korrick 's review for:

The Story of Gösta Berling by Robert Bly, Selma Lagerlöf

5.0

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The moon rose, and the loveliest time of night came.
The moon poured down her light from the pure blue
High arch of heaven over the leaves of the terrace.
At our feet a lily shivered in its urn;
And gold light rose from its chalice.
We had all come to sit on the stairs,
Both the old ones and young, silent
In order to let the emotions take up
The old tunes in the loveliest time of night.

I do not mourn for the stories told around the fire like those of previous generations do, for I was not the one who killed them. I do not mourn for "simpler" times in as pigeonholed a way as those of an aged nostalgia, for a smaller view of things does not inherently lead to less amounts of cruelty, or an increase in understanding. What I mourn for is what I have interpreted of the bits and pieces left to me, the music, the literature, the sense of Far over the misty mountains cold that raises hairs no matter how many may puke over technology and newfangled young'uns and their contemporary times. So I got Stravinsky's Firebird Suite through a Disney cartoon instead of a radio or concert hall or whatever is 'legitimate' and 'enculturated' these days. Big whoop. I'd pay attention if I heard "white supremacy" or "morality that must be babysat is no morality at all", but alas. I do not mourn for these times like one supposedly must, and thus must figure it out on my own.

Friends and children, dancing or laughing! I want to warn you to dance with care and laugh softly, for if your shoes should step on an oversensitive nature rather than on hard boards, it can cause an enormous amount of suffering; and your strong laughter can drive a soul to desperation.

One nice result of having set myself on all the Big and Difficult Things is that I can compare millenium old Japanese classics to Nineteenth Century Nobel Prize Winning Literature without any and all daring a peep, so I will go ahead and say Lagerlöf successfully pulls a Genji. Sure, I like Gösta Berling a hell of a lot more than Shikibu's titular soul, but that doesn't mean he's more of a main point than he is a particularly effective fictional device. Where he goes, we go, and enjoy what comes. What he does, we view from all sides, and appreciate the need for life and sociocultural norms. Whom we meets, we embody, and it is never so simple to say what we mean with love and alcohol on one side and the stability of civilization on the other. Deals with the devil never looked better when one thinks on how humanity's run the world thus far.

Those who were wiser could console themselves that they had fought for their country and for honor. What did he know of such things? He simply felt that he was hateful because he had killed and caused much injury.

Course, any work of this breed of creation and beyond is nothing more than a compilation of fictional devices, so let's do what some are pleased by and others are pissed off by (sometimes both, depending on the lies they are defending and the truths they are denying) and compare literature to math. Into our formula troops Gösta Berling, twelve guests, one major's wife, one heiress, one beauty, one devotee, one countess, the landscape of Selma Lagerlöf's childhood, the history of her riches and the future of her downfall, religion as the hardbound moral work it was meant to be, cultural heritage as it is meant to awe in equal measure, and that 'good' so fought over by pagans and Christianity and whoever else has a hard time with raisons d'être. It's beneficial to know something of the place and the times, but sagas of events that may have been a downfall, may have been a triumph, may have been a scandal and may have been a time of holiness have played out the world over, so too much knowledge of the nonfictional sort may cloud more than it conceals.

You ought to know that no one can worship the goddess of wisdom without some punishment.

Beyond that, the differences between the two previously mentioned works of classical status and male-webbed plotlines lie in a matter of worlds, insular Heian court versus sprawling Värmland woods, the latter of more instinctive appeal to my Euro-bred self for its ice, its mythos, the joys of its industry and the hells of its souls. My mind is most comfortable in sidelong conjuring when the woods are dark and the air is fog and the depths of evil are wandering the roads at will, so those to whom [b:Dracula|17245|Dracula|Bram Stoker|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1387151694s/17245.jpg|3165724] appeals for glimpsed landscapes and [b:Kristin Lavransdatter|6217|Kristin Lavransdatter (Kristin Lavransdatter, #1-3)|Sigrid Undset|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388289230s/6217.jpg|1370150] calls for the bitter glory of moral triumph, come. This one's happier than either and is best read aloud, even to music if one is of mind.

My reward would be enough if the poor would remember me for a year or two after my death. I should have done some good if I had planted a couple of apple trees in the yard or taught the country fiddlers some of the old tunes or taught the shepherd children a few good songs to sing in the woods.

The afterword's a mewling twit of a thing penned by someone who cannot believe a woman wrote this work, so find your Lagerlöf bio elsewhere. You do not need theological nitpicking, nor erratic Euro-patriarchal namedropping, nor even a few final begrudging lines about experimental literature and life that are ruined by being couched in whines of "feminine in the best sense" and the like. You may, however, need the work. It's something I'd hedge my bets on even if 'twere wrote in blood on black and rang of ghostly bells, deep in the misty nights.

Dear reader, must I say the same? The great bees of imagination have now swarmed about us for one year and one day; but how are they going to squeeze into the beehive of fact is a problem they will have to solve by themselves.