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gabkust 's review for:
Kristin Lavransdatter
by Sigrid Undset
This book is so moving. Where do I even start?! First of all, I had been very reluctant to start this book because ever since I was 21, it's the kind of book that people say you MUST read, it's just SO GOOD, as if it were Biblical in the undeniability if its goodness, and I honestly hate books that are held up for their morals vs their aesthetic. What finally got me to read this book was when someone (hi Moira!) told me she thought I would like it after she saw how much I enjoyed the award-winning film "Anatomy of a Fall" and how complicated marriage and blame and many things are portrayed there. I was going through a period where I needed to touch the messiness of life where things are not black and white and where there's not necessarily one person to blame.
This book, it seems to me, depicts all the gloriousness of the quantities of good and bad that stir around in all of us and lead to beautiful and tragic things by turns. Honestly, this books is like the Lord of the Rings but by a woman and about a woman. I was thinking this morning that Sigrid Undset in my eyes is a far greater novelist than George Eliot (who I've devoted so much time to!) in depicting the interior life of a woman because she's not constrained by Eliot's Puritan moral fears (at least it seems to me). Eliot's characters sin and then wail and are horror struck or just never sin at all but in KL, people sin happily and aren't scandalized and either try to go to Confession or don't and move on. People just seem freer in her novels. And yet...the scariest thing in KL is Kristin's inability to forgive and forget - her frozen resentment and pride.
Narratively, I'd compare this book to a k-drama. You cannot put it down! The plot keeps twisting and twisting to the very end! Honestly, it reminds me of a great 16-episode Korean drama in that regard. Romance, betrayal, jealousy, love triangl e...I think the only part I thought was not realistic (and very much like a k drama) is how ridiculously good-looking the main characters seem to be. And this isn't even a movie!
Having finished, it makes me want to pick it up and start from the beginning to reread all those parts about characters that I didn't realize were important in the moment (really dying to list some spoilers here).
It's so interesting that Sigrid Undset wrote this a few years before converting to Catholicism. I had never even known that Norway was Catholic for several hundred years. Although there are so many Catholic traditions are mentioned, it is mostly about Kristin's interior world... although it's true that this view of the world is tinted with Catholicism throughout because of the hope and redemption. Fascinatingly, one of the wisest and one of the most vile characters in the book are both priests.
What a book.
This book, it seems to me, depicts all the gloriousness of the quantities of good and bad that stir around in all of us and lead to beautiful and tragic things by turns. Honestly, this books is like the Lord of the Rings but by a woman and about a woman. I was thinking this morning that Sigrid Undset in my eyes is a far greater novelist than George Eliot (who I've devoted so much time to!) in depicting the interior life of a woman because she's not constrained by Eliot's Puritan moral fears (at least it seems to me). Eliot's characters sin and then wail and are horror struck or just never sin at all but in KL, people sin happily and aren't scandalized and either try to go to Confession or don't and move on. People just seem freer in her novels. And yet...the scariest thing in KL is Kristin's inability to forgive and forget - her frozen resentment and pride.
Narratively, I'd compare this book to a k-drama. You cannot put it down! The plot keeps twisting and twisting to the very end! Honestly, it reminds me of a great 16-episode Korean drama in that regard. Romance, betrayal, jealousy, love triangl e...I think the only part I thought was not realistic (and very much like a k drama) is how ridiculously good-looking the main characters seem to be. And this isn't even a movie!
Having finished, it makes me want to pick it up and start from the beginning to reread all those parts about characters that I didn't realize were important in the moment (really dying to list some spoilers here).
It's so interesting that Sigrid Undset wrote this a few years before converting to Catholicism. I had never even known that Norway was Catholic for several hundred years. Although there are so many Catholic traditions are mentioned, it is mostly about Kristin's interior world... although it's true that this view of the world is tinted with Catholicism throughout because of the hope and redemption. Fascinatingly, one of the wisest and one of the most vile characters in the book are both priests.
What a book.