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Gösta Berling's Saga
Nov. 27th, 2019 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scripsiHello all! I’m planning to do a read-along on Selma Lageröf’s Gösta Berling’s Saga, and I’d like to invite anyone who is interested to join in. The plan is to start on January 5th and make a post every 2-3 chapters. I will be posting on my own DW, but you don’t have to follow me, as I will post here to tell you when something’s new is up.
How does Gösta Berling’s Saga fit into this community? It was first published in 1891, but the plot takes place in the 1820s, so it was a historical novel from the start. It’s a somewhat strange book and though the first reviews were divided if it was a good book, or not, everyone agreed it was something new and unexpected.
The plot of Gösta Berling’s Saga is a bit difficult to summarize. The setting is in Värmland in the 1820s. Värmland is a very beautiful, sometimes wild, part of Sweden, sharing a border with Norway. During the 17th and 18th century it grew rich on iron, and there are a lot of manor houses, which in the 19th century provided a rich social life, albeit far from any large cities. It also had strong traditions of storytelling, and Lagerlöf was only one of several important authors who emerge from this particular province during this period.
Gösta Berling is a defrocked priest; he is young, beautiful and talented, but he also has a drinking problem, and he is pretty weak-willed when it comes to the fairer sex. He is taken in by the rich and powerful Mistress of Ekeby and becomes one of her 12 “cavaliers”, a bunch of men who for various reasons don’t quite fit in. Part of the plot is the cavalier's antics when they manage to dethrone their mistress, and part of the plot is Gösta Berling’s various love affairs. But what I remember most strongly is the stories about the women in Gösta’s life; and their struggles of independence and meaningful life in a time when no woman in Sweden had their own majority and was wholly dependent on their male relative.
Why read Selma Lagerlöf? Well, apart from a lovely language and a unique way of mixing realism with the supernatural, she was not only the first female Swedish author to win the Nobel prize in 1909, but the first woman, period, to win it. Literature history in Sweden has done it’s best to relegate her into insignificance; a little old lady who told fairy tales. She was so much more. She was passionate about women’s rights, and she had, which was largely unknown well into the 1990s, two long-term relationships with women. Gösta Berling’s Saga was her debut and written a couple of years before she met her first great love Sophie Elkan, but she knew long before that happened that she had no interest in men. She was quiet and introverted, but she also possesses a great deal of charm, and had an excellent self-confidence, especially when it came to her writing talents.
The book is free and can be found online in English here. In Swedish here. And as an English audio-book here.
How does Gösta Berling’s Saga fit into this community? It was first published in 1891, but the plot takes place in the 1820s, so it was a historical novel from the start. It’s a somewhat strange book and though the first reviews were divided if it was a good book, or not, everyone agreed it was something new and unexpected.
The plot of Gösta Berling’s Saga is a bit difficult to summarize. The setting is in Värmland in the 1820s. Värmland is a very beautiful, sometimes wild, part of Sweden, sharing a border with Norway. During the 17th and 18th century it grew rich on iron, and there are a lot of manor houses, which in the 19th century provided a rich social life, albeit far from any large cities. It also had strong traditions of storytelling, and Lagerlöf was only one of several important authors who emerge from this particular province during this period.
Gösta Berling is a defrocked priest; he is young, beautiful and talented, but he also has a drinking problem, and he is pretty weak-willed when it comes to the fairer sex. He is taken in by the rich and powerful Mistress of Ekeby and becomes one of her 12 “cavaliers”, a bunch of men who for various reasons don’t quite fit in. Part of the plot is the cavalier's antics when they manage to dethrone their mistress, and part of the plot is Gösta Berling’s various love affairs. But what I remember most strongly is the stories about the women in Gösta’s life; and their struggles of independence and meaningful life in a time when no woman in Sweden had their own majority and was wholly dependent on their male relative.
Why read Selma Lagerlöf? Well, apart from a lovely language and a unique way of mixing realism with the supernatural, she was not only the first female Swedish author to win the Nobel prize in 1909, but the first woman, period, to win it. Literature history in Sweden has done it’s best to relegate her into insignificance; a little old lady who told fairy tales. She was so much more. She was passionate about women’s rights, and she had, which was largely unknown well into the 1990s, two long-term relationships with women. Gösta Berling’s Saga was her debut and written a couple of years before she met her first great love Sophie Elkan, but she knew long before that happened that she had no interest in men. She was quiet and introverted, but she also possesses a great deal of charm, and had an excellent self-confidence, especially when it came to her writing talents.
The book is free and can be found online in English here. In Swedish here. And as an English audio-book here.
