Maura (maura853) - , reviewed on 7/31/2021 + 542 more book reviews

â... 'twas somewhat about good days falling to wise folk, but the best days of all falling to those who dare to be unwise.â

An incredible novel, one that ticks so many boxes and does it so effortlessly: it is a beautiful, detailed, convincing reconstruction of life in a bye-gone time, which is as alien to us now as a story about Martians or Little Green Men. It's a parable of morality, and ethics, and whether it's ever acceptable to ride rough-shod over the lives and feeling of others, to achieve your heart's desire. It's the saga of a woman, born into a world that seems -- seems -- timeless, unchanging and part of a community and a world-view, Medieval Catholicism, that has all the answers.

Born into one world, but from a very early age, conscious that there might be something more, something different reaching out for her, tempting her away from all that is known and "good" and settled in her life. In spite of her status, and her reputation as a good, obedient daughter to loving but pious parents, Kristen, the daughter of Knight and landowner Lavrans Bjorgulfson, keeps encountering temptations that are unseemly for a young woman of her class and her expectations: a mysterious encounter with what might be an elf-maiden, waiting to lure her away when she wanders away from her family's campsite; a deep affection for a boy she has grown up with, who is little better than a farm hand and thus not marriageable material; a chance meeting with a handsome young man whose status would make him a very good prospect, indeed, were it not for the little details of his unsavoury past, his cast-off mistress and his two illegitimate children.

Things like that matter in Kristen's world-- the status you are born into, the rules that govern every aspect of your life, the pagan gods and fey creatures that are still lurking just beneath the surface of Christian Norway in the 14th Century -- and as well as reconstructing it all beautifully, Undset does a fabulous job of suggesting how the world that Kristen knew has, slowly but inexorably, turned into the world we know, with our insistence on our rights and our privacy, our value as individuals, and our insistence that whatever the heart wants, the heart must have.

The three novels that constitute Kristen Lavransdatter follow the fortunes of a woman who dares to challenge the plans her family has for her -- who yearns for "the best days," and is willing to be unwise to achieve that. (It's telling that the quote above is Kristen recalling the advice of a woman who is considered little better than a adulteress, and possibly a witch ...) -- But (and this is where Undset is really, really clever) it's brave enough to face the fact that she just might have been wrong, and how she must pay a price for her hot-headedness, just as surely as if she had accepted the garland offered to her by the (perhaps) elf-maiden in the forest, and had disappeared into the pagan underworld.

Sigrid Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, probably based on this one novel alone and, seems to me, that's quite reasonable ... It's a massive and challenging read, but it's well worth it ...

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