Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross

"'Kristin, my dearest love,' begged Erlend in despair.  'Oh, Kristin, I know I've come to you much too late...'

Again a tremor passed over his wife's face.

'It's not too late,' she said, her voice low and harsh.  She stared down at her son, who lay in a swoon in her arms.  'Our last child is already in the ground, and now it's Lavrans's turn.  Gaute has been banished by the Church, and our other sons...  But the two of us still own much that can be ruined, Erlend!'"  (Kristin Lavransdatter, p. 973)

Kristin Lavransdatter (Penguin Classics, 2005)

by Sigrid Undset (translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally)

Norway, 1920-22

While I must have spent hundreds of Kristin Lavransdatter's 1124 pages trying to figure out whether inept storyteller Sigrid Undset was a bigger embarrassment to Scandinavian culture than lame-o pretentious pop star Bjork, I've decided to try to shy away from personal attacks now that Undset's historical fiction Beaches has finally reached its long drawn out tear-jerker of a conclusion.  Still, what exactly have I taken from this experience?  First, for all the people who seem to want to fawn over her for merely having created a birth-to-death portrait of a fictional woman with "realistic" flaws, Undset strikes me as an extraordinarily lazy writer.  Probably because she's so bad at dialogue, she spends endless amounts of time laboriously filling the reader in on what each character thinks and what each person looks like.  Very boring.  Second, Undset apparently never met a contrived situation she didn't like--in the key reunion between Kristin and Erlend in the passage above and in Kristin's final saintly acts when the Black Death comes to her convent, I was actually moved to laughter by Undset's cheap, Spielbergian theatrics.  No sense of subtlety whatsoever.  And even though The Cross was probably a slightly less annoying reading experience for me than either The Wreath or The Wife, I'm tempted to suggest that some of that sense of "improvement" was only noticeable due to the fact that the preceding books in the trilogy set the bar so low.  In short, a tedious and manipulative story unimaginatively told.  Refund! (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)

Sigrid "Woe is Me" Undset

Non-Satanic Devil's Advocates

I'll link other Kristin Lavransdatter: The Cross readalong posts below as soon as I can get to them, but thanks to everybody who read along with Emily and me and/or visited the various readalong blogs to join in on the discussions.  It was a lot of fun despite the novel in question!  If you've read the trilogy, please let me what you think of it--and if you haven't, please be aware that a certain online bookseller giant's website (let's call it Big Mythological Warrior Gal.com for the moment since this isn't one of those whorish book blogs that tries to pimp books for money) is actually full of raves of KL along the likes of the following:  "The saga covers every human emotion and possibility that can occur to a human being."  OK, I stand corrected!  I wasn't bored to death by Undset after all!!  Psyche!!!

Emily (Evening All Afternoon)
Amy (New Century Reading)
Claire (kiss a cloud)
Gavin (Page247)
Jill (Rhapsody in Books)
Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)
Softdrink (Fizzy Thoughts)
Valerie (Life Is a Patchwork Quilt)

Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife

Kristin Lavransdatter Readalong, Part Two

"Suddenly Kristin was overcome by violent sobs; she hardly knew what she was crying about."  (Kristin Lavransdatter, II: The Wife, p. 562)

While I'm mostly over feeling guilty about inviting so many trusting people to read the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy along with Emily and me (my bad), the shame and the embarrassment definitely linger on as this singularly uninvolving work continues to take shape as an 1,100 page Norwegian print version of a Lifetime channel drama or something. For whatever Undset's storytelling goals in The Wife, she's clearly her own worst enemy as a narrator--constantly undermining the flow of the narrative with the title character's endless crying jags, jealous whining about family members, and non-stop brooding.   To make matters worse, the flair for landscape scenes that I found at least partially appealing in The Wreath has now been replaced with completely superfluous descriptions about people's appearance at every turn.  Right after one of the occasions in which Erlend has struck Kristin, for example, we get the following odd insight into Erlend's state of mind: "Oh, his wife's quiet and dignified bearing was as lovely as the willowy grace of the young maiden had been; she was wider in the bosom and hips, but she was also taller.  She held herself erect, and her neck bore the small, round head as proudly and beautifully as ever.  Her pale, remote face with the dark-gray eyes stirred and excited him as much as her round, rosy child's face had stirred and excited his restless soul with its wondrous calm" (610).  While it would be nice to think that Undset's actually getting at something here--some truth about the husband and wife dynamic, some hint about gender relations in 14th-century Norway--I sincerely doubt there's any method to her madness: The Wife is filled with similarly empty, sometimes outright laughable descriptions about people from all walks of life, and no amount of "authentic medieval" references to the licking of festering eye wounds or of an adult giving hickeys to the twelve year old sister of an ex-fiancée of his can mask Undset's undeniably conformist tendencies as a narrator.  And with the novel's two most interesting characters, Lavrans and Ragnfrid, now dead, the only suspense left in part three for me will be seeing how schmaltzy things get as Undset prepares for the big sentimental finale with that lack of subtlety that she has so clearly established as her calling card.  To borrow a quip from an old punk rock fanzine friend of mine, "g-e-n-e-r-i-c gets easier and easier to spell every day"!  (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)

Sigrid Undset and her dog Erlend

Other readalong posts on The Wife:

Emily (Evening All Afternoon)

Amy (New Century Reading)

Claire (kiss a cloud)

E.L. Fay (This Book and I Could Be Friends)

Gavin (Page247)

Jill (Rhapsody in Books)

Lena (Save Ophelia)

Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)

softdrink (Fizzy Thoughts)

Valerie (Life Is a Patchwork Quilt)