This book is a story of a 14th century woman, from birth to death. It’s a thousand pages of incident, but as always with books of this historical distance all you come out of it thinking is THANK GOD FOR BIRTH CONTROL.
Kristin is born to a well-to-do family in Norway. She is a major daddy’s girl, and bar one unrequited love affair with a servant boy leads a pretty ordinary life until she falls in love with a handsome older man named Erland. Unfortunately she is already betrothed. She sleeps with him anyway, which I did not find an especially big deal, but this is because I am not from the 14th century. Guys, it’s a really big deal for everyone but especially for God.
Eventually she is able to marry him, and go on to have seven sons in eight years. But this is only the beginning, and I won’t try and summarize further, because the book is really the story of her whole life, and as such is packed with all kinds of things: the ups, the downs, all the in-betweens. It is like a real life and thus hard to summarize neatly. Lives, I notice increasingly as I get older, really have no thematic unity – this is one thing that makes them so difficult. The problem you are solving keeps changing.
I was struggling with myself to describe the appeal of the book, but the Introduction did it well, I think:
(It) achieves an exceptional sense of accumulating dailiness, of momentous actions concatenating in all sorts of minute and unexpected evolutions
Also very appealing is the level of research, that creates in intense domestic detail a really distant world, of dogs, and mead, and un-medicated births. In addition to birth control you thank god for vaccination and antibiotics, because people die at incredible speed and in large numbers. One major character gets a minor cut from a blade, and his arm swells up, and everyone knows: that’s it. Quick as that.
Side bar on the author: Sigrid Undset was an impressive workhorse. Her father died at 11, pushing them out of the middleclass, and so she abandoned her dreams of university to take at 16 a job as a secretary, that she held for ten years. She wrote furiously at night, stories as she put it about “you or myself or any of us office-worms”. She then went on to fall in love with a much older married man, take on board his 3 children as well as have 3 of her own, 2 of whom were disabled, and get divorced, all while pumping out multiple books and winning the Nobel.
KRISTIN is thought to be her masterpiece. The introduction comments on the special sadness that comes from leaving a long book you know you are unlikely to read again. I feel that way now. It was a success at least for this office-worm.