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Wanna read Gösta Berling's Saga with me?
I’m currently reading a new biography over Selma Lagerlöf. By Anna-Karin Palm; Jag vill sätta världen i rörelse (I Want To Make the World Move), and it’s SO GOOD! I’ve never had a biography which made me felt so close to the person in it. Now I already adore Palm’s fictional books, so I’m not that surprised, and I hope it will get translated. I also feel I will need to read Lagerlöf'ss collected work when I’m done with the biography. I’ve read large parts, but not all, and most of what I have read was done in my teens. Would anyone be interested in reading Gösta Berling’s Saga with me? I have a feeling I will feel a need to discuss it- it’s such a strange book. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisbluespirit, do you think it could be suitable for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
historium? The book was published in 1891, but the book is actually set in the early 19th century.
Why read Selma Lagerlöf? Well, apart from a lovely language and a unique way of mixing realism with the supernatural, she was not only the first female Swedish author to win the Nobel prize in 1909, but the first woman, period, to win it. Literature history in Sweden has done it’s best to relegate her into insignificance; a little old lady who told fairy tales. She was so much more. She was passionate about women’s rights, and she had, which was largely unknown well into the 1990s, two long-term relationships with two women.
The plot of Gösta Berling’s Saga is a bit difficult to summarize. The setting is in Värmland in the 1820s. Värmland is a very beautiful, sometimes wild, part of Sweden, sharing a border with Norway. During the 17th and 18th century it grew rich on iron, and there are a lot of manor houses. It has personal importance to me as I’m named after a great-grandmother who lived there. She was actually a distant cousin to Selma Lagerlöf, and they had a similar upbringing in manor houses not that far from each other.
Gösta Berling is a defrocked priest; he is young, beautiful and talented, but he also has a drinking problem, and he is pretty weak-willed when it comes to the fairer sex. He is taken in by the rich and powerful Mistress of Ekeby and becomes one of her 12 “cavaliers”, a bunch of men who for various reasons don’t quite fit in. Part of the plot is the cavalier's antics when they manage to dethrone their mistress, and part of the plot is Gösta Berling’s various love affairs. But what I remember most strongly is the stories about the women in Gösta’s life; and their struggles of independence and meaningful life in a time when no woman in Sweden had their own majority and was wholly dependent on their male relative.
I’m thinking of reading two or three chapters and then write up about them.
The book is free and can be found online in English here. In Swedish here. And as an English audio-book here.
thisbluespirit, do you think it could be suitable for historium? The book was published in 1891, but the book is actually set in the early 19th century.Why read Selma Lagerlöf? Well, apart from a lovely language and a unique way of mixing realism with the supernatural, she was not only the first female Swedish author to win the Nobel prize in 1909, but the first woman, period, to win it. Literature history in Sweden has done it’s best to relegate her into insignificance; a little old lady who told fairy tales. She was so much more. She was passionate about women’s rights, and she had, which was largely unknown well into the 1990s, two long-term relationships with two women.
The plot of Gösta Berling’s Saga is a bit difficult to summarize. The setting is in Värmland in the 1820s. Värmland is a very beautiful, sometimes wild, part of Sweden, sharing a border with Norway. During the 17th and 18th century it grew rich on iron, and there are a lot of manor houses. It has personal importance to me as I’m named after a great-grandmother who lived there. She was actually a distant cousin to Selma Lagerlöf, and they had a similar upbringing in manor houses not that far from each other.
Gösta Berling is a defrocked priest; he is young, beautiful and talented, but he also has a drinking problem, and he is pretty weak-willed when it comes to the fairer sex. He is taken in by the rich and powerful Mistress of Ekeby and becomes one of her 12 “cavaliers”, a bunch of men who for various reasons don’t quite fit in. Part of the plot is the cavalier's antics when they manage to dethrone their mistress, and part of the plot is Gösta Berling’s various love affairs. But what I remember most strongly is the stories about the women in Gösta’s life; and their struggles of independence and meaningful life in a time when no woman in Sweden had their own majority and was wholly dependent on their male relative.
I’m thinking of reading two or three chapters and then write up about them.
The book is free and can be found online in English here. In Swedish here. And as an English audio-book here.