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A review by dori_anne
La Légende de Gösta Berling by Selma Lagerlöf
5.0
wow.
what can I say to do justice to this book ? I am feeling very uncomfortable writing this review. First of all : the writing style ! Poetic to its core. Some of the depiction of Nature were absolutly gorgeous, the personnification of It gave a sort of tale atmosphere to the book. Talking about the atmosphere, Selma Lagerlöf plays with genre and she embarks us on adventures, romances, horror tales, and a little bit of fantasy sometime ; all of that in the beautiful setting if Sweden with its white mountains, deep forests and the Leuven, a lake, but a character as well. Perfect for winter. perfect for escapism.
One of the thing that pleased me the most were the characters. The women especially blew my mind, because I think it's the first time I actually read well built and realistic, credible female characters. All in nuances. In that sense there is also a bit of realism in this work : Selma Lagerlöf have a sharp eye on relationships between men and women, and too often unsaid truths can be found between the lines. The male characters are not less important, on the contrary, it's a whole, and the interactions between all those characters give us a fair account of the society.
Apart from that, the place of the narrator is ambiguous, she conveys the story, but she also receives it, and sometime the line between author, narrator and character is blurred. It kind of reminds me f the narration in [b:Eugene Onegin|441200|Eugene Onegin|Alexander Pushkin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1657538916l/441200._SY75_.jpg|1795311]
I've not read so powerful and beautiful a book for since long.
what can I say to do justice to this book ? I am feeling very uncomfortable writing this review. First of all : the writing style ! Poetic to its core. Some of the depiction of Nature were absolutly gorgeous, the personnification of It gave a sort of tale atmosphere to the book. Talking about the atmosphere, Selma Lagerlöf plays with genre and she embarks us on adventures, romances, horror tales, and a little bit of fantasy sometime ; all of that in the beautiful setting if Sweden with its white mountains, deep forests and the Leuven, a lake, but a character as well. Perfect for winter. perfect for escapism.
One of the thing that pleased me the most were the characters. The women especially blew my mind, because I think it's the first time I actually read well built and realistic, credible female characters. All in nuances. In that sense there is also a bit of realism in this work : Selma Lagerlöf have a sharp eye on relationships between men and women, and too often unsaid truths can be found between the lines. The male characters are not less important, on the contrary, it's a whole, and the interactions between all those characters give us a fair account of the society.
Apart from that, the place of the narrator is ambiguous, she conveys the story, but she also receives it, and sometime the line between author, narrator and character is blurred. It kind of reminds me f the narration in [b:Eugene Onegin|441200|Eugene Onegin|Alexander Pushkin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1657538916l/441200._SY75_.jpg|1795311]
I've not read so powerful and beautiful a book for since long.