Who Really Pays Attention to Nobel Literature Winners?

 When I decided to write again, I set myself to reading wider than I had for years. Nowadays, I think my imploding reading habits relate to my depression: the more I gave up reading, the more depressed I became, and the more depressed I read, the less I read. The more I gave up reading, the more I gave up writing. Fighting my way back from self-destruction, trying to fulfill my friends' pleas that I go back to writing, I had to read. I found reading the Nobel Literature winners instructive. All the same, I can see now I read the usual suspects: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Marquez, Buck, Morrison. Who reads the early winners, or even some of the more current ones?

Well, Ted Goia, The Honest Broker Blog, has taken an interest in one of those other Nobel winners, How Sigrid Undset Went from Secretary at an Engineering Firm to Nobel Prize Winner. I came to it from the Book Haven Blog.

And just to live up to that promise, I’m reviewing a 100-year-old book that almost nobody reads. And for a very good reason—it’s an immense Norwegian novel filling up more than 1,200 pages over three big volumes. The book has a cumbersome title no New York editor would allow in the current day, and the plot is dauntingly complex.

Her biography sounds interesting:

Sigrid Undset was an unlikely literary star. Modernist themes were on the ascendancy in those days, but she wanted to write medieval romances. So at night, after work, she researched her subject, studying the sagas, old ballads, and chronicles of the Middle Ages.

You might say she lived in the past. Or in a fantasy world of her own creation.

But Undset wanted to deal with these kinds of tales in a brutally realistic manner. She started writing stories where, in her own words, “everything that seems romantic from here—murder, violent episodes, etc. becomes ordinary—comes to life.”

Her first novel was rejected by publishers. But her second book got noticed—and caused a scandal. The opening line announced: “I have been unfaithful to my husband.” The book got denounced for immorality, but sold well. (Are you surprised?) By the time of her third novel, she was making enough from writing to leave the engineering office behind.

And this makes her sound even more interesting:

After the war Undset returned to Lillehammer, where she had previously done her best literary work. But by the time of her death in 1949, Undset was already fading from the fickle memory of the literati. In a world of young beatniks and Cold War manias, her soul-shaking medievalist narratives simply didn’t fit.

That was hardly fair. Undset had been developing stream-of-consciousness techniques in her prose even before Joyce published Ulysses. And the medieval world in her writings is eerily contemporary in some ways, especially in Kristin Lavransdatter.

I envy this searching of the past, would that I had time (although KH might say I have done it during my time in prison), but I have wasted decades and must make my stand with what materials I have at hand.  

sch 1/7/23