Selma Lagerlöf

[beer good]

Well, my summer project of reading Swedish classics I should have read decades ago is moseying along. Let's see if we can get at least some interest going for a writer who seems to be largely forgotten outside our borders.

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (1858-1940) was and remains one of Sweden's most popular authors, partly thanks to the children's book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, 1907) but also for novels like Gösta Berlings saga (Gösta Berling's Saga, 1891), Kejsaren av Portugalien (The Emperor of Portugalia, 1914) and Jerusalem (Jerusalem, 1902). She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1909) and the first woman to be elected into the Swedish Academy (1914). Oh, and she's on the 20-kronor banknote along with Nils and Gösta.


Most of her stories are set in her home province of Värmland, at the time a pretty rural place consisting largely of forests, small farms, and a few great mansions. Like other writers from the same area, notably her friend the poet Gustaf Fröding, she shows a mix of influences echoing both 19th century romanticism, early modernism (though she didn't care for strict realism), old folk tales and religious writings; the beginnings of modern Sweden, suffused by the myths and stories that built it.

She was also active in the women's suffragette movement, one of the founders of Sweden's liberal party, as well as an outspoken critic of rising national socialism in Germany. At the start of World War II, she sent her Nobel Prize medal and gold medal from the Swedish Academy to the government of Finland to help raise money to fight the Soviet Union. The Finnish government was so touched that it raised the necessary money by other means and returned her medal to her.

Many of her books have been turned into plays and movies, starting as early as in the silent film age, and continuing to this day.

 

[beer good]

Jerusalem (Jerusalem 1: I Dalarne, 1901; Jerusalem II: I det heliga landet, 1902)

On the same day that he arrives in the holy land after never before even setting foot outside his own village, a middle-aged pilgrim comes down with a fever that proves to be fatal. Dying, he asks his companions to carry him into Jerusalem so he can at least see God's city first-hand. As they carry him through a noisy, stinky, crowded city full of people of three different faiths going about their regular business, they point out the landmarks to him: this is where the last supper was held, this is where Jesus was tortured, this is where he carried the cross, this is the holy grave. And he looks at all this mundanity and begs them to stop joking. This can't be it, show me the real Jerusalem. Where's the gold? Where's the glory? Where's the peace and serenity? Where's God? Did he really come all this way, did he give up everything, did he die just to see a... city?

There's a long tradition in Scandinavian literature, especially 19th century literature, of the "simple" bygdedrama - village drama, the story of a small village and the farmers who live there, the big man on top of the hill, the old pastor, the simple but virtuous tenant farmer's daughter, etc. Selma Lagerlöf's Jerusalem, loosely based on real events and often cited as one of the major reasons why she became the first female Nobel Prize winner, takes that and runs with it, turning it into a great early-modern novel in the process.

Focusing on the inhabitants of a small village deep in the forests of Sweden, it follows the wave of religious awakening that swept across the Swedish countryside in the late 1800s and led some to abandon everything and everyone they'd ever known to make the pilgrimage halfway across the world to settle in Palestine. She takes her time setting things up; of the two volumes, the first is set entirely in the small parish they all come from, setting up who they are, the life they've led for generations, and the conflicts that arise when the modern world starts getting closer - both material and ideological/religious rules suddenly start changing, and all of a sudden it's not a given that the richest farmer, the schoolteacher and the preacher are unquestionable authorities. The second volume details what happened to the ones who, eventually, sell their farms and give up everything to emigrate to a country about which they know very little apart from what they've read in the Bible.

Lagerlöf tells it all like a fairly simple story, limiting herself to what her uneducated characters can feasibly know and think about; at the same time, though, she manages to weave in discussions on faith (both religious and personal), community and family that never tries to give any easy answers or pick sides; even when she introduces mystical elements and themes (both Christian, Muslim and pagan; fairytales were still very much alive in these areas a 100 years ago) she leaves it up to the reader to decide whether they're real or just in the characters' heads - and indeed, if it matters one way or the other. But what really makes the book is the way she handles the characters, gradually letting the main characters in this, at heart, fairly simple story become more fully drawn, giving them a history that goes back generations and then occasionally raising the drama to heart-wrenching levels without having to resort to any far-fetched plots. (See, for instance, the excerpts posted by Harry at world lit here.)

Beautiful.

(Read it for free at Project Gutenberg)

 

[steffee]

Thanks for the review, beer good. Based on its title alone, I never would have picked this up, but your "fairly simple story" along with the deeper religious undertones analysis make it sound worth a read.

 

[Cosimah2o]

I've seen your thread about Selma Lagerlöf when I finished my post about The wonderful adventures of Nils in children's forum. I read this book in Spanish when I was a child, so i have a nice memories. Great book!

 

[beer good]

Selma Lagerlöf: Gösta Berling's Saga (1891)

At long last, the preacher stood in the pulpet.

She's sadly overlooked outside her home country these days, but to Swedes, the opening lines of the first female Nobel Prize winner's debut novel carry the same weight as, say, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times". It's one of those openings that toss you right into the middle of a story and raises a few questions right away.

To answer them as quickly as the novel does: the preacher in question is a young man named Gösta Berling. The reason his standing in the pulpet is remarkable is that he's an alcoholic; sent straight from seminary to the dirt-poor forests of central Sweden in the early 19th century, he's crawled into a bottle and hasn't been able to perform his soul-saving duties for weeks. The reason he's in the pulpet this time is that the bishop is in the audience. And one last time, he preaches like a man possessed by the spirit of God. Then he's disrobed, dishonoured, fired.

Fast forward a few months. Gösta Berling, a pitiful drunk ex-preacher, is trying his damnedest to die in a snowdrift when the Majoress comes along. She's the most rich and powerful woman in the province, and having had her own life ruined by marrying into money rather than happiness, she collects pathetic losers (ex-soldiers, gamblers, philosophers, musicians) and puts them up in the Cavalier's Wing at her mansion where she orders them to live for nothing but wine, women and song. So now, Gösta is one of the twelve Cavaliers of Ekeby. And once they've gotten rid of the Majoress herself, they get to run the entire place and live life the way it should be led: without a care or a responsibility in the world... And they swear that if they do "anything that's unbecoming to a cavalier, anything that's wise or useful or womanly", then the Devil take them all.

From there, the story expands into a panorama of all the people they come in contact with. The poor farmers and maids trying to eke out a living in a part of the country still basically stuck in the middle ages, the local bigwigs doing their damnedest to live like the society in Stockholm or Paris (you're occasionally reminded that this is set only a few short years after the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars), and always circling back to Gösta himself: a supposed hero whom all women fall in love with, prone to grand dramatic gestures, forever romanticizing his own status as an outcast loser even as his pranks lay waste to other's lives and he becomes one of the most powerful people in the province.

Woe, Gösta Berling, strongest and weakest among men!

Lagerlöf had little but scorn for realism; in her debut novel, she answers Zola, Flaubert and Strindberg with a story that calls itself a saga, swears up and down that it's filtered through faulty memories of something that happened two generations earlier, and always keeps half a toe dipped in the fairy- and folk tales that were still alive in the deep forests (some would say they are even today). But at the same time, she doesn't want to go back to the old romanticism; her prose drips with irony as she sets up Gösta Berling as the quintessential hero, then gradually strips him of all his excuses. Lagerlöf was an early crusader for women's rights in Sweden, and for all that this claims to be the story of a defrocked preacher, it's often the women (not least the Majoress herself, one of the great literary characters) who carry the story - trapped by double standards, outdated morality and unfair laws in situations they have no right to even begin to control, they still somehow try to. And somehow Lagerlöf ties all the different, loosely connected threads together in the end, into one of the most cathartic endings I know of.

+

Incidentally, speaking of debuts, here's a scene from the 1924 movie version, starring a completely unknown former salesgirl named Greta Garbo.

‪The Saga of Gosta Berling (scene w Garbo)‬‏ - YouTube