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A review by octavia_cade
The Willow King by Meelis Friedenthal
dark
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
3.0
One of the quotes on the back of this book refers to it as "magical historicism" and I think that's accurate. There are elements of the supernatural here that come out in a very magical realist way, but while I enjoyed them, I'm not sure that they were effectively melded together with the rest of the text. I appreciate that the author is trying to balance science and the supernatural, and that this mix was an inescapable facet of the time - late seventeenth century Europe - but the effect was still disjointed, so much so that the end was pretty ambiguous, and not in a particularly compelling way. I'm strongly inclined to think that the protagonist, Laurentius, was suffering from more than melancholia, and that many of his odd experiences resulted from a creeping onset of insanity.
Certainly The Willow King might be read as a record of his hallucinations, and that could be a valid reading, considering the nightmarish state of the region at the time. Laurentius is a Dutch student, arriving at a distant university in Estonia in order to get away from suspicions of heresy, but he's walking into a powderkeg. There's a severe famine on, and starving people are descending on the university town of Dorpat (currently known as Tartu), and all this seeping misery and conflict is leading to accusations of witchcraft, which are not mitigated at all by local superstitions regarding a willow king. It's all enormously unsettling, and Laurentius - clearly not the most stable person at the best of times - is undermined in all his senses, particularly smell and taste. It's the shifting, nauseating atmosphere that's most successful here, but a little of the repetition and the slow pacing could have been sacrificed for a bit more clarity, I think.
Certainly The Willow King might be read as a record of his hallucinations, and that could be a valid reading, considering the nightmarish state of the region at the time. Laurentius is a Dutch student, arriving at a distant university in Estonia in order to get away from suspicions of heresy, but he's walking into a powderkeg. There's a severe famine on, and starving people are descending on the university town of Dorpat (currently known as Tartu), and all this seeping misery and conflict is leading to accusations of witchcraft, which are not mitigated at all by local superstitions regarding a willow king. It's all enormously unsettling, and Laurentius - clearly not the most stable person at the best of times - is undermined in all his senses, particularly smell and taste. It's the shifting, nauseating atmosphere that's most successful here, but a little of the repetition and the slow pacing could have been sacrificed for a bit more clarity, I think.