Olga Ravn

Real Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Based on a real-life seventeenth century Danish witch trial, The Wax Child tells in vivid prose the story of Christenze Kruckow, a noblewoman long pursued by a scandal of sorcery. People whisper that in her wake one finds illness, death, and unsettling behaviour by pigs and cats. Some even say she once fashioned out of wax a child, an instrument of the most sinister magic. Christenze will flee the rumours to Aalborg, that great city of seawater show more and mist. But even there suspicion and fear rule, and once a rumour of witchcraft has taken hold, it can prove hard to shake…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Beginning at about the time this book does, the Lutheran Reformation of Denmark was a bolt from the blue regarding social roles. Women, never favored as a class of beings in christian social organization, had carved out a side-hustles as "cunning folk" or "wise women" whom we would learn to call witches quite soon. Funny, that's part of what the cunning folk were helping their clients protect against..."witch curses lifted one laying hen" or similar verbiage would've been on the cunning folk's roadside signs had they had roadside signs. Or roads.

Author Ravn did a whole huge heap of research on folk magic and its practitioners, relying on court cases and church sources as they are the only extant words about the (mostly) women who worked in this field. This specific story is from court records of Danish women tried and executed for witchcraft.

The creation of a poppet, the European precursor to the voodoo doll (that terrible calumniating lie of a thing), was...faithless to the pop-culture b.s. written and shown for generations now...a bridge created to the intended recipient of health and healing and good fortune.

Once anything gets entangled in the filthy web of christianity it gets perverted and misused.

At all events, Author Ravn used her research heavily in making this story deeply unnerving and spooky. She's created on Christenze's factual bones a story of a woman who simply said "no" to patriarchal control systems, to compulsory heterosexuality, to life spent bearing baby after baby many, even most, of whom will die. Becoming, then, a beacon of sense and independence while attracting to herself a group of like-minded women who resonate to the lures of freedom from "femininity" and its subjugations and humiliations; well, that couldn't be tolerated in the brave new Lutheran world that demanded conformity to its rules and submission to its precepts (as all freshly installed orthodoxies must or face destruction by dissent). Christenze must be stopped, foiled, negated.

Our wax child narrator is created by Christenze prior to her final (dis)solution. The wax child, the poppet, is buried...and survives Christenze. Somehow, not ever vouchsafed us an explanation as to how, we meet the wax child and begin to learn Christenze's story, the story of the communities she inhabited, the story of her downfall...all from the poppet's "mouth" and memory. "How do I know this? The dead fly in the window-sill told me, the grass-pollen as it puffed into the air told me, a brass candlestick told me, a speck of grit. Everything remembers and speaks to those who will listen," we're told.

What elevates this read to all-but five stars is the sharpness of the wax child's awareness of the horrible price we exact, all unthinking, on the whole of creation for our simple continuation of existence as we want, selfishly, it to look. We demand and demand and demand but do not stop to reckon up the cumulation of effects that demanding exacts. "The reason is behind us. All reasons are behind us. The fire has its own reason. The future is already visible. It is over there by the exits. I want you to look directly into the fire—You will hear me in the night under the breath—You will hear me when spring turns to summer, and there in the light an opening occurs...will you come with us to the Lucia fest...? Magic is possible. Laughter is possible. There is a way out...there is a way out…" In this incantatory language, this cadence of a summoning, I want to believe the wax child knows and will vouchsafe.

Way out there might well have been. Might even, for all I know, be. It will not be easy, and it will demand reckoning with the fire. "It is in the depths of her vessels, in that which we call horn and hair. In the smallest sequences it resides there still. I don't need to tell so much, I am merely a reminder, a down that settles upon your brow, and I am with you."

I do not see it coming to pass. show less

Some of the crew members being interviewed seem to be suffering from trypophobia, and the descriptions are making me feel queasy too.

An employee was standing by the counter in the canteen eating a pomegranate with a spoon, and I couldn't look. When she reached for a serviette, I had to turn the fruit the other way round.
from STATEMENT 085

Things seem to be running smoothly at first, but I felt increasingly sad as the interviews progress.

The work wasn’t enough for me. I’ve lost myself. show more Every day, my hands yearn to dig deep into soil so that I might lower myself into its certainty, and the earth receive my death and make me its own.
from STATEMENT 159 show less

Sometime in the future, a spaceship is traveling, populated by works both human and humanoid. The humans can remember Earth, have had children and lost loved ones. The humanoid were created by one Dr. Lund and exist to work based on their programming, though some long for more than that. Now, a committee has come out to the ship to interview the employees and figure out their reactions to the objects that have been found and taken on the ship. How are these objects affecting the crew, and show more does it impact their productivity?

Told in a series of "statements" from each of the crew members, most unnamed, this odd little novella left me feeling unsettled. Because almost none of the narrators identify themselves, you need to look for clues and decide if there are repeats of the same person or if each statement is by a different crew member. Who is human and who humanoid, and how is each affected by the objects? Like Jeff Vandermeer's Area X, we're left with an odd assortment of information to sift through and every time you think you might have a grasp on it, the story veers away again from easy answers. The novella itself was inspired by the sculptures of Lea Guldditte Hestelund, who in fact asked Ravn to write a story to go along with a specific installation of artwork. And while the two pieces of art can be in conversation with each other, this story also stands successfully on its own, asking what makes us human and more than just cogs in the machine. show less

‘’And yet, I could cry if only I had eyes to cry.’’

Denmark, 1620. A child is born. A doll made of wax and longing, and sorrow. For its maker and mistress, a noblewoman, will soon be arrested and executed for being a witch. An entire country falls prey to prejudice, fanaticism and misogyny. And the Wax Child listens to all and sees all. But what can a doll do? Except live through the nightmare of not being able to cry for the one you love?

‘’I saw hearts thirst for revenge and show more hands that craved for violence.’’

In her exquisite novel, Olga Ravn uses folklore and strong imagery to portray the rawest human emotions. Longing, suffering, love as light and darkness. But most crucially, the silence that everyone chooses to listen to when the one in need is crying for understanding. It doesn’t matter that the women speak; it doesn’t matter what they say. Like the Wax Child, their mouths are made of beeswax and cannot be opened. The narrative is rich in folkloric knowledge. Of birth, love, and death, mixing religion with Protestant superstition and the imagery of night with the cries of the crows, earthy elements of wet soil and misty fjords, and the echo of screams through time. Primaeval, elemental descriptions of hair and nails and guts as pieces of the women’s souls are truly unforgettable.

‘’I think I could have been a wound.’’

Men who call themselves God’s voice on earth act like the best instruments of Satan, murdering women based on blatant sexism and Protestant fundamentalism. When a woman isn’t meek, she is a ‘witch’. The light of St Lucia’s night that breaks the winter darkness is forgotten; the hawthorn tree and the white blossoms usher in a bloody spring. And the women will burn because they spoil the narrative of a dark denomination that suffocates and has nothing to do with Christ’s teaching.

The Wax Child is a silent witness, a dull knife that cannot act. A woman standing under the Cross, shedding tears of love and loss…

‘’And there was a wind too that went through bone and marrow, as if she was a lock of hair and the wind a comb.’’

I accidentally read a small extract before I ‘properly’ started reading the novel. And then, another. And another. It was the first time I’d done such a thing, so this sacrilege speaks for itself. The writing is unlike anything I have ever read. More visceral than The Crucible, darker, without any trace of hope or love, but only a poor inanimate object’s ache. So powerful…

In the end, to me, this novel is the voice of unrequited longing and love, and the sorrow that grips your heart when the one you love is taken from you. Yes, there is superstition and Protestant barbarism and prejudice. But the way I see it, The Wax Child is a tale of the deepest kind of love and despair. It can’t get more relatable to human nature than this…

*Every time I read about the various witch trials, I thank God I am a Greek Orthodox woman.*
‘’I will love in vain for ever.’’

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less