Sara Lidman (1923–2004)

Naboth's Stone is the middle book in a sequence of historical novels dealing with the impact of the railway on the remote and thinly-populated inland regions of northern Sweden (Lidman grew up in Västerbotten herself). We are somewhere in the 1880s, and the ambitious Didrik is Chairman of the council in the raw settlement of Little Crane Water. He is eager to see the community develop: the imminent construction of the railway is the key to that, and he is determined to make sure that it will be routed through Little Crane Water. Didrik and his neighbours are only the second generation of farmers in the area, the economy is still largely one of subsistence farming, and the only way the settlers can get their hands on cash is by selling their trees (and/or their labour) to the big timber companies from the coast. As Didrik comes to see in the course of the book, the timber companies are exploiting their capitalist advantage remorselessly, doing irreparable damage to the forests, and giving farmers far less than the market value of their timber.

But this isn't just a political novel - most of the story is to do with Didrik's relationship with his wife Anna-Stava, with his elderly parents, with the mysterious wet-nurse who turns up when Anna-Stava isn't able to feed their son, and with Didrik's absent foster-brother Naboth. All of which feed into our understanding of how the community works, what its values are, and how it makes rough-and-ready arrangements for looking after people who can't support themselves (widows and orphans are taken into the farmers' extended families, but treated as unpaid servants).

Lidman's text, which is full of broken sentences, dialect, and bits of biblical/liturgical language, was obviously a nightmare for the translator. Tate makes a pretty good job of it on the whole, but there are some odd choices here and there. The generic dialect she uses seems to be a mixture of Scots, Northern English and rural Shropshire - there's probably no good answer when translating dialect, and I'm sure it would have been a mistake to pin it down to somewhere specific, but the mixture does sound a bit artificial sometimes, and lacks internal consistency. In the religious language, she has a tendency to re-translate the Swedish rather than use corresponding passages from the AV, which must have saved valuable time, but undermines the effect of the familiarity of the language that Lidman was presumably trying to get.

I found this a very interesting book - a sort of communist Swedish Middlemarch, perhaps...… (more)

Being the mother of two children out of wedlock, and rumored to having cheated the workers at a foresting venture, Linda already has a reputation. But when she meets with the musician Björn Ceder, with his slight frame and troubled eyes, and realizes he has just had a parting of ways with the other half of his duo, she just has to pick up her accordion and go with him. It’s the early decades of the 20th century in the rural north of Sweden, and Linda leaves her hard-earned lodging business and her two children, to go on eternal tours of village dances and recitals with the man she hopelessly loves. That Björn is homosexual is abstract to her, despite his constant flirting with young farmboys, spending their earnings on presents and sweets, and leaving a trail of angry parents behind. Between Linda and Björn something is growing that is more hate than love, more guilt than friendship, but a bond that none of them seem to be able to break.

This is an unusual Sara Lidman book, and it took me a while to get the hang of it. Her style is usually so sparse and dense, but here it is much more expressive, modernistic, rich in imagery. This, and that it focuses more on the meandering inner workings of people than outer events, creates a book harder to follow than many of her others. But once it grips me and I start to follow on this horrific, sad downward spiral, once Linda starts drinking and Björn humiliating himself, this is a profound meditation on the nature of obsession, self-destruction and the worst sides of friendship. Towards the end, I can hardly breathe. Not a happy read by any standard, but powerful, stark and full of insight. Highly recommended.… (more)

"Regnspiran" is a bird whose song, according to local superstition, predicts death and misery. Everybody knows this, but noone dares to mention it. Instead the official version is it predicts rain. This theme of what everybody knows but won’t say carries this dense novel about the girl Linda, who grows up wild, destructive and difficult in a Västerbottnian village in the early 1900eds. It’s a landscape Lidman has often returned to, and where she’s written much of her finest work.

Linda is caught between her self-punishing, closed father, and her too lenient mother, having a childhood difficult to navigate through. More or less by accident she predicts her father’s death , giving her a reputation as a fortune teller already at age eight. In her young naivety she uses this reputation to gain respect and fear from the villagers – and as she grows up it’s as someone you need to keep on the good side of, but whom nobody really knows, or likes. It doesn’t help her that she gets pregnant without being even engaged either, especially since the whole village already has taken her side on a rape charge once, years before. The only friend she has is the neighbor girl Ulrika, who fails to see what the rest of the village has already worked out: the child of Linda’s unborn child can’t possibly be anyone other than Ulrika’s fiancée, Karl, who suddenly eloped to America after the last ever village dance.

Sara Lidman is one of my favorite writers. As always, she is a joy to read. Her style, sparse and understated, with razor sharp insight into human behavior, fear and convention, is a delight. I know of almost no other writer that can make the rural, mundane everyday of a small village become a grand human drama. Here a stolen scarf or a wrong word in passing becomes nail biting tension. And her characters are rounded, complex and original down to the smallest parts. However, in this particular book I’m not sure I like what she’s saying. Lidman can often be harsh, but her insight into what makes a character tick is usually creating a sort of rugged tenderness. In this book there’s something unforgiving and hard in the way she looks at Linda and silly Ulrika, and the ending, inevitable as it may be, feels almost cruel. A strong and rewarding read, but far from my favorite book by this unique voice.… (more)

A good old-fashioned rural tragedy, the sort of thing that was seriously out of fashion in the English-speaking world in the late 50s. Obviously, the publishers must have thought the author's Swedish reputation made it worth taking a punt on a translation, despite the Cold Comfort Farm factor.

As the story is set in a remote village in the early years of the 20th century, we know that the characters must be speaking in dialect. This is something it's very difficult for a translation to deal with, unless the translator arbitrarily picks some other dialect to translate into, producing something that is either distractingly specific or Mummersettishly generic. The translator in this case sticks to very plain, simple words, relieved only by an occasional biblical flourish, which isn't too distracting and avoids most of these hazards, but obviously this must also lose a lot of the quality of the original.

Nonetheless, I think the book does work well in English: the characters are very strong individuals, and don't fall into the easy stereotypes that are such a hazard for this kind of story.… (more)