Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Reading report: ‘Kristin Lavransdatter,’ by Sigrid Undset

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“It seems to me that the dragon is awfully small,” said Kristin, looking at the image of the saint who was her namesake. “It doesn’t look as if it could swallow up the maiden.”

“And it couldn’t, either,” said Brother Edvin. “It was no bigger than that. Dragons and all other creatures that serve the Devil only seem big as long as we harbor fear within ourselves. But if a person seeks God with such earnestness and desire that he enters into His power, then the power of the Devil at once suffers such a great defeat that his instruments become small and unimportant. Dragons and evil spirits shrink until they are no bigger than goblins and cats and crows. As you can see, the whole mountain that Saint Sunniva was trapped inside is so small that it will fit on the skirt of her cloak.”

Saint Sunniva won’t be familiar to non-Norwegian readers, and not even to most Norwegians if they’re the American kind. She is a legendary saint supposed to have been martyred by Jarl Haakon (whom you’ll remember from The Year of the Warrior and Death’s Doors). She fled into a cave with her companions to avoid falling into Haakon’s hands, and they all died there. Later King Olaf Trygvesson found their uncorrupted bodies and declared their sainthood. I never used the legend in my own books.

I shared with you a special deal on Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy in the Tina Nunnally translation last month, and now I’ve taken up (re-)reading it myself. I’ve read the trilogy before – twice in the previous English translation and once in the original Norwegian. I should probably read that again, but my second-hand copy’s in very poor condition. And I wanted to try Nunnally – I’ve heard good things about her work.

I admit I approached the book with some degree of reluctance. It’s a fine example of the great Scandinavian tradition of depressing literature (though with the ameliorating influence of Christian faith, which most of the other modern stuff lacks). Kristin is a vivid and fascinating character, mostly respectable by most people’s standards, and always honorable in her own eyes. Yet Undset’s penetrating artistic eye looks deeply into her essential selfishness, which is gradually revealed to Kristin herself through a lifetime of living with consequences.

I’ve often said that Kristin Lavransdatter is an inverted romance novel. The beautiful, willful young girl defies her parents to run off with the dashing knight. But where the romance heroine lives happily ever after, Kristin has to live with her choices. All her chickens come home to roost, one after the other. And yet, the promise of God’s grace never leaves her.

What do I think of Tina Nunnally’s translation? It’s good. I can never read a Norwegian translation (my own included) anymore without quibbling, of course. I sometimes think this one a little too literal, just a little clunky. But I probably need to remove the beam from my own eye before I say that.

The first English translation, done in the 1920s by Charles Archer and J. S. Scott, has been criticized as artificially mannered, featuring deliberate English archaisms that don’t correspond to Undset’s idiomatic Norwegian. I understand the concern, though I can’t help sympathizing a little with Archer and Scott. One of the pleasures, for me, of working with Norwegian is the fact that its diction does have a kind of medieval quality from an English-speaker’s point of view. If I ask, “What means this word?” in English, that’s Renaissance Faire talk, but it’s perfectly grammatical in Norwegian. Getting used to such sentence construction has heavily influenced the way I write my Viking novels. When I think out a sentence in Norwegian, I sound medieval.

But the old translation had other sins, too, I am informed. Certain passages were bowdlerized, and are now restored in this version. (No doubt another, politically correct, bowdlerization is on its way soon, courtesy of Our Betters. So read this one while we enjoy a season of free speech.)

It’s pointless to criticize Kristin Lavransdatter as a work of art. It’s above my pay grade, and I’ve written much about it before. But I recommend it without reservation.

Writing

Who was Vigleik Arnesson?

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Work continues apace on The Baldur Game. I think I’m nearing the end of my initial drafts. Once I’ve finished this current red-pen revision, I plan to give it one more personal read-through, and then send it to some readers for comments. After that, I expect to do one more revision, and then move into the publication process. So I think that light up ahead may be the end of the tunnel, not just phosphors in my eye.

The tough part about nailing a large construction together is that you find out where you measured wrong. An intriguing little irregularity has appeared. I think I can describe it in vague enough terms not to spoil it for you.

If you read King of Rogaland (and of course you have. You haven’t left a review yet, though, have you? Not that I want to nag…), you may recall the wedding of Ragnhild Erlingsdatter (my hero’s daughter) to Thorberg Arnesson, a son of an important Norwegian family.

Okay, so I set that up. Thorberg will play a major role in The Baldur Game. So far, so good.

But in the saga accounts of the events I’m describing now, there’s another character named Vigleik Arnesson. He doesn’t actually appear on stage in my narrative, but an action he performs has important consequences. And I’ve been trying to figure out who this Vigleik Arnesson was. Snorri Sturlusson never tells us. One would imagine he was a brother to Thorberg, but I’ve seen several lists of those brothers, and Vigleik never appears.

I searched extensively online, not only in English-language but in Norwegian search engines. I found one notation on a Norwegian site that said Vigleik Arnesson was Erling’s nephew. But I couldn’t find out how that connection worked. Who were his parents?

Here’s where my scholarly sins caught up with me. In actual history, I learned at last, two of Erling’s daughters were married to Arnesson brothers – one to Thorberg (as I chronicled), but another to his older brother Arne. Vigleik was this Arne’s son. I had missed the Arne Arnesson connection completely. And the circumstances I set up in King of Rogaland left no room for that marriage. It has to have happened before the Thorberg-Ragnhild wedding, for various reasons, but I made it clear that (in my book) there’d been no previous alliances.

Now if I were Stephen Hunter, this would be no problem. He simply ignores any contradictions that pop up between various volumes of his Earl Swagger series. But I can’t do that. If you find contradictions in my Erling books (no doubt there are some), they’re due to sheer inadvertence. So I have to work this problem out in terms of my fictional world.

I think what I’ll have to do is wrest Vigleik from the bosom of his true family, and give him some other kind of pedigree. Perhaps I’ll marry his mother to some other Arne from some other family. It’s not that uncommon a name. I’m thinking about it.

When a man undertakes to write an epic, he takes on a vainglorious, hubristic task. He will make radical mistakes, demanding radical remedies.

All for about three paragraphs in the final book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Manistique,’ by Craig Terlson

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I shook my head. Lydia studied my face, looking for the lie.

“We’re just looking for answers,” I said.

That part was true—otherwise, I would’ve left this soggy grayscape days ago. Even now, the sun pulled a Houdini and went back to its usual place, shining somewhere over a cornfield in Kansas.

Luke Fischer, hero of Manistique, a Canadian transplant in Mexico, is emphatically not a private eye. But he ends up looking for people anyway. When his friend Franco, who is a private eye, asks him to sit in on a private poker game, he ends up witnessing a shooting. A young woman dies, and there’s talk of missing money. Soon Luke is headed to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (of all places) trying to find the young woman’s father, who is rumored to have stolen a lot of money from some dangerous people.

In Michigan, Luke finds himself teaming up with “Sam,” an attractive female county sheriff. The body count rises steadily as they pursue Luke’s quarry, and when that man is killed, they pursue the killers. The trail will finally lead them all the way to New Mexico.

I very much enjoyed, and positively reviewed, Three-Minute Hero, the book that follows Manistique in the Luke Fischer series (I seem to be reading them in the wrong order). And the virtues of that book were displayed here – colorful hard-boiled prose and strong dialogue.

But the weaknesses were here too – a little more apparently. Chief of these is a certain aimlessness in the plotting. Although there’s plenty of violence in this story – and it’s pretty explosive – one can’t help wondering in the intervals what these people are here for. Luke’s mission is somewhat vague from the start, and even when he’s finished the job he was paid to do, he feels obligated to keep following the money –  though he doesn’t seem interested in it for its own sake. It’s something about justice, for people he barely knows.  One senses an echo of Carlos Castaneda, too,  as he has a mystical conversation on a motel porch with an old man who may or may not exist. Perhaps this is all an existentialist exercise.

I must also confess my slight annoyance at a surrender to current intellectual fashion, evidenced by the inclusion of not one, but two Girl Boss characters – women indistinguishable from men except in their physical appearance, one of whom easily tosses much larger men around a room.

And I have a couple Gun Culture quibbles – a .40 caliber pistol is described as remarkably powerful, and a “silencer” reduces pistol shots to a near-whisper (that’s technology firearms companies would pay good money for, because it doesn’t exist yet).

Author Craig Terlson is now a friend of mine on X, and an entertaining one. I like his writing very much, and all in all I enjoyed Manistique – especially as the story approached its big, climactic showdown. The next book in the series will show considerable improvement, so he’s learning the craft. I recommend this book, in spite of some weaknesses.

Authors, Reading

Remembering C. S. Lewis’ memory

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As you may recall (though it won’t be on the test), I’m a long-time member of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. I’ve been getting their monthly Bulletin for just as long. But the latest issue (Nov./Dec. 2023) features something novel – my name listed as an attendee in the minutes of a meeting. Being among those present was never convenient for me when they met in person, but since Covid, the meetings have been held on Zoom. The regular meeting date is, unfortunately, a night on which I usually have an obligation, but last June I finally got in, in a virtual manner.

Aside from that momentous development, this latest issue also features a headline article of considerable interest. It’s a reprint of a notable memoir by the late Alastair Fowler, originally published in the Yale Review (October, 2003). Dr. Fowler had C. S. Lewis as his dissertation supervisor while he attended Oxford University, beginning in 1952.

His memoir seems a fairly even-handed one – he clearly liked and admired Lewis very much, but he’s careful to describe his weaknesses, both as a supervisor and as a man, and to include some unsaintly details.

This article is particularly notable, though, as the one that finally exploded the unfortunate theory promoted by the late Kathryn Lindskoog in her 1988 book, The C. S. Lewis Hoax. Ms. Lindskoog insisted that Lewis’ abandoned novel, The Dark Tower, which his secretary Walter Hooper published in the collection, The Dark Tower: and Other Stories, was a counterfeit. She accused Hooper of writing it himself, and passing it off as a Lewis fragment. A lot of heat got generated by this accusation. But Dr. Fowler’s memoir states explicitly: “He showed me several unfinished or abandoned pieces… these included The Dark Tower, and Till We Have Faces. Another fragment, a time travel story, had been aborted after only a few pages.”

The Dark Tower is certainly different from Lewis’ other works, and many readers have found it distasteful. But Lewis wasn’t a one-note author, and he made conscious efforts to avoid that. Till We Have Faces, for instance, is quite unlike anything else he wrote.

There’s also a fascinating section on Lewis’ remarkable powers of memory:

Kenneth Tynan, whom Lewis tutored, tells of a memory game. Tynan had to choose a number from one to forty, for the shelf in Lewis’ library; a number from one to twenty, for the place in this shelf; from one to a hundred, for the page; and from one to twenty-five for the line, which he read aloud. Lewis had then to identify the book and say what the page was about. I can believe this, having seen how rapidly he found passages in his complete Rudyard Kipling or his William Morris.

I’m pretty sure (but here I rely on my own, far less robust, memory) that I read an account elsewhere which exaggerated this feat. That account claimed you could name a book, suggest a page and a line, and Lewis could recite it on the spot, verbatim. That always struck me as implausible, especially as Lewis often misremembers quotations in his letters. Fowler’s version seems far more likely, but still testifies to a remarkable memory.

Membership in the New York C. S. Lewis Society is not expensive, and I’ve always found it rewarding. I might also mention that our friend Dale Nelson adorns many Bulletin issues with his “Jack and the Bookshelf” column. The Society’s web page is here.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fade Up From Black,’ by Steven Womack

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I get a lot of free e-books through online offers, as I’ve mentioned before. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising, in these days of self-publishing, that a fair number of those books are unreadable. For one reason or another. Unless an author writes so egregiously that I can’t restrain my pen, I’ve taken to generally dropping these books and forgetting them. Nobody set me up as a judge of aspiring novelists.

I had dumped two books in a row in the aforementioned manner, before I picked up Steven Womack’s Fade Up From Black: The Return of Harry James Denton. I was delighted to encounter readable prose, and settled back to enjoy it.

Harry James Denton is, apparently, the hero of a private eye series which the author dropped for a while, and is now picking up again. Harry lives in Nashville, Tennessee. He and his partner built their investigative business up into a digital security company, and now they’re both multimillionaires. But Harry’s old girlfriend, with whom he had a passionate but volatile relationship, recently died of cancer, leaving behind their 15-year-old daughter. The girl has been living with her mother in Reno, but will now be moving to Nashville to live with Harry.

However, the day before he leaves for the funeral, Harry gets a visitor in his office. The man is Leo Walsh, who was briefly a celebrated novelist some years back. A series of bad decisions led him downhill, and now he’s teaching screenplay writing at a seedy local cinema school. Leo tells Harry he wants him to investigate a murder – his own murder.

Harry explains that he doesn’t really do private investigation anymore, though he keeps his license current. He has a lot on his plate and can’t take the case. Leo Walsh walks away disappointed. When Harry returns with his daughter a few days later, he’s shocked to learn that Leo’s body has been found beaten to death and left behind a dumpster.

Harry feels guilty about turning the man away. Learning that the police have made no headway, and aren’t even trying very hard, he decides to stretch his investigative muscles again.

As I mentioned, the prose in Fade Up From Black was pretty good. That’s always a plus. But it takes more than good prose to make a successful mystery story. I’d been reading a while when I realized that the narrative was moving at a snail’s pace. Many pages passed between actual plot developments. The author has a fascination with describing Nashville traffic, for instance.

When things finally do start happening, Harry seems to have lost more than a step as a PI. He gets an anonymous threat over his cell phone – a threat not only against him but against his friends and daughter. Yet he – although he is a multimillionaire and owns A FREAKING SECURITY COMPANY, just ignores it, not taking a minute to employ the resources with which he’s so richly supplied. And again, in the buildup to the final confrontation, he puts off calling on his highly capable friends.

There are a couple veiled political comments in the book, and I think it’s fair to conclude that the author is a lefty. However, he actually did a pretty good job of trying to be evenhanded.

But overall, Fade Up From Black was a disappointment, flaccid in plot and deficient in dramatic tension.

Music

Sunday Singing: Steal Away to Jesus

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“Steal Away to Jesus” performed by Mahilia Jackson and Nat King Cole in 1957

Let’s stay with spirituals this week before shifting to Easter-related songs soon. (Easter is the last day of the month this year.) Here’s an endearing spiritual about leaning on, following, and slipping away to the Lord Jesus.

“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” (John 14:3 ESV)

Steal away, steal away,
steal away to Jesus!
Steal away, steal away home,
I ain’t got long to stay here.

1 My Lord, He calls me,
He calls me by the thunder;
The trumpet sounds within my soul;
I ain’t got long to stay here. [Refrain]

2 Green trees are bending,
Poor sinners stand a trembling;
The trumpet sounds within my soul;
I ain’t got long to stay here. [Refrain]

3 My Lord, He calls me,
He calls me by the lightning;
The trumpet sounds within my soul;
I ain’t got long to stay here. [Refrain]

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Poetry

On the West Side of the Red Sea

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I started reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road this week, and I’m having a hard time flipping over to the bright side of things. That’s where I’m going to lay the blame anyway.

He pushed open the closet door half expecting to find his childhood things. Raw cold daylight fell through from the roof. Gray as his heart.

We should go, Papa. Can we go?

This year, as was last year, is going to be filled with difficult news. I’m asking myself, on which side of the Red Sea am I going stand, the west side or the east? Will I ask, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness” or say, “The LORD is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation” (Exodus 14:11; 15:2 ESV)?

I’m on the west side today, but I can see the east bank from here.

Let’s move on.

Ukraine: “Talking with Ukraine’s own ‘Generation of Fire’ who came of age during the past decade of Russian aggression against their country reveals a keen understanding of the hand they’ve been dealt, despite moments of despair or near disillusionment.”

“We’re faced with paying for the mistakes of previous generations,” Serhiy, a 21 year-old from Chernivtsi, lamented.

From the Shadows: Gina Delfonzo reviews the paintings and stories found in Tears of Gold: Portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian Women by Hannah Rose Thomas. “I am so happy. I have never held a pencil in my life before, and this is the first time I have been able to write my name and even to draw my face!”

Poem: Here’s a poem that could be plucked from a fairy tale by Marly Youmans (via The Palace at 2:00 a.m.)

Real Food: Advocates for the environment need to wake up and enjoy the bacon. “They strive to protect bees from suffering by embracing policies that will extinguish all bees; they embrace no-animal policies that in the name of animal welfare will end all livestock animals being alive—and with them, the manure upon which plant agriculture has always depended will vanish.”

Photo by Jamie Hagan on Unsplash

Religion, Writing

Nidaros Cathedral

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So, I’m working away at ‘The Baldur Game,’ which I think is going to be a pretty good book. Better than pretty good, to be honest. Not that I’m unprejudiced. But this one’s a genuine epic — broad canvas, big action, historical figures, battles and obsession. The Viking book I always wanted to write, I think.

So, above, a little video of a tour of Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim. This is where King (Saint) Olaf, a major character in this book, was buried. I believe his bones are still in there somewhere, but nobody’s sure exactly where (supposedly they were hidden to keep them from relic smashers during the Reformation).

I visited there once, briefly. It was part of a tour in connection with one of the cruises I lectured on. By good luck, they were doing a medieval fair in the Bishop’s Palace area that day. Fun to see.

According to my mother, my great-grandfather, her mother’s father, worked on the cathedral restoration in the 1880s. He came from a farm not far away.

Have a good weekend. My book is coming — possess your souls in patience.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Central City,’ by Indy Perro

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“Pete wants to know if there’s something there. He wants you to have the case because he believes you are honest and meticulous but still our guy, and we’re all on the same side…. I, on the other hand, didn’t want you on the case because I know you. I know you won’t let go of something if you don’t understand it.”

“Would you?”

“Yes. I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes you need to let things go. You can’t make the world right.”

Kane liked Detective Vincent Bayonne. Bayonne looked like a mountain man and a long-haul trucker had a coyote for a baby, but he had intuition.

A few days back I reviewed Indy Perro’s Welcome to the Party, a prequel to his noir mystery series featuring Detective Vince Bayonne and his gangster informant, Kane Kulpa. I noted that the writing and characterization were excellent. But that novella did not really prepare me for Central City, the first book in the series.

The year is 1992. The fictional Central City is run in the time-honored way – organized crime and the cops work in an uneasy partnership. Neither side wants blood in the streets. It’s bad for business. Even honest cops like Vince Bayonne “have a taste” from time to time; it’s the only way his criminal contacts will trust him. He has a new partner, a fat young man with brains but a lot to learn.

Kane Kulpa is right-hand man to two partners who run gambling and drugs and prostitution in a section of the city. He seems void of ambition. People think he’s lost the nerve that made him notorious during his time in prison. Few know about the mute, brain-damaged woman he shelters in his apartment.

When a naked man is found dead in a massage parlor, strangled with a belt and posed as if in prayer, Kane’s bosses want Bayonne on the case, for reasons explained in the snippet at the top of this review. But Bayonne is stymied. Usually, when he looks at a murder scene, it speaks to him, tells him a story. But this scene tells him nothing. When other men are found murdered the same way, he flounders. Meanwhile, a gang war starts, and Kane will have to decide where his loyalty lies.

I was very impressed with Central City. This is about as noir as a novel gets. The violence was shocking, the final resolution (mostly) a surprise. And Indy Perro is simply a knockout wordslinger. His descriptions fascinate, and his characters are compelling.

Still, I wasn’t entirely happy. The final resolution seemed a little too grand opera, too over the top. The story offers one of those familiar crime scenarios where really bad people – pimps and drug dealers – are rendered sympathetic simply by the fact that they’re contrasted with opponents who are monsters. And the picture of how a city works was simply depressing (worse because you can’t be sure it’s exaggerated).

Also, the author used “begging the question” wrong once. With his gifts, he should know better.

A notable eccentricity in the story is the information, casually related, that one of the city’s criminal bosses is a Lutheran pastor.

I hope Central City is excessive in its picture of the world. On the other hand, certain characters do exhibit genuine nobility from time to time.

I’m not sure what my final judgment on Central City is. Except that it was extremely well written and atmospheric. It left an impression. Definitely worth reading, if you like to take your Noir straight.

Authors, Reading, Religion, Writing

Jordan Peterson and Andrew Klavan, on stories

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I watched this video discussion yesterday, and it had me ready to stand up and cheer. I don’t agree with either of these men entirely (though I respect both immensely), but the essence of their theme is exactly what I’ve had on my mind recently.

In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis remarks that, although he was an atheist as a young man, he found — to his annoyance — that all the writers who really spoke to him believed in God. I think most of the real creativity in art today comes, to some extent, from our side. Some of the best artists don’t even know they’re on the Road yet, but they are.