
I don't read much historical fiction, to be quite honest. When I do read it, one thing that has always bugged me is what I call the "anachronistic feminist." I'm referring to those historical fiction heroines who come across more as time-warped modern women, who act and believe as their author thinks women of that era should have acted and believed. Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune, for example, tells the story of a woman who finds personal liberation by disguising herself as a man and having a variety of adventures among the Wild West underclass of California during the Gold Rush. Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus centers on an heiress in the Italian Renaissance who sympathizes with persecuted gay men, unapologetically has an extramarital affair, and then gets even more hot sex as a nun. In Dora Levy Mossanen's Harem, set in fourteenth-century Persia, a liberated courtesan tells her daughter that virginity is a social construct created by men to control women.
Don't get me wrong: these are all great books and I do recommend them. But I also think that, despite their authors' talent, they all illustrate the tension inherent to writing historical fiction, particularly aimed at a female audience. You want to create a protagonist the modern reader can identify with, but problem is, the past is often a wholly foreign place with values and customs that we, looking back from our vantage point, find objectionable. According to what I've read about the antebellum South in non-fiction texts (i.e. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Eugene D. Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll), wealthy Southern women were known to be even bigger die-hard supporters of slavery than their men were; yet, at the same time, they were also heavily subordinated. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, despite its focus on twentieth-century African-Americans, touches on some of the very real problems associated with this "plantation pedestal" role. Even in the 1910s-30s, the respectable wife as a submissive, genteel, socially isolated symbol of her husband's status remained the primary model for Southern women. (Hurston's heroine Janie, of course, chafes under these restrictions and eventually rebels.)
So a truly honest novel about a Southern belle in the pre-Civil War era would have to be about a vicious racist who sees her severely restricted role as a sign of her superiority over black women and poor white women. But how can the modern reader be expected to sympathize with and root for a protagonist like that? The author, by writing a such a protagonist, might even be seen as apologizing for her beliefs and behavior. And yet, at the same time, most authors writing historical fiction want their portrayals of the past to be believable.
(I also think there's also a didactic element of the "anachronistic feminist." These women triumph and achieve personal enlightenment despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles that women today usually do not have to deal with. If they can do it, so can you!)
So it was with that in mind that I opened to the first book of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, The Wreath, originally published in 1920 and eventually winning its author the Nobel Prize in Literature. I found myself agreeing with Leithauser's analysis: for all the overwrought "soap opera" elements of the plot, there is also an underlying component of temptation and its incurring dangers. I interpreted the title as a reference to the wreath worn by the beautiful "elf maiden" who, for nefarious purposes unknown, attempts to lure seven-year-old Kristin away from the encampment and into the woods. In fact, the titles of the three books - The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross - seem to indicate a progression from sin, transgression, and overall earthiness to medieval Christian holiness, and also mirror the transition of Norway out of paganism. The elf maiden marks the beginning of Kristin's encounters with the perils of seduction. Fru Aashild, whose previous actions had led her to be condemned as a witch and rendered an outcast for years, becomes the next questionable influence in Kristin's life with her nonconformist words on pleasure and peril.
And sometimes she spoke of her youth, when she lived in the south of the country and frequented the courts of King Magnus and King Eirik and their queens. . .
"It seems strange to me that you're always so happy, when you've been used to - " she [Kristin] broke off, blushing.
Fru Aashild looked down at the child, smiling.
"You mean now that I'm separated from all those things? . . . I've had my glory days, Kristin, but I'm not foolish enough to complain because I have to be content with sour, watered-down mild now that I've drunk up all my wine and ale. Good days can last a long time if one tends to things with care and caution; all sensible people know that. That's why I think sensible people have to be satisfied with the good days - for the grandest of days are costly indeed. They call a man a fool who fritters away his father's inheritance in order to enjoy himself in his youth. . . But I call a true idiot and fool only if he regrets his actions afterwards, and he is twice the fool and the greatest buffoon of all if he expects the see his drinking companions again once the inheritance is gone."
Kristin sees a resemblance between Fru Aashild and the elf woman even though they don't look at all alike. But both characters foreshadow the appearance of Ereland Nikulaussøn, the reckless knight whose dashing, rogueish ways threaten to destroy Kristin's future. Kristin knows her physical relationship with a man not her husband is morally wrong in her world, and is also socially hazardous due to the possibility of unmarried pregnancy. The theme here is what Dante's Inferno called "losing the straight way" and finding oneself adrift in the "dark wood." In the Second Circle of Dante's Hell are the sinners of love, who allowed the winds of lust to blow them astray and are now condemned to be blown around in a torrent for all eternity.
When I understood those injured souls, I bent my face downward, and I held it down so long that the poet [Virgil] said: "What are you pondering?"
When I replied, I began: "Alas, how many sweet thoughts, how much yearning led them to the grievous past!"
Then I turned back to them and spoke, and I began: "Francesca, your sufferings make me sad and piteous to tears.
But tell me: in the time of your sweet sighs, by what and how did Love grant you to know your dangerous desires?"
And she to me: "There is no greater pain than to remember the happy time in wretchedness; and this your teacher knows."
(This is the Robert M. Durling translation. And clearly, Dante and Fru Aashild are at odds here, which is probably why Fru Aashild is such an outsider.) In Canto 5, where this passage comes from, Dante depicts Love/lust as an active agent who ruthlessly acts on passive humans. But, interestingly, his use of the adjective "noble" in the same canto also reflects the ideas, of both his and Kristin's time (they are roughly contemporaneous) of courtly love and the superiority of love for its own sake rather than for status and property (a neo-Platonic notion - see Socrates's and Plato's thoughts on the superiority of homosexual over heterosexual desire, as the latter is believed to exist solely for reproduction). The conflict here, however, is expressed through the souls' punishment of uncontrollable, unceasing motion: true peace is found only with God, and Francesca's sin is that she substituted for God another flawed human being as the ultimate endpoint of her love.
Kristin does the same thing. As a result, she is not at peace: her and Ereland's transgression haunts and harries her even as she continues to do it.
I came to see The Wreath as depicting a world suspended between opposing poles: paganism and Christianity, desire and respectability, guilt and innocence, loyalty and self-assertion. Undset recreates a world of pre-Raphaelite pastoralism where dwarves and elves still lurk in the dark wood and men are both unruly criminals/rapists and chivalrous heroes exhibiting courtly restraint (though not always). There is a very defined moral code (the "straight way") in this time and place, based ostensibly on Christian ideals but also reflective of the old pagan warnings to look out for beautiful danger. We would tell Kristin there's nothing wrong with consensual pre-marital sex, but we live in the twenty-first century. Kristin does not.
I found The Wreath rather dull until Kristin left for the convent and things started to pick up. It starts out as very much a "day in the life" kind of book, where the focus is more on history and setting than plot. But what I ended up liking is that, unlike other historical novels I've read, Kristin is believable as a heroine of her era. She doesn't jump from medieval morality to modern feminist liberation. She exists in her own time.
The writing is also quite good, although I'm not seeing how it's particularly Modernist. Maybe someone can fill me in?
Other posts by Kristin Lavransdatter read-along participants:
Today we encourage you to blog about a book you read only because you discovered it on another book blog. Preferably, this will be a book you loved! You might also write a bit about the blog you discovered it on!
A thought wanted to get out. Something. A context. He didn't catch hold of it. But then that other thought came out, the terrible, frightening one. That Eli was just pretending. That there was an ancient person inside of her, watching him, who knew everything, and was smiling at him, smiling in secret.
I've been having a bit of a vampire theme going on This Book and I Could Be Friends lately. It began when I read Dracula and wrote this essay in response. It was kind of rambling, but I discussed what I think the modern vampire (dating back to the nineteenth century) represents in the cultural imagination and how they compare to the modern (George Romero) zombie in that respect. In response to a very insightful comment left by Emily of Evening All Afternoon, I did a brief follow-up a couple days later. I then reviewed Eugene Woodbury's Angel Falling Softly.
I like vampires. I have made my Anne Rice fanship known. I've also blogged about Kohta Hirano's Hellsing anime/manga series, as well as Elizabeth Kostova's well-written, well-researched novel The Historian. I've argued that being a beautiful woman who kicks ass doesn't automatically make Anita Blake a Mary Sue. I have trashed that poorly-written, vampire-ruining, anti-feminist, pro-Mary Sue crap Twilightonnumerousoccasions. No, I can't leave it alone. I refuse to sit by while sparkly teenybopper vampire high school students are on the loose! IN THE SUNSHINE????
So needless, to say, it totally caught my attention when Lu of Regular Rumination specifically stated that John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma) contains vampires that do not sparkle. It also has zombies, she added, plus it is scary and Swedish. Translated fiction is a major part of This Book and I Could Be Friends; it is interest I share with both Lu and Richard of Caravana de recuerdos, both of whom I met through the 2666 read-along hosted by Claire and Steph. Lu and Richard can actually read Spanish books in their original language (Lu has a BA in Spanish, largely due to her love of Spanish literature), a skill which, alas, I am lacking. Even in English, though, Lu's reading tastes are actually quite similar to mine and I enjoy her posts about graphic novels, poetry, and literary fiction. (Regular Rumination is also where I found the "Books Read in 2009" meme.) Anyway: great blogs all around, check'em out.
(Both Richard and Frances of Nonsuch Book, another 2666 reader, have been shortlisted for the Best Writing Category. Good luck guys!)
So obviously, via Lu's review, I was warned beforehand that Let the Right One In was extremely creepy and best read during the daytime. I actually disagree somewhat - it wasn't really scary in the suspenseful, what-was-that-noise sense. It was shocking, disturbing, and gruesome. In my post-Dracula vampire essay I brought up how the modern vampire often acts as a sort of dark wish fulfillment fantasy. They are beautiful, wealthy, and cultured, but ultimately represent the temptation of evil and a form of corruption. Bram Stoker's Dracula and Anne Rice's creations exemplify this. ("Darkness. No grace," says Rice, on the Interview with the Vampire movie. "No salvation. The film got it. It got 'the glamor of evil' and that darkness, that hopelessness, that despair.") Twilight and its ilk, however, have watered down this moral gray area in favor of a simplistic "bad boy/femme fatale" portrayal. But either way, whether you're reading Anne Rice or the latest YA fantasy, the vampire is always going to be a highly alluring creature.
What I loved about Let the Right One In was how completely Lindqvist subverted this current pop cultural norm.
One vampire is a grubby little girl who with the scent of sickness: "it was [close] to the smell that came when you removed the bandage from an infected wound." Another is hideously mutilated middle-aged child molester, and another is a 50-year-old alcoholic burnout whose condition causes intense physical torment. In other words: definitely notThe Vampire Diaries territory. Like Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, Let the Right One In also closely links vampires to zombies as undead monsters. Even more so than Bram Stoker, Lindqvist makes it abundantly clear that to become a vampire is to suffer a horrific, and never-ending, fate.
But whereas Dracula still had his seductive, aristocratic side, there is absolutely nothing remotely attractive (sexually, aesthetically, culturally, etc) about the Lindqvist vampire. Like his predecessors of the genre, Lindqvist uses the vampire as a metaphor for, and commentary on, the human condition. As Lu noted, Let the Right One In is not simply a vampire story - there are also themes of love, sacrifice, broken families, social class, bullying, and alcohol/drug abuse. The biggest motif is one of disease - in the body, in relationships, in society. Lindqvist's vampires personify this. The atmosphere is bleak, hopeless, run-down. The characters live in bland apartments reminiscent of American housing projects, and even the humans hurt themselves and each other in a variety of ways. As one man reflects:
"I don't want to be here anymore!"
[. . .] "You don't have to. Not for my. . ."
"No, not that. Here. The whole shebang. Blackeberg. Everything. These buildings, the walking paths, the spaces, people, everything is just . . . like a big damn sickness, see? Something went wrong. They thought it all out, planned it to be . . . perfect, you know. And in some damn wrinkle it went wrong, instead. Some shit.
"Like . . . I can't explain it . . . like they had some idea about the angles, or fucking whatever, the angles of the building, in their relationship to each other, you know. So it would be harmonious or something. And then they made a mistake in their measurements, their triangulations, whatever the hell they call it, so that it was a little off from the start, and it went downhill from there. So you walk here with all these buildings and you just feel that. . . No, no, no. You shouldn't be here. This place is all wrong, you know?
"Except it isn't the angles, it's something else, something that just . . . like a disease that's in the . . . walls and I . . . don't want any part of it anymore."
In the very first chapter, Blackeberg is described as a brand-new post-WWII suburb with absolutely no past. The children do not learn about their town's history in school because there is no history. Blackeberg was maybe meant to be a refuge of sorts, from the recent war, the recent depression, a look to the bright future. But human nature does not change. The arrival of Eli, 200-year-old waif, is essentially the catalyst for a chain of events that forces Blackeberg's citizens to finally confront evil - even though it already exists among them, self-inflicted, in one form or another. People will react to a brutal murder, but not to the repeated and brutal bullying of Oskar that's been going on for years.
The sole attraction of Lindqvist vampires, debased as they are, is simply evil itself: the ability to do great harm and get away with it. You can say this of many modern vampires, but Lindqvist is unique in that he never tries to sugarcoat it and make it "glamorous."
Let the Right One In is unlike ANY vampire novel I have ever read. Many vampire authors attempt a new spin on a well-known myth, but Lindqvist actually pulls it off. But please be advised that this book is very dark and very graphic - I was even forced to skim a few pages because it got to be too much. But it is still an awesome read and I would like to thank Lu for introducing it to me! This is why I read book blogs: to discover new books I likely wouldn't have heard about otherwise, ESPECIALLY international/translated literature.
(Also: please check out this review I did for an Austrian post-apocalyptic novel by Thomas Glavinic called Night Work. It was personally recommended to me by Larry. Thanks Larry!)
I had just finished reading Jakov Lind's Landscape in Concrete, a 1963 novella about a Nazi soldier and accidental criminal, when I came across a review for Christian Jungersen's The Exception. A 2004 European bestseller, The Exception has been translated from Danish by Anna Paterson and, like Lind's book, deals with questions regarding human behavior during wartime. Unfortunately, however, according to Bookgasm's Mark Rose, The Exception is also "deeply distasteful" and "its attitudes, as expressed by its characters, simultaneously signal the death knell of European culture and legacy while being masked under the guise of liberal progressivism. If European readers believe in the puerile philosophy expounded herein, then Europe is surely lost." Hmmm. While I wouldn't go quite that far, I do agree that the novel feels rather pointless - kind of like a misanthrope's big rant on Why People Suck - but I did enjoy (morbidly) the embedded articles on genocide and psychology. But everything else . . . meh.
Warning: Great Snark Ahead
The Exception centers on four women - Iben, Malene, Ann-Lise, and Camilla - who work for the Danish Center for Information on Genocide, a small non-profit in Copenhagen, headed by a man named Paul, that disseminates information on genocide for governments and researchers. Malene is suffering from early-onset rheumatoid arthritis and Iben is her longtime best friend (they are in their late twenties). Camilla is a middle-aged woman who works closely with Iben and Malene, while Ann-Lise (Camilla's age) is relegated to the back room, where she feels left out and ignored by her three coworkers. Things are going smoothly, despite some tension with Ann-Lise, until one day, out of the blue, Iben and Malene receive threatening emails from revenge_is_near@imhidden.com, an anonymizer server that makes tracking the sender impossible. Now, as professionals who write about and raise awareness of war crimes for a living, you would think that these two would be no strangers to anonymous death threats. But no, Iben has a big freak-out and the whole thing catalyzes a period of bullying and intimidation among the four women of the DCIG.
Basically, it's supposed to be microcosm of the group dynamics that lead perfectly ordinary people to commit horrendous atrocities, such as the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the Stanford Prison Experiment catastrophe. So, in other words, the characters are not meant to be particularly likeable. But did they really have to be so incredibly annoying? The four DCIG employees start out as these liberal progressive tolerant self-righteous Social Democrat types who then descend into immature playground tormentors. They even resort to breaking into someone's house at night to access her computer. One gets mad at another just for looking at her and not sitting with her at lunch. Practical "jokes" are played. Ergo: Mean Girls = Apocalypse Now.
At that point I was ready to hop into the story myself, go Super Saiyan Republican, and start bitch-slapping every one of these insufferable, whiny "ladies" until they starting acting like responsible adult human beings again. Of course, presiding distantly and benevolently over the four hysterical females is Paul, the level-headed man, which gives The Exception some sadly sexist overtones. I mean, other than that one war criminal and his goons, all the male characters in this book come across as pretty normal when compared to the DCIG drama queens. Probably the best part is when Iben starts researching split personality disorder and goes to Paul to inform him that Ann-Lise doubtlessly has this highly rare condition. Wow, srsly? Does Jungersen honestly expect us to believe that we are all potentially this neurotic, bratty, and self-destructive? But lo! there is hope. You can still be the Exception, that lone individual who rises up above the collective juggernaut and acts selflessly in defense of your fellow man, whatever the personal risk. Maybe, that is. Possibly. Uh, actually we're not quite sure. You know what? Humanity might just be doomed after all.
And yeah, that's pretty much the moral of the story. Again I ask, what's the point? This?
"We all know the bottle of wine we've drunk tonight could have paid for vaccinating twenty kids and saving the lives of at least one. We're no different from the Germans during World War Two. They knew that Jews were being killed but they ignored what it meant."
Okay, so enjoying a bottle of wine with an old friend is the moral equivalent of going about your daily business in Weimar while Buchenwald was in full swing? WTF? So where are you while your two bosom buddies Iben and Malene and bullying poor Ann-Lise into emotional hell? Oh, Iben. Does Jungersen expect us to believe you are an Everywoman who merely acts as any of us are capable of acting given the right circumstances?
Iben can smell the evil inside a young man cutting in just ahead of her. He is wearing a long coat and carries a briefcase, but she has a vision of him inside a Russian army helicopter, throwing out mined toys to kill children in Afghanistan. Ruthlessness oozes from his pores and the smell prickles inside Iben's nostrils, like the drinks of freshly opened lemonade she remembers from childhood. . .
She lands near a young woman walking her old bike with a child seat on the back. She is the type of person who, as a trained nurse, helped eliminate invalids in gas chambers well before the Second World War. Her brand of evil stinks like the raw meat left in a plastic bag that you forgot to throw out before going away on a holiday.
*facepalm*
Another issue: this attitude towards immigrants that occasionally popped up. Iben acts fearful around obviously foreign men while Denmark's Bosnian refugees are portrayed as a hard-partying bunch with nothing better to do than receive state benefits, toast to the memory of their lost homeland, and shelter war criminals. As someone who lives near Utica, New York, I found that so depiction so far off base it wasn't even in the ballpark.
Bragi Ólafsson used to be in a band with Björk, which should probably give you a clue as to the . . . uniqueness of his character, although Open Letter Press director Chad Post claims he is a very nice guy. I like Chad so I'll take his word for it, but the Ólafsson novel I'm about to review does feature some very, um . . . funny animal abuse. Is that the right word? Funny?
The Pets (Open Letter Press, 2008), translated from Icelandic by Janice Balfour (157 pages) and originally titled Gæludýrin, is essentially one of those pieces of black comedy that is really funny but also probably shouldn't be funny at all. The entire thing is basically Emil hiding under his bed from a psychopathic acquaintance who proceeds to host a bizarre drinking party for Emil's friends. Through a series of flashbacks we learn that Emil had stupidly asked Havard (the nut), whom he didn't know well at the time, to house-sit with him in London, having been charged with caring for the several small pets that lived there. And so Havard, um, killed them all. One got decapitated, while another two got coated with cement dust and then sprayed with a garden hose during a malicious/misguided cleaning attempt. (Even more disturbing: Ólafsson claimed that particular incident actually occurred in real life and inspired the whole book.) Now Emil thought that Havard had since been committed to a mental institution in Sweden and was struck with terror to see him out the window while boiling some water. When no one answers the door, Havard spies the water on the stove and, good citizen he is, decides Emil has forgotten it and goes in to take it off. Emil is by now safely under the bed. Havard doesn't leave. People show up. Alcohol is consumed.
That's pretty much it. I'm not sure what else there is to say, other than it's certainly a very surreal and darkly humorous work. The Open Letter Press online catalogue describes it as "[a]n alternately dark and hilarious story of cowardice, comeuppance, and assumed identity" with a deceptively simple plot that conceals its topical richness. I dunno . . . I just mostly thought it was very, very odd. I know that's not a very deep analysis, but I was unable to get over what happened to those poor, poor animals! I mean, it was awful! The hamsters were named Moby and Dick! The owner loved his little pets!
Um, yeah.
For some better reviews of The Pets click here and here.
Anja Snellman is a leading figure in contemporary Finnish literature, renown as “a skilful [sic] teller of urban stories, a bold breaker of taboos and a shaker up of the traditional form of the novel” who “has developed from the cult writer of her generation to a challenging chronicler of the moral state of fermentation of contemporary humanity.” Sonja O. Was Here, her bestselling debut novel translated by Timo Luhtanen (103 pages), was first published in the early eighties as Sonja O. kävi täällä.
My initial response to Sonja O. Was Here was that of a dizzying, fast-paced exploration of female sexuality and Cold War communism. Though she comes across as a hard-hitting protagonist who does ask for sympathy, Sonja’s endless series of loveless sexual encounters, juxtaposed against scenes of her difficult childhood, come across uncomfortably as a litany of exploitation and emotional abuse (she even wonders if she was raped after losing her virginity). Snellman is generally seen as a no-holds-barred feminist author (her novel Pelon maantiede caused a bit roversy for its graphic depiction of vengeful sexual violence committed by several women against one man) who wrote Sonja O. Was Here as a female version of the proverbial Intrepid Boy Becomes a Man yarn that sought to raise the question of why, in the words of Luhtanen, an “adventurous man continues to be a hero – [yet] an adventurous woman [is] still called unprintable names?”
Soooo . . . in other words . . . this meant to be the celebratory tale of an independent woman? Sonja is supposed embody some form of feminism? Um, what?
Basically, I’m confused. Would Snellman argue that my negative reaction to Sonja’s behavior is simply the result of social conditioning as to the “proper” female role and the internalization of the double standard? Judging from her background, Snellman is trying to make a case, and one that I’m just not getting. Again, all I see when I look at Sonja is an emotionally apathetic woman who is repeatedly taken advantage of until she ends up (literally) in a mental hospital. And all that, in a crux, is the problem with Sonja O. Was Here: its overall muddled message. (I think there’s a difference between confusion and deliberate, thought-provoking moral ambiguity.)
Now, I am not saying at all that Snellman is a poor writer from a strictly aesthetic point of view. Quite the opposite. Her prose itself is fabulous: energetic, evocative, and razor-edged. Indeed, the first several pages are positively riveting, setting the reader up for what should be a brashly unapologetic tale of independence and sexual adventure. Obviously, some would argue that that does precisely describe Sonja O. Was Here, but I disagree because Sonja never truly owns her sexuality. What Snellman tries to present as toughness struck me as simply psychological indifference. Ultimately, therefore, the reader is disappointed and the most radiant prose in the world can't make up for a sad, befuddled story.
The Brothers
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