This one should be subtitled, "decent people make scads of bad decisions and then agonize over them." Seriously. I am surprised to have liked it as much as I did, because there is no reason this massive book should work.

And yet, it does precisely because of all the reasons why it shouldn't: plot and pace sacrificed to character development, pages and pages of seemingly trivial detail and enough Catholicism to fill a smallish catechism. Taken individually, its separate parts sound like a grueling exercise in literary masochism, but combined, there is no clearer fictional portrait of medieval life.

It's not going to appeal to everyone, but until someone invents time travel, this one is your best route to 14th century Norway.

Not that I'd recommend going there.

Lice and the plague are a bitch, ya know?

Kristin Lavransdattar is a majestic book. It is the portrait of a woman as she finds herself falling in love with someone (Erlend), builds a family for herself, goes through the trials and tribulations of daily life, then dies. The novel can be slow moving but also extremely dramatic. There are some things that happen in this book that could be out of an Indian TV serial.

But like many great tomes Kristin Lavransdattar is a full macrocosm. It is a book that makes its subject matter feel completely lived in and real. One feels like one lives with Kristin and dies with Kristin.

This is a larger than life book that deserves to be on any serious reader’s bookshelf.

[ETA movie review at the end.]

Man, I don't even know how to review this book. It's really big, and full of melodrama, and it took me a pretty long time to read; and now that I'm done I'm somewhat tired and will be glad not to have to think about this anymore.

Don't get me wrong, this is a fine book. But I didn't love it. At times, I didn't even like it. There was a lot of talky-talk, and maybe that's my own fault for reading the entire kit-and-caboodle in one collection as opposed to reading the three books individually. At times it felt like I was stuck in 14th-century Norway and couldn't get out. On paper that sounds great - it's really not so great when you think about stuff that was going on in 14th-century Norway.

Things I liked:
- Massive books make me happy. Really. Truly. Despite how little it seemed to work for me with this book.
- Descriptions galore. My girl Sigrid knew who to write scenery, and it makes me want to go to Norway stat. Makes me want to run around in the woods in the snow and make snow angels with the birds and shit.
- This was clearly very well researched. I give Sigrid props for that, because as much as I love doing my own research, I have a feeling I would have petered out halfway through and there'd be a lot of really glaring mistakes. I couldn't help it - at times I forgot that Undset wrote this in the 1920s; it feels very much like it was written three or four hundred years ago.

Things I didn't like:
- The characters. Really. I didn't like many of the characters. The ones I did like disappeared for one reason or another. That's disappointing. In addition to that, the characters that did exist for more than one appearance were terribly flat and uninspiring. I learned a lot about Kristin, sure, and her relationship with certain people. But her gazillion kids that she kept pooping out? I have no idea who they were. As they got older, it made it easier because they started to have real lives outside of the little world Kristin tried to keep them wrapped up in, but when they were kids? Forget it. Hell, one of the kids (I don't remember which one) just sort of appeared out of nowhere. I barely even remember there being talk of Kristin's pregnancy. And I don't care what anyone says, I am not convinced that the majority of the characters were even necessary.
- As well-researched as the book was, and as beautiful as the descriptions of the scenery were, I think Undset often got tired of writing. She'd be all chatty about something and then all of a sudden she'd end the paragraph with something like, "Then he left." What? What happened? Why did that scene end? It's like Undset's bedtime snuck up on her, or the nurse called her from the waiting room, and she had to quickly finish up the scene lest she not be able to continue it later. Whatever, it was distracting and annoying, and made it hard for me to really get involved in the story.
- I wanted to beat the crap out of just about everyone. This is separate than my complaint about the characters. Just 'cause I say so. Seriously, everyone was exasperating.


But in the end, it's a touching story, if you can muddle your way through all the melodrama. There's a lot of whining and tears, some strange and often sudden aggression, lots of talk about religion while at the same time lots of talk of forest fairies and whatnot. It must have been hard to live in the 14th-century in Norway. No one had any idea what the hell was going on. Superstition was the impetus for any decision, and then when said decision didn't turn out so a-okay, then there'd be lots of talk of forgiveness and the need to repent.

I'm glad I read this in any case. It's a Nobel Prize winner, though for why I'm not entirely sure other than it's written by a woman and was controversial for its time (there's talk of sex and pregnancy! Say it ain't so!). Kristin has the ability to be a strong-minded and forceful woman, but then she would slip back into this pathetic shell of a girl which infuriated me beyond believe.

I can see how many people love this book, even though it didn't work for me. I'm rating it the way I am because of the beautiful scenery. I think Undset's real skill was nature writing, but since I don't know jack about her, I don't know if she ever did anything along those lines or what. I read Gunnar's Daughter by her a few years ago and didn't care much for it either; though I see my brother read it recently and he gave it a whopping five stars.

It is possible that Undset doesn't work for me, period. For now, though, I am pleased to be done, I feel very accomplished. And now this goes on to my brother so he can read it and we can fight about it.


[ETA, 04/01/12: So I watched the movie version of this. I know, right? Who even knew there was a movie version of Kristin Lavransdatter? But really, it exists, and the stunning Liv Ullmann directed it. That's right, the chick from those Ingmar Bergman movies. She was his "Molly Ringwald". She's wonderful.

Unfortunately, the movie version of Kristin Lavransdatter wasn't that great. She directed it in 1995 but it felt more dated than that. And I think she was trying to go for some Bergman effects but fell sort of short. (And, yes, it pains me to say this.) There were dramatic scenes which was fitting, I suppose, because the book itself was so OMG-dramatic; still, it's even more frustrating to actually witness it than it is to just read about it.

And, seriously, the book is a gazillion pages long - the movie itself is only three hours. You can't cram all that shit into three hours. In fact, she barely even scratched the surface. She only focused on one or two major themes, and in the process spent a lot of time showing people crying upon close-ups and some frolicking among trees. Yes, for real.

So, meh on the movie, meh on the book. Still a bunch of thumbs up for Liv Ullmann though. For what it's worth.

I had heard several people say that this was an excellent book, yet I kept putting it off because it was so long and I was busy. But one day this summer, I had three different people tell me I would love this book, and I took that as my sign that I really did have to get around to reading it. So I ended up starting it the same week I started grad school, and I was instantly hooked.

The writing is beautiful (big shoutout to Tiina Nunnally for her translation), and there are so many twists and turns in the plot that it almost never drags--which is quite a feat for an 1100 page book. I loved that it covered the whole span of a woman's life because we get to see the whole spectrum of human emotions that Kristin experiences, and even though she lives in a time very different from our own, I think that every reader (or at least every female reader) will relate to Kristin in some way. I met a mom at my parish today who was saying that she wants to re-read this book every ten years because she knows it will resonate with her in different ways in new stages of life, and I totally want to do that too.

Sigrid Undset just does a remarkable job portraying the experience of being human: she shows great perception in the way she writes about relationships between characters and the spiritual life. When I was reading, I felt like I grew in understanding of how the Father loves us as I saw how unconditionally Lavrans loved Kristin in spite of everything. And throughout we get glimpses into Kristin's own relationship with God, something you don't often find in novels.

In sum, I am so glad I read this, and it is now one of my new favorite books. This is your sign to start reading Kristin Lavransdatter--you won't regret it.

Around the World Reading Challenge: NORWAY
===
3.5 rounded up

Somewhat mixed feelings with this one! On the one hand, I did quite enjoy the story and the writing. There are some gorgeous descriptions of nature and setting, and the author really does transport you to Medieval Norway. The characters, for the most part, are interesting and compelling, and despite the 1000+ page length of this trilogy, I found myself flying through it--if I hadn't specifically made myself stop at my planned # of pages for the day, I don't doubt I could have finished this much quicker. This book essentially covers Kristin's entire life, and as such, there are times where there are large/sudden time skips, in which we find out about important events that happened during those passed years vaguely in the aftermath--this was sometimes a bit confusing and a little unsatisfying, even if I can understand that clearly the narrative didn't need to be any longer!

My biggest issue, was just that, for all that I'm sure the Medieval Christian morality throughout this book is quite faithful to the time & place, I find that mindset extremely off-putting, especially given current world events. I think I'd have enjoyed this more as a teen, when I was a bit less critical of my books. I found it very difficult to sympathize with Kristin's continuously torturing herself for things I don't view as bad, and even more difficult to swallow the patriarchal misogyny of both the clergy & the men around her, even the "good" ones. I do understand that it's just how things were, but it did prevent me from absolutely loving this one, though I'm glad to have finally read it!

Edit: Feb 5 23:fixed up the links which had broken.
When I finish a book such as Kristin Lavransdatter, the remnants of its prose, its strategy and intent swirl around my head like a flock birds coming in to roost: each one carrying a sentence, an idea, a conclusion. But it's not like a mumuration, it's more like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds without the terror. So, a few words about the major themes that have so far settled out. I want to be a reader, not a writer so I'm not going to spend a lot of effort putting things into reviews that others have said so well before me. Thus, I introduce two of the best reviews I've read since finishing the book.

In the course of 1185 pages, Undset succinctly answers the question, “what is the meaning of a good life?” Undset believed (in 1920!) that to answer the question you would have to strip away all of modern life. Strip away automobiles and telephones. Strip away the industrial revolution. Strip away art and the renaissance. And this is doubly true for us today. Strip away our busy lives, our iPhones, our social media, our followers, our internet, jobs, politics, and pastimes. Strip away Donald Trump. What is the essence of life? How do we live it well?

The author's answer is to go back to the simpler truths of 14 century Norway where you carried an axe and a spear for protection from wild animals. There you begin to recognize the timelessness of her characters and their situations. Go back to living life delicately balanced on the land. Where "We feel the winter cold and the demands made to survive it; we begin to understand that if the crops fail we will starve.  The consequence of every human action is amplified, in the absence of our "safety nets."  The politics which Undset depicts are personalized, not abstracted: men of all classes take counsel of each other, not from lofty principles but out of necessity.  The dependency of man on man, of woman on woman, of man on woman, and woman on man, ceases to be any sort of parlour game." Continue with David Warren here: https://www.davidwarrenonline.com/201...

A second major theme in Kristin Lavransdatter is motherhood. The world and everything in it is seen through the lens of motherhood. (Yes, we've stripped away the male dominated western canon.) This is so well documented by Carrie Frederick Frost that I must recommend you read her review, Motherhood in Kristin Lavransdatter. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclu...

These two reviews both come from Catholic educators. I knew I would have to go to that crowd to read reviews. That will tell you that God, religion, whatever you want to call it, plays a third and major role in this book. I myself am a hard fallen away Catholic. I stopped believing in the 5th grade and hated the Church by year eleven. It would be fair to say that I have been welcoming the destruction of institution of the Catholic Church for these past 55 years since high school. Given that, I will still leave it to you to sort out your own feelings about religion. It certainly played a predominant role in ordering the life of Kristin Lavransdatter. And it makes me wonder what role it may have in this complicated world of ours.
#Motherhood #Feminism #WIT #NobelPrize

Rereading this along with the Close Reads podcast (bonus subscriber feed).

=====

This has been recommended to me several times but I've never been very interested. Now, however, my book club is forcing the issue as it was selected for our March discussion. Two months and a thousand pages — can I do it? Yes I can!

=====

This was a really wonderful book. Kristin Lavransdatter herself is a highly flawed protagonist and I often thought, reading this, that if Scarlett O'Hara had married a young Rhett Butler, this might have been their story. If one includes true belief in God and the Catholic faith, that is. The self-examination required by the demands of faith in medieval Norway makes this a truly unique book. Neither Kristin or most of the other characters in the book probably would have reflected upon their own characters or lives otherwise, just as many of us don't in regular life. This character treatment combined with wonderfully written prose describing medieval Norwegian life and surroundings makes this an unforgettable book.

WOW!! I don’t have words to express the beauty, pain, and enchantment that this book contains within it. This is the kind of book I would WANT to write a paper on because it’s JUST SO GOOD! It’s incredibly long, incredibly heartbreaking, and incredibly beautiful. The highlights of this book for me were Kristin’s childhood years and her relationship with her father, the character of Simon, the gorgeous descriptions of nature, fabrics, etc., the strong sense of sin and mercy, motherhood, and resentment. The fact that this book is set in Medieval Norway but has such relatable and realistic characters absolutely blew me away. I loved reading about their customs, myths, and (kinda weird) practices, while also feeling a gut punch every time the narrator or a character would make a too astute comment on human nature.

Just a few of the quotes that stood out to me:

“It’s good when you don’t dare do something that doesn’t seem right, but it’s not so good if you think something isn’t right because you don’t dare do it” (52).

“Vae terrae, ubi puer rex est. In plain Norwegian it means: there’s no peace at night for the rats on the farm when the cat is young” (199).

“Jesus, her good deeds! She had repeated the prayers that were placed on her lips. She had given out the alms that her father had placed in her hands; she had helped her mother when Ragnfrid clothed the poor, fed the hungry, and tended to the sores of the ill.
But the evil deeds were all her own” (403).

“And their father would clap his hands and laugh: Fly, fly, my young birds.
They would take with them bloody threads from the roots of her heart when they flew off, and they wouldn’t even know it” (854).

“So it’s futile to regret a good deed, Ulf, for the good that you have done cannot be taken back; even if all the mountains should fall, it would still stand” (1124).

When I was in college, a kid in a writing class I was in opined that the only worthy books were about "extraordinary people or extraordinary situations." I bristled against the suggestion but also didn't push back too hard because I couldn't think of obvious counter-examples.

Well, anyway, now I've read Kristin Lavransdatter, and that can be my go-to.

It is really hard to explain why this is one of the best books I've ever read. On the surface, a book about the life of a medieval Norwegian woman, from the time she is 7 to her death somewhere in her 50s (I think) does not sound all that interesting. Despite the fact that the book is suffused with forbidden love affairs, political intrigue, and even occasional murders, it always returns, in the end, to the life of Kristin as she struggles to eke out an existence amid a harsh landscape that means to wash her from the Earth.

The book is also SUPER Christian. I would argue this is because Kristin herself is super Christian. (Undset steps back from her protagonist's point of view often enough to let you know that, yes, Kristin is flagellating herself a little too wildly because she thinks it makes her Better.) But I get why some readers have been put off by a book that ends with frank discussions of the purpose of sins in the life of a god-fearing person.

Also: If you don't know anything about Norwegian politics of the 1300s (as I don't), large sections of the second book are going to be borderline incomprehensible to you. I figured it out with some diligent Wikipediaing, but good luck if you don't feel like digging in to everybody's beef with King Haakon.

And yet this is maybe the best book I've ever read about the ways that choices we make in our youths imprison us in lives we don't always recognize as we grow older. Kristin chooses to break her engagement to one man in order to marry the man she feels more passion for in the book's first 200 pages, and then the following 900 pages are about how that choice locks her -- and everybody she knows! -- into a course of action they cannot escape. Undset frequently situates these characters against massive, implacable natural landscapes. They pretend to have control over their lives, but they are specks on specks on specks. The Earth can and will toss them aside.

The book also boasts a rich supporting cast of players, and if Undset strains a bit to give everybody a final bow in the book's closing 100 pages, I still gasped a bit when Ulf turned up again with a handful of pages to go. (Good old Ulf!) This book needs to feel like a Life, and lives have people who enter and exit them. It's a unique strength of Undset's that she can introduce a brand new character (a wife for one of Kristin's sons) in the last section of the book and make her seem just as rich and alive as everybody else.

But the center of this book is always Kristin, and her psychology is plumbed by Undset both directly and indirectly. When we realize just how her husband thinks of her at one point, it comes as a slap in the face, because he has no reason to be reverential to her (and he's also right about at least some of what he says). But when she laments how wicked she is and tries to move toward a more pure existence, we feel for her inability to vanquish her most core self. This has been interpreted as a kind of anti-sex, anti-passion stance from Undset, but I find it more likely that so much of the book is inside Kristin's head that it's hard for the reader to not become infected by her would-be piety. That's such a tricky thing to do and do well, and Undset makes it look easy.

Above all, though, the book is one that restores to the center of the human story the women whose lives running farms and managing households while their husbands were off at the center of the narratives we typically tell. Kristin is not a remarkable or great person. She's weak and vulnerable, and the few great things she does are not going to be recorded in the history books. But by the end of Kristin Lavransdatter, you become convinced that history belongs to her as surely as it does anyone better known. These stories are worth telling, too.

This trio of historical novels won the author the Nobel Prize in Literature. "Kristin Lavransdatter" was assigned to me in high school, at a time when I could barely imagine what it meant to be an adult woman from New York, let alone a 14th century Norwegian woman.

Sigrid Undset vividly portrays conflicts that arise when Kristen, this independent-minded woman, is pressured to fall in line with her society's all-pervasive, restrictive church; she keenly feels the pressure, and yet she resists.

Which bad boy has won Kristin's heart? That would be Erlend Nikulausson, who has been excommunicated by the church. Kristin marries him anyway, and winds up bearing him seven children.

This historical novel emphasizes the conflicts and complexities of Kristin's inner life, such as her nuances of guilt, vividly portraying her inner life in ways that may -- to my thinking -- reflect mostly the historical time when these novels were actually published, in the 1920's.

Apart from Undset's considerable literary skill, it seems to me that setting the characters 500+ years back in history gave both author and readers a certain kind of freedom; allowing readers to indulge in imagining that their complexity of inner life was normal for all humankind.

Of course, when these books were published, adults could vividly remember going through World War I. Choosing this outwardly different historical setting made it seem as though Kristin's anguish was precisely the kind of inner experience that people have always had.

How credible is that? Maybe like reading a picture book, where the cute little bears or mice are adorably drawn stand-ins for human children. Goodreaders like us, encountering a good yarn, are all too successful at suspending our disbelief.

>i>In a comment below, I'll summarize the main reason why I don't believe that to be true, that women in the 14th century were inwardly identical to women in the 20th century, etc.

Nonetheless, Undset's trio of novels was powerful, vividly credible, both outwardly and inwardly dramatic. As a teenager I didn't know much about much about either time in history, the 1300's or the 1920's. Nor did I have any real-world experience to help me comprehend the problems experienced by Kristin and Erlend. But my amazing English teacher, Monica Lacrouts, chose this assignment well.

Intense inner life, intense conflict?

Ask any girl of 15 and she'll tell you, "I know all about that."

Wow- what a book! I think I���ve developed arthritis in my wrists from holding this tome too much over the past two weeks, that and thank goodness it was not a hardback because otherwise I’d have several black and blues across my face from dropping it while in bed.

However, it was all worth it.

Undset’s novel is actually three in one and I think it really should be read this way instead of breaks between since they are so seamless: The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross.

The Wreath was by far my favorite of the three because the setting and cultural traditions were so new to me. The story follows a young maiden in rural, 14th century Norway – Kristin, and you meet her father, Lavrans, and her strange, silent, and depressed mother, Ragnfrid. You’re introduced to the main theme of the trilogy here: motherhood as you learn just exactly why her mother is so morose. You are also introduced to all the religion in this book, which I normally hate but it’s such a part of the culture at the time that it didn’t seem heavy-handed. Kristin is betrothed to Simon, but hardly loves him and is sent to a nunnery until she is older, but meets Erland, a good looking but excommunicated man currently living 'in sin' with judge’s wife and their two illegitimate children. They begin a passionate romance that will propel the plot for the rest of the novels.

The Wreath had it all – medieval customs, death, witchcraft, attempted rape, illicit romance, a strange fairy in the woods, a shocking confession from Ragnfrid – it was fantastic. If you’re going to read only one of these three books, read this one.

The Wife sees Kristin become the head of her household at Husaby, give birth to 7 sons, witness the marriage of her sister to her former beau, Simon, and you become an intimate witness to her gut wrenching estrangement from Erland. This book was all about what it is like to be a mother – both the good and the bad. There is more death, illicit love, political intrigue, and arguments and you’ll find yourself at times wanting to slap Kristin as she tries to apply her religious code to others.

The Cross is quite depressing and as I neared the end of it I found that I didn’t want to read it before falling asleep. You’ve spent a good 800 pages with these characters, you learn to love them despite all their faults, and then Kristin commits a major breach of local custom that brings dire consequences. The black plague then comes to Europe and …. I’ll leave it at that ;-)

Set in 14th century Norway, this novel follows the story of Kristin Lavransdatter from the age of 7 to the 51. Christianity is firmly established in Norway, but vestiges of paganism remain when famine or plagues strike. Undset won a Nobel prize for the book and it's clear why. The descriptions of the natural setting and the way she described characters makes it one of the best novels I've read. It's a long book and I feel like really did watch all of Kristin's life unfold. If your library has it, you should check it out--or come to Zurich and take my copy home with you.