I read The Wreath, and will read the other two books (The Wife and The Cross). Our book group met and discussed it about six weeks ago; I’m just sitting down to put together my thoughts now, and I’m afraid they’re more than a bit disjointed. Richard at Caravana de Recuerdos is co-hosting a Kristin Lavransdatter read-along during October – December. He indicates that reviews and impressions are welcome; impressions are what I offer here.

I found the naming conventions interesting. It seems that children were not named after a living relative, but generally were named in honor of a dead one. Each generation takes its own father’s name as its surname. So, Lavrans Bjorgulfson, the patriarch of the family, is father to three daughters with the surname Lavransdatter. It’s fairly easy to track children through their fathers this way, but maternal ties get confusing. With seemingly as many names as in War and Peace, I could have used a lineage chart; there wasn’t one in my book, perhaps in other editions (?)

The family of Lavrans Bjorgulfson were well off; better than peasants and servants, but not as well-off as more wealthy landowners and royalty. Lavrans Bjorgulfson did have political influence in the area.

When Kristin became engaged to be married to Simon, she was sent to a convent for a year. Apparently there were two types of girls at the convent: those who were dedicated to a life within the church, and those who spent a period of time before or after a life-event … almost like a finishing school.

The book had a curious mix of Catholicism and mysticism. Religon played an important role in their daily lives, yet they still relied on potions and incantations for healing; they were very superstitious. In one scene very early in the book, an elf maiden (also called a dwarf maiden) tried to lure Kristin into the woods by offering her a “wreath of golden flowers.”

I don’t want to talk about the relationships, for fear of giving away some plot. The teaser is that you’ll read about unrequited love, adultery, jealousy, murder, and other potential scandals!

A quote that struck me:

"" It’s a good thing when you don’t dare do something if you don’t think it’s right. But it’s not good when you think something’s not right because you don’t dare do it.""

You might have to read that quote a few times, it sounds like a bit of a logic puzzle. When you’ve got it sorted out tell me, do you agree? ( )

(More to come as my readalong continues)

Thoughts on Part 2: The Wife

Personally, The Wife was a bit of a mixed bag for me. The first 150 pages continued some of my least favorite aspects of The Wreath: guilt-ridden Christian moralizing, overwrought dramatic shenanigans from main characters, and seemingly ENDLESS weeping on the part of Kristin herself. Indeed, there's hardly a scene after Kristin's childhood in which she doesn't break down in tears for one reason or another. If she can't have what she wants, she cries. If she gets what she wanted, she feels guilty and cries. If nobody is paying attention to her, she cries some more. If she's the center of attention, she takes the opportunity to...cry. No wonder the woman loses weight throughout the book; between the tears and the alcohol consumption, she is probably severely dehydrated. After several hundred pages of listening to her whiny, guilt-stricken interior voice, my sympathy was wearing very thin. Like Lavrans, watching her weep at his bedside, I was continually asking "What is it now, Kristin?"

Kristin's inability to find peace for the sins of her early life is intensely annoying, but not unbelievable. I have to admit that I can relate to the experience of banging up against the same mental/emotional wall for years and years, making little headway, and even being alienatingly self-involved in the process. And a third of the book still remains for Kristin to come to terms with her demons. But what interests me about her spiritual block is how it reflects Undset's relationship to the church.

During the early scene when Kristin is walking twenty miles barefoot in sackcloth in order to be granted absolution by the Archbishop at Nidaros Cathedral, I thought to myself that, even if this kind of mentality seems harsh to me, belief in a Church hierarchy does at least provide a way out for believers who fall victim to sin. Kristin has to do this intense, painful penance, but after she's done it and the Church higher-ups tell her she's forgiven, she should feel at peace, right? That's one benefit of belonging to something like the medieval Catholic Church: someone else can theoretically decide for you when your sins have been purged, and then you get to start over with a clean slate.

But Kristin? Does not regain peace when the Church fathers have told her she's forgiven. She even weeps herself into two religious visions, and neither of them make much of a dent in her seemingly endless supply of self-recrimination. In some other book (James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for example, in which Stephen Dedalus is hounded into complete abandon by his religious guilt), I might read this as a judgment of the Church - about how it's unrealistic to attempt to externalize shame, guilt, and forgiveness, or that any other human could know whether or not God has cleansed us of our sins. But it doesn't seem to me that Undset is taking this view. After all, she herself converted from skeptical agnosticism to Catholicism just 2-3 short years after this book was published, so she must have found some value in the structure and ritual it provided, even if, in her novel, it seems to act more as a crutch to prolong Kristin's self-flagellation, than as a comfort to mitigate it.

Most of the time I feel Undset is trying her best simply to present the medieval Norwegian Church: there are earnest, pious priests like Brother Edvin and Gunnulf Nikulaussøn, and there are also people who abuse their position in the hierarchy. Among the lay people, there are those who are victimized by the Church (men and women accused of witchcraft), and those who derive comfort and strength from it. But I continue to wonder about Undset's choice of protagonist - why focus on a character who seems, however pious, to be immune from the comforts offered by the Church - who seems actually to be made a WORSE person by her religiosity? Is Undset working out her own crisis of faith, just prior to conversion? Or is she merely making the point that spiritual journeys can be long and torturous? And why does Kristin have a more difficult time reconciling herself to her past mistakes than certain other characters do - her husband, for example? This is a question I often have about protagonists eaten up by religious guilt. Nobody around Stephen Dedalus seems to think they're going to Hell for a passing crush on a woman glimpsed on the streetcar, but he, for whatever reason, does. The priests have all told Kristin she has made amends for having sex before marriage, but she can't accept it. In both cases, the all-consuming guilt these characters feel erodes their ability to live their lives in a generous and responsible way.

What singles out these super-sensitive, selfish, all-or-nothing believers? A number of Stephen's behaviors (in particular his childhood bedtime ritual, which must be completed properly on pain of eternal damnation) align neatly with a modern diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder; Kristin, though, just seems depressed. One interesting parallel Stephen and Kristin DO share is an extremely close connection with their opposite-sex parent; Stephen spends Ulysses hallucinating his dead mother, and Kristin's relationship with Lavrans is a little too close for comfort. Is an overdeveloped religious fixation tied to some kind of Oedipus/Electra complex? Portrait and Kristin came out within four years of each other, around the time that Freud's theories were beginning to gain currency.

In any case, Kristin and her religious guilt do get to be a bit much. Yet around the 450-page mark (of the omnibus edition), I found myself enjoying the novel more than I had previously. Undset's narrative branches out, and we spend extended periods either outside Kristin's head completely, or observing through her eyes with minimal commentary. Whenever this happened, as in the narratives of Kristin's ex-fiancé Simon or Erlend's brother Gunnulf, I found myself relaxing into the storyline and enjoying the exploration of different corners of the medieval world, whether it be the hostels of Rome or the unconverted wilds of Finland. Occasionally, too, I started noticing moments when Undset made surprisingly poignant use of her plain, unadorned prose. This exchange between Lavrans and Ragnfrid, for example, struck me as lovely:

"Perhaps you may think, wife, that you've had more sorrow than joy with me; things did go wrong for us in some ways. And yet I think we have been faithful friends. And this is what I have thought: that afterwards we will meet again in such a manner that all the wrongs will no longer separate us; and the friendship that we had, God will build even stronger."

Something about the quietness of that "I think we have been faithful friends" is very touching to me, although it's marred by Ragnfrid's wish a few pages later that he had just hit her once in a while. Likewise, Kristin's slow realization of the depths of her parents' relationship, although it seemed a little, um, delayed (what is she here? in her mid-twenties?), struck a chord as well:

"While she lived at Jørundgaard, she had never thought otherwise than that her parents' whole life and everything they did was for the sake of her and her sisters. Now she seemed to realize that great currents of both sorrow and joy had flowed between these two people, who had been given to each other in their youth by their fathers, without being asked. And she knew nothing of this except that they had departed from her life together. Now she understood that the lives of these two people had contained much more than love for their children. And yet that love had been strong and wide and unfathomably deep..."

By the end of The Wife I felt that the second book is stronger than the first, although still not a knockout. Despite an annoying protagonist, it widens its scope and develops a diversity of characters, and relies less on clichés of gothic and romantic literature than The Wreath. When she's not obsessing on her own sinfulness, Kristin can make an insightful observer, as when she contrasts the feasting styles of her husband and father, and notes that Erlend tends not to get as drunk or boisterous as Lavrans, since he's not as constrained while sober. I'm sure that the Black Death will give Kristin lots of opportunities to wail and sob, but I'm also somewhat hopeful for more non-Kristin time in Undset's third volume.

Thoughts on Part 1: The Wreath

One of the reasons I suggested reading Kristin with a group was that I had heard such great things about it from a huge variety of sources, yet kept putting off the actual moment when I would crack open the covers and begin to read. Historical fiction is pretty far outside my normal reading comfort zone, especially books set in the medieval period that involve some kind of romance. I have certain snobbish instincts to bundle all such stories into my personal stereotype of awkward exposition, overwrought dialog, and anachronistically modern notions of love and marriage. Frankly, I think it's high time that snobbishness was challenged. And so far, Kristin Lavransdatter is doing a good job of challenging it, but in ways that are different than I anticipated. I think I was expecting something more like the work of Icelandic novelist Halldor Laxness: ultra-realistic; moving slowly and hinging on small, everyday events; grimly funny in a militantly anti-romantic way. Instead, Kristin moves quickly and smoothly, and involves big swathes of drama, veering at times into melodrama. I'm still not quite sure what to make of the old seduction-while-sheltering-in-the-barn-during-a-storm chestnut, or the conveniently untimely death of Erlend's first mistress Eline: both of those events disrupted the flow of my reading a bit, and made me direct rhetorical questions at the author: "Really, Sigrid?" I asked. "Really?" Nevertheless, apart from those two examples I was completely sucked into the story while I read it, and I think Undset does an impressive job of writing a thoroughly-researched novel that doesn't force its research down the reader's throat. Kristin, Lavrans, Ragnfrid and the others seem true to what I know about people, as well as being true (as far as I can tell) to their place and time. They don't stop in the midst of the action to explain their culture to the modern reader, which is one of my top peeves about "otherized" literature, including historical fiction. And Undset's descriptions of the Norwegian landscape are understated, yet lovely:

In the middle of the night she woke up when her father touched her shoulder in the dark.

"Get up," he said quietly. "Do you hear it?"

Then she heard the singing at the corners of the house - the deep, full tone of the moisture-laden south wind. Water was streaming off the roof, and the rain whispered as it fell on soft, melting snow.

Kristin threw on a dress and followed her father to the outer door. Together they stood and looked out into the bright May night. Warm wind and rain swept toward them. The sky was a heap of tangled, surging rain clouds; there was a seething from the woods, a whistling between the buildings. And up on the mountains they heard the hollow rumble of snow sliding down.

In one sense, the novel is called Kristin Lavransdatter simply because that's the main character's name: the old Norwegian naming system formed surnames from one's father's first name, so that I, since my dad is named Michael, would be Emily Michaelsdatter, and my dad, son of Warren, would be Michael Warrenson. So in a way Kristin Lavransdatter is as obvious a title as David Copperfield. In another way, though, I think it's more significant, because the relationship between Kristin and her father Lavrans is a major theme, at least in The Wreath. Kristin is her father's best-loved daughter - loved, it turns out, better than his wife, better than the home he's kept for them. In the early scenes, during her childhood, the tenderness between them is palpable. She identifies so much more strongly with her father than her mother that at one point Ragnfrid has to reassure Kristin that she actually loves her - and while I was inclined, as the story began, to sympathize with Lavrans and blame Ragnfrid for this family dynamic, those sympathies were significantly complicated by the end of The Wreath. In many ways, I think the Lavrans/Ragnfrid and Lavrans/Kristin relationships are more interesting and important, in this first volume, than Kristin's courtship and engagement to Erlend. Kristin's wintry standoff with her father, when she is living at home after he refuses to consent to her marriage, is so heartrending to me, and quite delicately done (this is probably the section of The Wreath that most closely approaches my expectations of Laxness-ian desperation). In the end, loving Kristin forces Lavrans to reexamine his own decisions and assumptions about how life works, which I think is an interesting commentary on families - how parents learn from their children, as well as the other way around.

To me, one of the most intriguing aspects of The Wreath is its portrayal of the process of Christianization. Kristin's family are devout Christians; it's established in the early pages of the novel that they're more pious than average: "...the other people in the valley felt that God's kingdom had cost them dearly enough in tithes, goods, and money already, so they thought it unnecessary to attend to feasts and prayers so strictly or to take in priests and monks unless there was a need for them." Yet even for the extremely pious in Undset's novel, it seems that their world has only been partially Christianized: in the villages and cities Christian beliefs apply, but in the mountains, away from civilization, live the elves, dwarves and trolls of the old, pre-Christian belief system. It's as if the medieval Norwegians perceived the work of religious conversion as applying more to the actual land itself than to the people living on it - as if the act of buildling churches and cities transformed a region from the territory of the old beliefs to a Christian region. Even Lavrans, who gives ample proofs of his piousness, sees no contradiction in continuing to believe in other kinds of supernatural beings in the mountains. Before seven-year-old Kristin has her titular vision of a blonde maiden with a golden wreath beckoning to her from beyond a pool, Lavrans admits that "I've seen herds of cattle and sheep, but I don't know whether they belonged to people or to the others." And after the little girl runs terrified back to her father, saying that she thinks the vision was a "dwarf maiden," nobody thinks to contradict her:

"Oh, that must have been the elf maiden - I tell you, she must have wanted to lure this pretty child into the mountain."

"Be quiet," said Lavrans harshly. "We shouldn't have talked about such things the way we did here in the forest. You never know who's under the stones, listening to every word."

He pulled out the golden chain with the reliquary cross from inside his shirt and hung it around Kristin's neck, placing it against her bare skin.

"All of you must guard your tongues well," he told them. "For Ragnfrid must never hear that the child was exposed to such danger."

So the Christian ethos, while real for these characters, is something that needs to be guarded and invoked, rather than something that naturally permeates the whole world around them. And threats to a Christian enclave are often localized and external - similar to a modern person's bodily fear of venturing into a "bad neighborhood." It's a take on religious conversion I'd never run across before, and one that fascinates me.

Tuesday over at Tuesday Reads wrote a couple of posts on the question of whether or not Kristin is a "modernist" novel, and I think it's an interesting question - one that speaks to what I was expecting from Undset versus what I got. Because it was published between 1920 and 1922 and often labeled "modernist," I was taken by surprise by the relatively traditional, un-experimental narrative style, and the somewhat Victorian level of drama (I wouldn't have batted an eyelash at the barn scene in, say, a Bronte novel, but I was surprised to find it in the twentieth century). So I think Tuesday's on to something in her rejection of the idea that this book is "modernist." On the other hand, there are certain, more subtle ways in which Undset plays with our expectations. Despite the romance elements and the fact that Kristin and Erlend triumph over steep odds to achieve their wedding, the end of The Wreath definitely doesn't feel like a happy-ever-after. Kristin experiences her wedding as a surreal nightmare, haunted by the sins she feels she has committed, and by the knowledge of how many people she's hurt to get what she wants. And the book itself doesn't end with the happy, reunited couple in their bridal bed, but with Kristin's parents, who must face up to their regrets about their own married life. So perhaps Undset is more transgressive than at first appears.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to continuing on to Part 2: The Wife.

Be sure to read the translation by Tiina Nunnally--it's SO much better than the older translation; very long book but definitely worthwhile reading through; follows life of Kristin Lavransdatter from childhood through stages of life to old age; shows the long-range consequences of decisions; a window into life in a certain time & place long ago; Sigrid Undset was the first woman to win the Nobel prize for literature, back in 1927 (I think) & this novel was part of the body of work that earned that for her ( )

Rich in historical detail, this story of Kristin Lavransdatter is full of the richness of the lifestyle of the Norwegian royalty and commoners. Many characters are actual characters in history. Her life is full of so many things, that you are always caught unaware at the next events. Truly worthy of the award given it. ( )

I judged this book by its cover.

My copy of Kristin Lavransdatter is kinda unusual. I don't really remember when I acquired it. I think it must have been when the estate of Joe Granquist (my uncle) was settled, back in the 1970's. That would explain why the book is musty - from sitting in my sister's cellar for a decade, during probate. The dust jacket is gone, except for the inside sleeves which were scotch-taped in place...a long time ago judging by the patina. The creased front cover is a dirty green cloth - worn down to cardboard filler on the edges, with threads dangling here and there. The copy was published by Alfred Knopf in 1954 in NYC, a Borzoi edition. 1070 pages. "Brooklyn Public Library" is stamped on the bottom and top sides. There's a return reminder card in a slot that says "Due 10/14/59" and an intriguing note on a sheet of paper ripped from a spiral notepad that proclaims "This book was reported lost before its due date. It was taken out on a card belonging to Gail Mozarsky. Please see that her record is cleared." (I hope to God it was, Ms. Mozarsky, or you'll need a federal bailout too.)

If the tome hadn't had such a charming, intriguing "presence", I really really doubt I would have made it through the first few pages, which are to easy reading what Normandy Beach on 6/6/44 is to a picnic at the shore.

First, I stumbled over the obscure place names. I can deal with Oslo, Stockholm, Denmark, and on a good day, even Reyjavik or whatever...but Jorundgaard, Skog, Follo, Sil, Gudbrandsdalen, Sundbu. Behalten sie Tak o mucho!

Then there's the small matter of patronymics. William Johnson's kid is Tom Williamson. His kid is John Tomson. And just when I tumbled to the routine, his kid is William Johnson - oh no, again! It's almost like that country-western song "I'm my own Grandpa".

And then I had to become a lexicographer...and refresh my memory - if there ever was one - of the exact meaning of "fain" "trow" "lief" "beck" and "wot". Some clarifications, it's true, were in the notes in the back of the book. You know, back there around page one thousand fifty or so.... Wait a few minutes while I look, and I'll tell you for certain. (In fairness, the book has been translated in a more modern style. I read the older "Archer" translation)

But I persevered. And I'm glad I did. You know, if I had Groucho Marx's Duck Bearing $100 every time I heard a teenager say "Epic!"...my IRA would be back to normal. But Kristin Lavransdatter, "seriously", is an epic epic.

It's like the Escher drawing of men climbing/descending staircases. On the one hand, the setting is medieval and bucolic to the core. The landscape, the farmsteads, the legal and religious customs, the political framework - all are precisely and, for the most part, clearly rendered. But the thing is - heh heh, not the "Thing" which is a whole 'nother Scandinavian thing - the thing is... that Kristin, Lavrans, Erlend, Simon all, oddly, seem very contemporary and very intense and very I-can't-think-without-my-latte cerebral. Kristin is, at the beginning, a very familar figure, a strong-willed, rebellious teenage girl. Later on, she's very much the multi-tasking soccer mom. And in her older years, she's the empty nester. But she's always worried and, it seems, just one Prozac away from being cool with life. Erlend, her husband, proves the rule that opposites attract. He is a very recognizable slacker, dreamer and excitement seeker...just look into the next cubicle and you'll find one...Cheetos on his shirt, leading a squad on a World of Warcrack quest...and puzzled as to why his girlfriend is leaving. And then, there's Simon, the nice but plain looking guy who never gets the girl because the girl likes the bad boy.

Oh I know, I'm doing a great injustice to Sigrid Undset - Lord have mercy on her soul - by trivializing Kristin and her peers. It's my defense mechanism. The book is just too real and too moving for me treat it otherwise. I can't very well break down sobbing in a book review now can I? And if I were to tell you why I was sobbing - and it happened more than once while reading this epic - well that would be an inconsiderate "spoiler", wouldn't it? Clue! Somebody dies. Clue! Everybody dies! Just take my word for it...this masterpiece is the same league as War and Peace or the Brothers Karamazov. Or if that's too Russian for you, how about Gone With the Wind, or Updike's Rabbit Run (on and on) books?

Actually, the experience of Kristin Lavransdatter put me in mind - more than anything else - of a summer's day back in the early 1980s. I was vacationing in Manhattan and looking for a quick way to escape the local heat wave. I wandered into the now-defunct art house cinema, the Thalia, on West 95th street. Satyajit Ray's masterpiece, the Apu trilogy, just happened to be starting. I had no idea who Ray was or what I was in for. I just wanted to cool off. Soon I was entranced - by the monsoon rains, the skinny dogs, the sad brown eyes, the haunting sitar - I kept going back for coke after coke after popcorn. The three films were like a soul transplant. Like reliving a past life as a Hindi, or maybe all the past lives of India. I emerged six hours later, blinking at the daylight, trying to remember who I was and how to get to my hotel. Now that's epic! And that's Kristin Lavransdatter. ( )