The Story of Gosta Berling

The Saga of Gosta Berling is a novel by Swedish author and Nobel prize winner, Selma Lagerlof. Combining two of my current obsessions, Scandinavian literature and women authors, I've been really looking forward to this one. This ended up not being an easy read for me, though I ended up finding it

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rewarding.

Gosta Berling starts out his adult life as a minister, but is quickly run out of town and defrocked for his excessive drinking and bad behavior. He falls in with a misfit group of cavaliers in the town of Ekeby. The rest of the book chronicles his various love affairs (which always end badly for the woman) and tell the stories of his fellow cavaliers. There is a strong element of folklore/mysticism running through the book and the stories are told in an episodic fashion. The episodic nature of the book kept me at arm's length, as I was never sure whether this was a character I would continue to run in to, or one I'd get to know for a few pages and never see again. It also made it a bit hard for me to get in to the flow of the book.

There is a lot of death in this book and a lot of infatuation (I can't call it love). What saved the book for me was that in the end there were a lot of loose ends tied up that I'd despaired of ever revisiting. Also, several of the women sort of come in to their own instead of killing themselves over Gosta Berling. Though I found the characterizations a bit weak or at least different than I'm used to, I will say that the writing is beautiful and I think the translation by Paul Norlen must be very good.

All in all, I'm glad I read this and I suspect it is a book that will improve for me as I think about it more and more.

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I liked Selma Lagerlof's "Gosta Berling's Saga" but I didn't exactly love it. The book has a very folk tale feel to it -- which I both liked and disliked.

The folk tales were fairly interesting and had good, solid stories to them, However, the characters felt sort of cardboard to me, so it made the

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book a slow read since I really didn't connect with me.

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I don't know quite why, but I was expecting this to be a kind of generic late 19th century novel - agricultural realism, a family struggling to hang on to their estate in difficult times. And of course it turns out to be something quite different, much harder to pigeon-hole. There is an element of

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realism in the underlying description of ordinary people's lives, but there's also a picaresque arbitrariness about the sequence of events that seems almost 18th century; larger-than-life characters stomp about in seven-league boots in a rather ETA Hoffmannish way; there's a Faust-story that keeps popping up in the background when we least expect it; nature intervenes whenever it chooses; the whole thing is set seventy years back in the 1820s in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and narrated by someone who claims to have been around at the time (but Lagerlöf was only in her late 20s/early 30s when she wrote it); altogether it's difficult to work out when you are supposed to be.

While the story is full of parties, celebrations, escapades and practical jokes, there's a very hard moral line under it all. Frivolity is good and necessary, but as soon as it's taken too far (as it invariably is, here) we are brought down to earth with a painful bump and shown that events have consequences that are almost always both nasty and irreversible. Without order, work, and moral discipline the community falls apart into chaos (but we can't rely on established institutions to keep us in line: it's a matter of individual responsibility). Mostly, but not exclusively, it's the men who make a mess of everything and the women that suffer and try to patch it up again. But practically everyone in the novel is weak and fallible and makes at least one culpable mistake. But don't imagine that it's all dour moralising: apart from the occasional sentimental deathbed scene, the atmosphere is consistently light and ironic, and there are some very good jokes.

I haven't advanced far enough in Swedish to tackle something like this, so I was grateful for Paul Norlen's translation, which reads very naturally and mostly manages to avoid being either intrusively modern or archly Victorian. Penguin are clearly patting themselves on the back because this is the first new English translation in over a hundred years, but that does rather lay them open to the question why didn't they commission one earlier? Could it be that they were just waiting for Lagerlöf's copyright to expire...?

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Dreadful. Author's name anagrams to "llama-free slog" and while I don't think there are any llamas in this book, I can't say for sure because I Did Not Finish.

Reason read: January 2024 botm Reading 1001. Author is winner of Nobel Prize for Literature, in fact she is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. This work was a collection of sagas, or folktales. I think sagas might be a common form of literature in the Scandinavian countries. Iceland is famous

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for their sagas. This one is Swedish. Gosta Berling is a defrock clergy. He got into drink and then he became a cavalier which sounds like a bunch of men who drink and carouse but in general mean no harm. The stories are interconnected and that is what makes it a novel but it really does have a plot. It may have symbols, motifs, etc, but no real plot, no rising action, etc. The land is a part of the story. The culture is interesting. I enjoyed listening to the reader on Librovox because he had that Scandinavian accent. Fund to hear the words but also funny when I heard him pronounce “fatigue” as fa-ta-gue. The whole book was read by the same reader. Something that doesn’t always happen with Librovox. It was a so so read for me. Took up way too much time.

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