Recent reading
Aug. 3rd, 2020 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeSome variations of time, place and mood in the last few books...
Jerusalem by Selma Lagerlöf (1901; translated by Velma Swanston Howard, 1914). This is a fairly short but wide-ranging book, which begins by touching on the lives of various characters in a village in Dalarna (called Dalecarlia in the translation—apparently that's the English name for the same region?), particularly in the locally prominent farming family of Ingmarsson, and gradually converges on the story of a revivalist Evangelical sect that grows up in the district and whose members ultimately decide to emigrate together to Jerusalem. Ingmar Ingmarsson, the current heir of the Ingmar farm, his sister Karin and her husband, Ingmar's sweetheart Gertrude and their neighbours contend in various ways with the arrival of a charismatic preacher and his growing influence on their lives and community. It's a somewhat meandering story, and full of memorable characters and moments, sometimes dark and disturbing, sometimes ironically tragic, sometimes comforting. Lagerlöf has a sort of detached mood in narrating her characters' follies and misfortunes (very different from, e.g., D. K. Broster's warm and obvious care for her own characters), which I think adds to the effect of the strange but largely very believable things that happen here, and the picture of a community gradually turning from ordinary life to zealous fanaticism. There's one scene right at the end that's particularly chilling. I thought it was a bit strange for the story to end where it does, with the emigrants leaving Sweden and before anyone even gets to Jerusalem, but now I realise that's because it's the first of two parts (which are called '1' and '2' in Swedish but not in English, for some reason)—the second, happily, is available on archive.org. I shall get to it shortly!
Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman (1993; translated by Joan Tate, 1995). This was a serendipitous find—some neighbours put out a shelf of books to give away, and I happened to spot the name of an author wholuzula recommended a while ago. This is a thriller, of sorts, set in a remote region of northern Sweden near the border with Norway. The violent murders which which the plot opens are left unsolved for twenty years, and most of the book, rather than being what I'd think of as a 'murder mystery', is a sort of psychological exploration of the consequences of what happened for the various characters: Annie Raft, a teacher who arrived in Blackwater with her young daughter on the day of the murder; residents of the village and its surroundings, including a local doctor and a young man who Annie suspects of being the murderer; the hippie commune where Annie briefly goes to live. The mood throughout is deeply unsettled and disturbing—there's a lot of disjointed, troubled thought and a lot of dwelling on sordid details (and some decidedly unappealing sex scenes), none of the characters' lives go especially well and none of the relationships seem particularly positive or fulfilling. This was a bit much for me—as was the narrative style, which is very modern, very immediate and very much thought rather than narrative, and difficult for me to follow in places (honestly, I think I'm too literal-minded for modern books). The story touches on a lot of interesting themes—the characters' relationships with their environment, their views of deforestation, the cultural place of the Sami characters—but prefers significant and unsettled implication to detailed exploration or really any kind of resolution. Even the eventual reveal of whodunnit doesn't really clear anything up. One thing I did appreciate a lot, though: this book has an excellent sense of place, and Ekman uses descriptions of the natural world to great effect. They're not nice, of course—everything contributes to the general displaced mood, what could otherwise be beautiful scenes are made threatening and unfriendly and you get the sense that, for all the varied ways the characters see the world around them, none of them ever quite get it right, if there is anything to get—but it's very well done.
Mistress and Maid: A Household Story by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1863). So after that foray into the modern world I thought I'd go and read something comfortingly Victorian. This book was a good choice! It's incredibly Victorian, and I mean that as both a good and a bad thing. It tells the story of Elizabeth Hand, who at the age of fifteen is taken on as a maid by the Misses Leaf, three sisters living in genteel poverty in a vaguely-Midland country town, and follows maid and mistresses through the fortunes and misfortunes of their lives over the next ten or fifteen years. This sort of 'household story' portrayal of quiet, everyday women's lives and commonplace struggles is something I always enjoy in nineteenth-century fiction—the story shows all sorts of little details of these women's domestic lives and relationships, good and bad. I especially liked the relationship between Elizabeth and Hilary, the youngest and most enterprising of the Leaf sisters, who supports and takes care of Elizabeth and wins her undying loyalty. Craik leaves the reader in no doubt of what she thinks about anything: she makes frequent authorial intrusions into the narrative to give her opinions on the characters and to expound her views on society, class relations and gender roles, which are very conventionally Victorian and hence largely wrong in a rather tiresome way—but she is sympathetic and compassionate, and the story she's telling honestly sometimes gives the lie to her moralising. We follow Hilary as she is driven to take work in a shop to support herself and her sisters in the face of their less responsible brother's mounting debts, and as her sister Selina marries a man she doesn't love to escape from their life of poverty. Miss Balquidder, the independent and successful businesswoman who helps Hilary in her need, is a great character, and I enjoyed her relationship with Hilary and the exploration of the lives of unmarried women in early Victorian Britain. There's also a quietly enjoyable love story; although I thought the ending in general could have cleared things up better, and I would have liked to see more of Elizabeth and Hilary together.
Jerusalem by Selma Lagerlöf (1901; translated by Velma Swanston Howard, 1914). This is a fairly short but wide-ranging book, which begins by touching on the lives of various characters in a village in Dalarna (called Dalecarlia in the translation—apparently that's the English name for the same region?), particularly in the locally prominent farming family of Ingmarsson, and gradually converges on the story of a revivalist Evangelical sect that grows up in the district and whose members ultimately decide to emigrate together to Jerusalem. Ingmar Ingmarsson, the current heir of the Ingmar farm, his sister Karin and her husband, Ingmar's sweetheart Gertrude and their neighbours contend in various ways with the arrival of a charismatic preacher and his growing influence on their lives and community. It's a somewhat meandering story, and full of memorable characters and moments, sometimes dark and disturbing, sometimes ironically tragic, sometimes comforting. Lagerlöf has a sort of detached mood in narrating her characters' follies and misfortunes (very different from, e.g., D. K. Broster's warm and obvious care for her own characters), which I think adds to the effect of the strange but largely very believable things that happen here, and the picture of a community gradually turning from ordinary life to zealous fanaticism. There's one scene right at the end that's particularly chilling. I thought it was a bit strange for the story to end where it does, with the emigrants leaving Sweden and before anyone even gets to Jerusalem, but now I realise that's because it's the first of two parts (which are called '1' and '2' in Swedish but not in English, for some reason)—the second, happily, is available on archive.org. I shall get to it shortly!
Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman (1993; translated by Joan Tate, 1995). This was a serendipitous find—some neighbours put out a shelf of books to give away, and I happened to spot the name of an author who
luzula recommended a while ago. This is a thriller, of sorts, set in a remote region of northern Sweden near the border with Norway. The violent murders which which the plot opens are left unsolved for twenty years, and most of the book, rather than being what I'd think of as a 'murder mystery', is a sort of psychological exploration of the consequences of what happened for the various characters: Annie Raft, a teacher who arrived in Blackwater with her young daughter on the day of the murder; residents of the village and its surroundings, including a local doctor and a young man who Annie suspects of being the murderer; the hippie commune where Annie briefly goes to live. The mood throughout is deeply unsettled and disturbing—there's a lot of disjointed, troubled thought and a lot of dwelling on sordid details (and some decidedly unappealing sex scenes), none of the characters' lives go especially well and none of the relationships seem particularly positive or fulfilling. This was a bit much for me—as was the narrative style, which is very modern, very immediate and very much thought rather than narrative, and difficult for me to follow in places (honestly, I think I'm too literal-minded for modern books). The story touches on a lot of interesting themes—the characters' relationships with their environment, their views of deforestation, the cultural place of the Sami characters—but prefers significant and unsettled implication to detailed exploration or really any kind of resolution. Even the eventual reveal of whodunnit doesn't really clear anything up. One thing I did appreciate a lot, though: this book has an excellent sense of place, and Ekman uses descriptions of the natural world to great effect. They're not nice, of course—everything contributes to the general displaced mood, what could otherwise be beautiful scenes are made threatening and unfriendly and you get the sense that, for all the varied ways the characters see the world around them, none of them ever quite get it right, if there is anything to get—but it's very well done.Mistress and Maid: A Household Story by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1863). So after that foray into the modern world I thought I'd go and read something comfortingly Victorian. This book was a good choice! It's incredibly Victorian, and I mean that as both a good and a bad thing. It tells the story of Elizabeth Hand, who at the age of fifteen is taken on as a maid by the Misses Leaf, three sisters living in genteel poverty in a vaguely-Midland country town, and follows maid and mistresses through the fortunes and misfortunes of their lives over the next ten or fifteen years. This sort of 'household story' portrayal of quiet, everyday women's lives and commonplace struggles is something I always enjoy in nineteenth-century fiction—the story shows all sorts of little details of these women's domestic lives and relationships, good and bad. I especially liked the relationship between Elizabeth and Hilary, the youngest and most enterprising of the Leaf sisters, who supports and takes care of Elizabeth and wins her undying loyalty. Craik leaves the reader in no doubt of what she thinks about anything: she makes frequent authorial intrusions into the narrative to give her opinions on the characters and to expound her views on society, class relations and gender roles, which are very conventionally Victorian and hence largely wrong in a rather tiresome way—but she is sympathetic and compassionate, and the story she's telling honestly sometimes gives the lie to her moralising. We follow Hilary as she is driven to take work in a shop to support herself and her sisters in the face of their less responsible brother's mounting debts, and as her sister Selina marries a man she doesn't love to escape from their life of poverty. Miss Balquidder, the independent and successful businesswoman who helps Hilary in her need, is a great character, and I enjoyed her relationship with Hilary and the exploration of the lives of unmarried women in early Victorian Britain. There's also a quietly enjoyable love story; although I thought the ending in general could have cleared things up better, and I would have liked to see more of Elizabeth and Hilary together.
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Date: Aug. 3rd, 2020 07:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 3rd, 2020 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 3rd, 2020 07:35 pm (UTC)Häxringarna by Kerstin Ekman (The Witch Rings in English)
Historical fiction about people (mostly women) in the Swedish town of Katrineholm and how the town grew up around a railway station. It's the first book in the series Kvinnorna och staden (The Women and the Town). My main takeaway from this book is women getting pregnant and then being abandoned by the man who fathered the baby. It happens three times in 300 pages (though to be fair, one of the men dies). Aaagh, contraceptives or abortion or men taking responsibility, can we please have them. Will probably be reading more? [But then I never did, apparently...]
Rövarna i Skuleskogen by Kerstin Ekman (in English as The Forest of Hours)
This is the story of a troll over 500 years of Swedish history. Association with humans changes him over time from a wild thing eating bugs and with only fleeting thoughts in his head, to something close (but not identical) to human. I guess this is historical fantasy, but in flavor it's more like a folk tale. This book does beautiful things with the Swedish language. I have no idea if the translation is as good; I doubt it could give the same sense of place. Anyway, recommended!
If you want to read Swedish historical fiction, I very much recommend Sara Lidman's The Tar Still! Though I have no idea how the translation handles the dialect.
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Date: Aug. 4th, 2020 05:10 am (UTC)Dialect in translation is an interesting thing. There were a few bits in Blackwater where the translated dialogue was in what looked like a northern English dialect (much use of t' and so on), and I assume that was an attempt to render dialect in the original in a way that got across a corresponding sense of 'rural' and 'northern'.
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Date: Aug. 3rd, 2020 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 4th, 2020 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 3rd, 2020 10:30 pm (UTC)Nitpick: Dalarna isn't strictly a village, it's a region or more precisely a 'län', which is like a Parish but without religious involvement. (We have a lot of sprawling countryside with occasional houses and comparatively few traditional villages)
Dalecarlia was indeed the English name for the region in that period, used by English-language travelogues. It sounds like a linguistic joke, 'Dalkarl' means roughly 'Man from the Dales' (Dalarna translates to 'The Dales') so 'Dalecarlia' is just a way to make it sound 'fancy' in a faux-latin style.
(Dalarna is home to a lot of old Swedish folk culture, so there's an added sense of 'southern gothic-y-ness' in a 19th century setting.)
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Date: Aug. 4th, 2020 05:17 am (UTC)Thanks for the geographical information, too—yes, that sort of landscape of scattered countryside dwellings is just how it's described in the book, now I think of it. Huh, I like the unnecessary fancy re-naming... :P
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Date: Aug. 4th, 2020 10:48 am (UTC)I just looked up a list of Swedish provinces, Dalekarlia isn't even unique in the theme of faux-Latin. Hats off to Bohuslän, which has been translated from 'Lived-in(Bo) House(Hus) Region(Län)' to Bahusia.