Lessons from the Bog People

If I had to conjure a coherent theme for my Winter Break reading, it would have to be “quirky non-fiction.” Cleopatra, Charlie Chan, and then this: Bog People.

It seems that nineteenth- and twentieth-century peat diggers throughout Northern Europe unearthed bodies so perfectly preserved that the local police were regularly called out to investigate possible murder. As it happens, the victims were ritually murdered – around 2,000 years ago. P.V. Glob’s The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved, written in 1965 and brought back into print by the New York Review Books imprint, was the first comprehensive archaeo-anthropological look at Denmark and Germany’s bog people, and the clues to Iron Age Germani society they provide.

P.V. Glob was Denmark’s Director General of Museums and Antiquities, as well as Director of the National Museum of Copenhagen, which afforded him particular access and insight into that country’s bog people. Some of the black and white photos throughout the book struck me as totally gruesome, but also fascinating in their detail, right down to a perfectly preserved Swabian hair curl, which had been described by Roman chroniclers, but not actually seen. (**Digression: I can’t get my hair to keep a curl for one swanky evening – apparently, some enterprising hairdresser needs to come up with a peat bog treatment for the wavily-challenged.**)

Think of this book as the literary equivalent of a very comprehensive National Geographic special, and you have the idea. Glob starts by describing the individual finds in detail, but by far the most interesting part of the book is the last third, when Glob uses the mummies to piece together the day-to-day life of Denmark’s Iron Age society, as well as speculating very convincingly about the meanings of these particular deaths.

For me, it was the photo of an intricately knit bonnet that really brought the dichotomies of Iron Age society home – it’s impossible to call a society that produced something so beautiful, without a written pattern or a machine, “barbaric.” And yet ritual sacrifice was clearly part of the fabric of their lives. How much have we changed?

The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved is a good, nerdy read. Highly recommended for readers who love anthropology and archaeology, readers who enjoy nonfiction, and who enjoy reading about ancient history. The pictures are pretty graphic, though, so it’s not the kind of thing I’d leave on a table for very sensitive little children to find.

This book counts for the Dewey Decimal Challenge -- if you like reading nonfiction, you should check it out over at The Introverted Reader. Thanks to Jen for hosting!

Astrid & Veronika: A Character Connection

It was not a good idea to read Astrid and Veronika on a plane. Especially sitting next to a stranger. Especially with a colleague dozing a few rows ahead of me. Honestly, by the time I landed in Albuquerque I had cried sad tears, happy tears, hopeful tears and disappointed tears. I was a puffy, sappy mess by the time I exited the aircraft. Linda Olsson’s book wrung me out. That’s mostly because in Astrid Mattson, Olsson has created one of the most surprising characters I have come across in a while. Which is why I decided to review this book with a Character Connection.

When we first meet the solitary Astrid, she is in a quandary: something is definitely wrong at her new neighbor’s house, but she’s sidelined herself from society for such a long time that she doesn’t really know what to do about it.

Astrid could no longer sleep. She wandered between her room and the kitchen, coffee mug in hand. The car was still in the same place. She couldn’t have left. Yet there was no sign of life. She means nothing to me, she told herself. I know nothing about her. I have no business intruding. (p. 14)

Astrid’s humanity conquers her reticence, however, and she finally makes her way to Veronika’s door:

When the door opened and she stood face to face with the young woman, she realised that life had irrevocably returned. She cared. (p. 15)

Because of this choice, this singular act of reaching out to another human being in need, the eighty-year-old Astrid is eventually able to reclaim a part of her life. With the decision to help comes a kind of absolution, and Veronika, a young writer with her own sadnesses to escape, acts as Astrid’s confessor. And with every secret she reveals, Astrid’s character comes more into focus.

Up to the point where she meets Veronika, Astrid’s life has been almost entirely defined by her relationships with two men: her father and her husband. Both are destructive, malevolent forces, and Astrid’s bitterness remains, even when they are both out of her life forever:

“When my father died, I cut up all his clothes and started to weave. When my husband was taken to the rest-home, I began on his.” Astrid stepped onto one of the rugs and let the sole of her foot rub against it. “It gives me pleasure to walk on them,” she said. (p. 56)

But as the book progresses, Astrid learns that she does have control over her reactions to her past. Each secret she reveals to Veronika is a part of herself she can finally face and accept. Her final letter to Veronika crystallizes her understanding of her life and her hard-won philosophy of community. It was one of the most inspirational passages I have read in a very long time, a kind of manifesto for sisterhood. Which is why I cried. Uncontrollably. Astrid is truly unforgettable.

This book will make you reflect on the relationships that have defined your life – the short ones and the long ones. I would recommend it to readers of literary and world fiction, especially those who appreciate a feminist perspective.

This finishes The Black Sheep Dances’ Scandinavian Reading Challenge. I am so happy I participated – I have found two of my favorite books of the year (and maybe of all time) through the challenge! Thanks, Amy, both for hosting the challenge and for the book recommendation! And thanks to Jen at The Introverted Reader for hosting Character Connection. If you’ve never participated in that meme, you don’t know what you’re missing.

More peril in Scandinavia: Smilla's Sense of Snow

Smilla Jasperson doesn’t belong in Copenhagen. She was born in Greenland and raised by her Inuit mother, from whom she learned everything about snow and ice. But after her mother’s death, her estranged Danish father brought her to Copenhagen, where as an adult she lives a solitary, callous, irascible existence, except for her friendship with a poor Inuit boy, Isaiah. When Isaiah falls off the roof to his death, even though she knows he is terrified of heights, she suspects foul play. The authorities quickly close the case, and she realizes someone with a lot of power doesn’t want the murder solved, so she sets out to do it on her own.

Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow presents the reader with a difficult protagonist in a difficult situation. She is already an outsider, a sensory-oriented woman in a verbal society. She is uncomfortable with language (her native tongue is leaving her, but she has never been quite comfortable with Danish), and her first person narration reflects that anxiety. In fact, the narration is so frustratingly incomplete that it feels almost antagonistic at times:

“He has a collection of aftershave lotions and eau de toilette that smell expensive and sweetly alcoholic: I open them and put a dab of the fragrance on a paper napkin, which I then roll into a ball and put in the pocket of my smock, to flush down the toilet later on. I’m looking for something specific, but I don’t find it. Or anything else of interest, either.” (page 268).

The reader is being kept in the dark deliberately, because Smilla won’t – or can’t – share.

I can see why some people give up on this book. It’s non-linear and cryptic, with important pieces of information tossed in as asides. The story hangs on some elaborate coincidences, and some giant leaps of logic move the reader through the “clues” to solve the mystery.

I liked the book, though. As someone who normally looks at snow only as a potential traffic hazard and school delayer, I found Smilla’s meticulous observations of ice absorbing. I wondered who Hoeg got to explain ice and snow to him in such painstaking detail. I also liked the author’s descriptions of the uneasy relationship between the government of Denmark and Greenland’s Inuit peoples, which are scattered throughout book. The social commentary on contemporary Danish society was fascinating.

I would recommend this book for those wanting another dose of Scandinavian Noir – Smilla’s contrary, outsider sensibility has something in common with Lisbeth Salander's. Also to those who like titles that explore the perspectives of different cultures. But that recommendation comes with a caveat: if your satisfaction with a mystery depends on a tidy resolution, this may not be the title for you.

So more peril from Scandinavia finishes my fifth book in the Scandianvian Reading Challenge – only one more to go! And it also counts for the RIP Challenge, so only one to go to complete Peril the First. Now for some grading – the sooner it’s done, the sooner I can get back to the books!

Independent People: A rock-hard view of the human condition

Where to start with a novel whose main character starts out disagreeable and winds up almost monstrous—a novel that despite its main character’s obvious faults is still impossible to put down? This is my problem with Halldor Laxness’ Independent People. Reading it was worthwhile and even fascinating, but it was not enjoyable in any traditional sense. In fact, I suspect the ruggedness and hopelessness of the book was the author’s intention, capturing the plight of Iceland’s early 20th century croft farmers, many of whom endured lives of tremendous hardship to free themselves from the debts they were forced to incur to farm their own land.

Bjartur of Summerhouses insists on his family’s independence –independence ironically handed to him by a wealthy landowning family who needed to marry off a servant made pregnant by their son. He wields his independence like a weapon, bludgeoning dissent and enslaving his children. In fact, independence, in the form of his sheep, is Bjartur’s only loyalty. His actions lead to the deaths of both his wives and one of his sons, yet he counts himself virtuous because of his fidelity to his own independence. He is pitiless, but never pitiable, which makes the book hard to like.

And yet I actually did like it. The author’s storytelling is detailed, and yet spare, like the countryside I imagine it captures. But what was most interesting was the way the author was able to articulate his very sophisticated world view so powerfully through the lives of these obscure, desperately poor people. Laxness’ mistrust of government is a recurring theme:

To be poor is simply the peculiar human condition of not being able to take advantage of a generous offer. The essence of being a poor peasant is the inability to avail oneself of the gifts that politicians offer or promise and to be left at the mercy of ideas that only make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The book manages to expound on organized religion, war, international trade, healthcare and sexual mores. No wonder it is often described as a modern “epic.” But from my point of view, it’s more an “anti-epic.” Rather than relating great deeds and expansive travels with broad strokes, it depicts commonplace occurrences in one very small part of the world in intimate, minute detail. The effect is the same, however: Independent People, like all epics, is at its heart a rendering of the human condition, in all its sadness, fear, anxiety, and hope. It won’t make you smile, but it will make you think. I highly recommend spending the time on this novel.

The Summer Book is a wonderful discovery

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is a rare and beautiful study in character and emotion. There is no plot. No excess. Nothing larger than life. It is sleek and beautiful and well-crafted – the literary equivalent of Tapia Wirkkala glassware. No surprise: the Finnish love for design is evident throughout this novella.

At the beginning of the book, we learn that six-year-old Sophia has lost her mother. She spends her summers on a tiny island off the Finnish coast with her artistic grandmother and her very distant father – so distant, in fact, that he never actually speaks. It is the relationship between Sophie and her grandmother that is the central focus of The Summer Book. Each chapter offers a stark vignette that offers new information about Sophia’s relationship with her grandmother. There is no chronology, and the time span of the book is unclear.

The Summer Book is a meditation on both love and death, and yet only mentions them tangentially – in Sophia’s unrequited love for a prickly cat, or her grandmother’s musings on what might have been lost in a terrible storm. Anger and frustration, on the other hand, are mentioned often, and seem to mask one emotion that no one is able to express: grief.

This small book illuminates the possibilities for the profound that lie within the trivial. It is charming, and engrossing, and often very funny. Not a word is wasted, and yet nothing is lost. Every piece fits together perfectly, even if you can’t see what’s its function is – just like the strange items that spill out of a box from IKEA. If it were furniture, it would certainly be Scandinavian modern. Reading it will remind you that some books are works of art: this is one of them.

If this was the only book I discovered because of this summer’s reading challenges, then every other page would have been worth it. I have to thank Amy at The Black Sheep Dances for hosting the Scandinavian Reading Challenge, and Cynthia at the Seasonal Reading Challenge for the “book with a beach” task, since that happy confluence of events led me to choose The Summer Book. I will be buying a copy when I return this one to the library, because I’m sure I will want to read it again.

Ice Land: Of Valkyries and Volcanoes

If I had no other knowledge of the time period and place, here’s what I would know about medieval Scandinavia after reading Betsy Tobin’s new historical fantasy, Ice Land: 1) men were brutal; 2) arranged marriages were unhappy; 3) Asgard was some prime Icelandic real estate before the volcano Hekla chose to blow her top; 4) being a Norse goddess – even the goddess of love – was not all it was cracked up to be; and finally, in reference to #4, 5) the feathers were a nice perk, though.

Tobin’s novel is both imaginative and derivative. The Norse pantheon is, ironically, less known to English-speaking audiences than their ancient Greek and Roman counterparts. Tobin attempts to bring the Aesir to life, also ironically, just as they are about to fade from the planet, with the coming of Christianity to Europe’s last pagan outpost, Iceland. Freya, the Norse goddess of love, beauty and loss, is the first person narrator of the adventure. However, her personal reminiscences are mixed with the omniscient narration focused on other main characters: Fulla, a beautiful young woman from a traditional pagan (or godi) family, in love with the young man whose father killed her father (an old motif, but one sure to cause tension); Dvalin, half dwarf/half Aesir, marked by Brando-like internal struggle; Hogni, one of the last of the godi, trying to secure his granddaughter’s future in a world he will not see, and cannot understand. The change in narrations does serve to give us different views of Freya, but it also means that the book is at times disjointed.

The short passages narrated by The Norns (Norse goddesses of destiny) are particularly dissonant, as they mix modern knowledge of plate tectonics and vulcanology with the mystic ability to see the future when explaining Hekla’s machinations. These interludes stood out as particularly silly, frankly, and not up to the rest of Tobin’s accomplishment.

The book is imaginative because Tobin presents us with a very different version of the Aesir than might be expected. They have powers that humans do not have, certainly – humans don’t go flying around in falcon forms unless one of the Aesir is willing to take them along for the ride. But Tobin makes them far more human than godly, with their power based on their own astute public relations as much as their exceptional gifts. When asked by a young dwarf to tell him about her people, she struggles:

Where do I begin? With our deceit, our jealousies, our failures? Or with our own imagined triumphs, the heroic tales we’ve told each other for so long we now believe them to be true…I realize that the lines between truth and falsehood have long ago become blurred in my mind. (p. 140)

The book is derivative because it harkens back on so many levels to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s amazing The Mists of Avalon. Small band of true pagan believers? Check. Forced baptisms? Violent and greedy men bent on using the new religion to consolidate power? Check and check. Misunderstood humanoids of extraordinary power and beauty at their fin de siècle? Check. Romance despite the backdrop of complete cultural and social revolution? Check. In fact, Tobin plucks Asgard right out of the heavens and plunks it down in a mysterious Icelandic valley that can only be reached through a veil of water. (Hello, Morgaine Le Fay, here! The drippy trip to the magical world was my calling card – can you please send that back?) And while the placement of Asgard subjects it to physical, rather than metaphysical, decimation, the threat to the magical world permeates the book, just as in MofA.

The book also suffers from major lapses in continuity. Iceland was settled late in European history (the late 9th century, by most accounts) by disaffected Norwegians and Swedes who presumably took their culture, including their gods, with them. Why then the placement of Asgard in Iceland? Were the gods and goddesses commuting to Trondheim from their summer places near Reykjavik during most of their pagan reign? It’s silly to quibble with a fantasy, I understand, but that breech in historicity was so clear that I found it distracting. Another lapse involves the overlapping of two significant incidents in Icelandic history that actually happened 100 years apart. It’s the kind of thing that makes my inner medieval history major cringe.

Ice Land is a very decent beach read, especially if you’re dreaming about cooler climes in summer. It moves quickly and lightly, and the plot is interesting enough to keep you turning the pages. But if the literature critic from The Times of London really called it “Not just a good story, but one of the greatest,” as noted on the back cover, he or she seriously needs to expand the library. I think I’ll help by sending a copy of The Mists of Avalon.

This book counts for both the Goodreads Seasonal Reading Challenge and the Scandinavian Challenge. Can't fit it into No Ruts though, as I've definitely read something like it before!