Wow. Every summer I regularly visit a local park in Oslo, just 10 minutes walk from my apartment. This park has a very small restaurant and I have a special agreement they stock ouzo only for me. I love this place where I can stay for hours (if weather is OK) reading, listening to podcasts or meet friends. This park has a statue of Sigrid Undsæt and I often thought: When will I read some of her works? I’d never thought of the possibility an american (mainly) music writer would be the one who put me in action. I will visit my local second hand book shop. I’m sure this shop can supply with the trilogy and when summer arrives I will be in my local park, by the statue of Sigrid reading this history. It’s impossible not to do so after reading what Mr. Gioia wrote (and being a norwegian).
I read “Kristin” during the pandemic and was totally engrossed by it, for all the reasons you listed. Also, it was unsettling to read Undset’s very vivid description of the Black Death while COVID was raging across the globe. Pandemics will upend whatever plans humans have laid, then as now.
Another article where you’ve done a great service to your readers by bringing up amazing long forgotten, works. And now I have another book to add to my reading list!
Bravo! I read this book in the Nunally translation in 2021 after having noticed it in bookstores for years. I absolutely loved it for all the reasons you said and more. I’d add that another genius of the work is that the thought life of the characters is rich but umquestionably medieval. In so much historical fiction we see characters straight out of our time (finding your own truth, rebelling against society’s strictures, being independent) but in corsets and chain mail.
Kristin is a woman thoroughly of her time yet rich and complex.
I do think it’s important that it be read in the Tina Nunally translation and not the kind of stilted original English rendering.
Riddle: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Ibsen, Strindberg, Zola, Proust, Kafka, Rilke, Brecht, Croce, Hardy, Henry James, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. J. Lawrence, García Lorca – what do they have in common? Well, yes, but besides that, they were living after the Nobel Prizes got under way, and didn’t win in literature. Sully Prudhomme, José Echegaray, Rudolf Eucken, Paul von Heyse, Verner von Heidenstam, Wladyslaw Reymont, Grazia Deledda, Erik A. Karlfeldt, Frans Sillanpää, and Halldór Laxness did.
That the literature Nobel Prize is kind of frivolous and time-dependent is a constant at The Atlantic and elsewhere, I think. Undset is probably in the good company of other laureates in oblivion.
Still, a very interesting heads-up for an impressive author that apparently knew how to write (killer openings included). Your take on her magnum opus indeed suits nicely with your Cervantes piece.
Classic literature is timeless. It tells us that human nature is complex, and ingrained in us no matter when historically and where geographically we look.
Hardly read. But in our circles, Catholic home schooling folks, very common! I love when young teenagers are at a gathering and you overhear their Undset analyses.
She converted in 1924 and acclaimed Chesterton’s _Everlasting Man_ the greatest book ever written. And she translated it into Norwegian.
Some modern critics call her the Nordic Catholic Viking…
Good stuff. I hope your readers locate and dive into the trilogy.
Even though I have it, I have not read it. But I am so glad that you featured it in this posting, Ted. I will move it higher on my TBR stack. From Brad Leithauser's Introduction to the Kindle edition:
"Kristin Lavransdatter was a publishing phenomenon. My own edition was the seventeenth printing—an elaborate clothbound hardcover published in 1973, a half century after the trilogy first appeared in English. The trilogy was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, where its striking success elicited an unprecedented testimonial: “We consider it the best book our judges have ever selected and it has been better received by our subscribers than any other book.”
Thanks for sharing this interesting piece. I'm not familiar with Undset, but the first thing that strikes me, based on your description, is that at her time she probably would have seemed incredibly old-fashioned. When she wrote, Europe was finally coming out of a long period of deep interest in medieval literature dating back to the early Romantics. I expect to many contemporaries she would have seemed anachronistic - something like a fusion of Tolstoy and Wagner.
It helps to know the book is perhaps the most Catholic historical novel ever written. The story is a story of virtue and vice, the reason a religious faith is grounded in a discipline of doctrine and works, and ultimately a story of grace.
It seems that at least on rare occasions, as here, the paths of outstanding literary achievement and identity politics would cross. Yet, it has not been so with Undset. That she is a woman of great imaginative genius is appreciated only by the precious few. Why? Her politics are politically incorrect. She's a mother and a Christian first and foremost. Politics trumps art. Always has.
Thanks so much for this memory jog! I have this book somewhere, bought it ages ago but didn’t get around to reading it. My husband read it and raved about it but somehow I never picked it up. Really excited to read it now--first book for 2023!
Thank you for this beautiful piece on the writing of Sigurd Undset. She appears a great woman of courage for our own times. The comment I left earlier was a reaction to realizing how far we have fallen in our choice of Nobel laureates.
Your essay hit home in many ways. The immense complexities of her characters and her implementation of historical narratives is deeply interesting.
Since I found a bunch of Norwegian settlers way back in a family tree her Norwegian connection is interesting also. But also that she became an American. There remains a bunch of yet to be written literature - not to mention music and art to be achieved - in this great experimental process we call “America “.
I never made it past the first volume of Kristin. Too painful to read.
I'm in a reading group working through each volume of what is usually translated as "The Master of Hestviken." The new translation by Tiina Nunnally restores the original title, "Olav Audunsson." The reading group keeps me going through the usual painful action. The third volume just came out, "Crossroads."
I liked your description of the characters:
" I’m tempted to call them hyperreal. They are as complicated and contradictory as the members of your own family, but in a turbocharged and amplified way. This heightening of lived experience is amplified by the deadly circumstances of their life and times, where dangers loom that hardly exist in the 21st century."
I'd add that they struggle with spiritual and religious conflict, which adds depth and additional hyperrealism to the characters.
Wow. Every summer I regularly visit a local park in Oslo, just 10 minutes walk from my apartment. This park has a very small restaurant and I have a special agreement they stock ouzo only for me. I love this place where I can stay for hours (if weather is OK) reading, listening to podcasts or meet friends. This park has a statue of Sigrid Undsæt and I often thought: When will I read some of her works? I’d never thought of the possibility an american (mainly) music writer would be the one who put me in action. I will visit my local second hand book shop. I’m sure this shop can supply with the trilogy and when summer arrives I will be in my local park, by the statue of Sigrid reading this history. It’s impossible not to do so after reading what Mr. Gioia wrote (and being a norwegian).
I read “Kristin” during the pandemic and was totally engrossed by it, for all the reasons you listed. Also, it was unsettling to read Undset’s very vivid description of the Black Death while COVID was raging across the globe. Pandemics will upend whatever plans humans have laid, then as now.
Another article where you’ve done a great service to your readers by bringing up amazing long forgotten, works. And now I have another book to add to my reading list!
Bravo! I read this book in the Nunally translation in 2021 after having noticed it in bookstores for years. I absolutely loved it for all the reasons you said and more. I’d add that another genius of the work is that the thought life of the characters is rich but umquestionably medieval. In so much historical fiction we see characters straight out of our time (finding your own truth, rebelling against society’s strictures, being independent) but in corsets and chain mail.
Kristin is a woman thoroughly of her time yet rich and complex.
I do think it’s important that it be read in the Tina Nunally translation and not the kind of stilted original English rendering.
Thank you so much for this essay! A treat!
I read this some years ago. I've been thinking of reading it again. Now I know I will. Thanks!
From The Atlantic, 1966:
Riddle: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Ibsen, Strindberg, Zola, Proust, Kafka, Rilke, Brecht, Croce, Hardy, Henry James, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. J. Lawrence, García Lorca – what do they have in common? Well, yes, but besides that, they were living after the Nobel Prizes got under way, and didn’t win in literature. Sully Prudhomme, José Echegaray, Rudolf Eucken, Paul von Heyse, Verner von Heidenstam, Wladyslaw Reymont, Grazia Deledda, Erik A. Karlfeldt, Frans Sillanpää, and Halldór Laxness did.
That the literature Nobel Prize is kind of frivolous and time-dependent is a constant at The Atlantic and elsewhere, I think. Undset is probably in the good company of other laureates in oblivion.
Still, a very interesting heads-up for an impressive author that apparently knew how to write (killer openings included). Your take on her magnum opus indeed suits nicely with your Cervantes piece.
There was a movie of the book, in 1995, I think, directed by Liv Ulman. The book is available as a free download.
Classic literature is timeless. It tells us that human nature is complex, and ingrained in us no matter when historically and where geographically we look.
Thanks for the cat videos!
Hardly read. But in our circles, Catholic home schooling folks, very common! I love when young teenagers are at a gathering and you overhear their Undset analyses.
She converted in 1924 and acclaimed Chesterton’s _Everlasting Man_ the greatest book ever written. And she translated it into Norwegian.
Some modern critics call her the Nordic Catholic Viking…
Good stuff. I hope your readers locate and dive into the trilogy.
Even though I have it, I have not read it. But I am so glad that you featured it in this posting, Ted. I will move it higher on my TBR stack. From Brad Leithauser's Introduction to the Kindle edition:
"Kristin Lavransdatter was a publishing phenomenon. My own edition was the seventeenth printing—an elaborate clothbound hardcover published in 1973, a half century after the trilogy first appeared in English. The trilogy was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, where its striking success elicited an unprecedented testimonial: “We consider it the best book our judges have ever selected and it has been better received by our subscribers than any other book.”
Undset, Sigrid. Kristin Lavransdatter (The Kristin Lavransdatter Trilogy) (p. 9). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. "
Thanks for sharing this interesting piece. I'm not familiar with Undset, but the first thing that strikes me, based on your description, is that at her time she probably would have seemed incredibly old-fashioned. When she wrote, Europe was finally coming out of a long period of deep interest in medieval literature dating back to the early Romantics. I expect to many contemporaries she would have seemed anachronistic - something like a fusion of Tolstoy and Wagner.
It helps to know the book is perhaps the most Catholic historical novel ever written. The story is a story of virtue and vice, the reason a religious faith is grounded in a discipline of doctrine and works, and ultimately a story of grace.
It seems that at least on rare occasions, as here, the paths of outstanding literary achievement and identity politics would cross. Yet, it has not been so with Undset. That she is a woman of great imaginative genius is appreciated only by the precious few. Why? Her politics are politically incorrect. She's a mother and a Christian first and foremost. Politics trumps art. Always has.
Thanks so much for this memory jog! I have this book somewhere, bought it ages ago but didn’t get around to reading it. My husband read it and raved about it but somehow I never picked it up. Really excited to read it now--first book for 2023!
Thank you for this beautiful piece on the writing of Sigurd Undset. She appears a great woman of courage for our own times. The comment I left earlier was a reaction to realizing how far we have fallen in our choice of Nobel laureates.
Your essay hit home in many ways. The immense complexities of her characters and her implementation of historical narratives is deeply interesting.
Since I found a bunch of Norwegian settlers way back in a family tree her Norwegian connection is interesting also. But also that she became an American. There remains a bunch of yet to be written literature - not to mention music and art to be achieved - in this great experimental process we call “America “.
Thanks, Ted, for the review.
I never made it past the first volume of Kristin. Too painful to read.
I'm in a reading group working through each volume of what is usually translated as "The Master of Hestviken." The new translation by Tiina Nunnally restores the original title, "Olav Audunsson." The reading group keeps me going through the usual painful action. The third volume just came out, "Crossroads."
I liked your description of the characters:
" I’m tempted to call them hyperreal. They are as complicated and contradictory as the members of your own family, but in a turbocharged and amplified way. This heightening of lived experience is amplified by the deadly circumstances of their life and times, where dangers loom that hardly exist in the 21st century."
I'd add that they struggle with spiritual and religious conflict, which adds depth and additional hyperrealism to the characters.