Sigrid Undset
La saga on Vigdis
Utopia, 170 pages, 18 euros
Among the great storytellers of the twentieth century, Undset has been unjustly forgotten, and it is good to be back. His best known novel is Kristin daughter of Lavrans, a trilogy from the early twenties that was proposed to us by two different publishers, thanks to the Nobel that had been awarded to it in 1928.
Norwegian, rival of the other Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf, she became Catholic in 1925. Her novels are great female sagas that narrate the Norwegian (and Scandinavian) past, reinventing the sagas of the past with dry significance and for short chapters, with tension that comes from distance: a distant yesterday, of loves and hatred, persistence and revenge, between land and sea when there were different visions of life and death and peace and war from ours and yet recognizable, in the eternal history of human restlessness, of the conflict between homelands and also of the sexes, as in the Vigdis saga, the woman raped by the man she loves and who loves her, and who lives dreaming, from her son, of revenge. Wonderful is the chapter with Vigdis’s dream of unborn children.
We are far from the most recent British sagas, and if “deep is the well of the past”, man in his essence does not change, just as the hope of a more serene and lovable society does not die. It is nice to find Undset again, breathing a very different air from that of contemporary literature.
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