The Bridal March

I feel a bit bad about this review, seeing as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson is known for his poetry and all I could find in my local library was a selection of short stories. So know that this probably isn't his greatest work. Then again, translating poetry into other languages is difficult,so...maybe it is for the best.

Name: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
Year Won: 1903
Read: "The Bridal March and Other Stories"
Original Language: Norwegian
Reason: "as a tribute to his noble, magnificent and versatile poetry, which has always been distinguished by both the freshness of its inspiration and the rare purity of its spirit"

About: The Bridal March follows a couple who falls madly in love, but then the bride's mother has bad memories about the march. The bride hums her family's bridal march a lot and there's a lot of peculiar intergenerational angst relating to the march and marriage in general.

It (and the rest of the stories in the collection) seem to take place in a half-real, half-fairy tale Norway in which things are in a sort of bucolic peasant world that never actually existed, but is kind of what Romantic era writers imagined peasant life to be like. The intro mentioned that Hans Christian Anderson was an inspiration, which is an apt comparison. Yet while in  Anderson, there's always this plot pulling everything forward, often enough in this collection, things just happen.

(e.g. in one story, a woman wants a girl as a daughter in law, so commands one of her sons to marry her. None can decide who will marry her, so they summon her and let her decide which brother she wants. She, of course, decides on the best, they have six sons, then eventually she dies and is buried by her sons. There is literally no dramatic tension.)

Yet it's all strangely compelling, perhaps because of its time out of time setting, or maybe because it's well written or...who knows?

What I liked: The stories are really, really compelling. And they describe what I imagine late 19th century Norway was like fairly well, in a similar way that the Anne novels probably give a good glimpse of life in 19th century Prince Edwards Island. They're also extraordinarily well written.

What I disliked: Most of the stories didn't have much in the way of a plot, which made them maybe less exciting than they otherwise could be.

Should it have won a Nobel?: Hard to say, seeing as Bjørnson's poetry is what probably got him the prize. As the stories go...they weren't bad, but L.M. Montgomery or Laura Ingles Wilder probably deserved it more for beautifully describing a time and place.

Next up: Henryk Sienkiewicz (Alas, the 1904 winners Frédéric Mistral and José Echegaray do not appear in my local library, likely because their contributions appear to have been in poetry and drama, respectively)

A History of Rome

Now onto my first review. Whew! We'll begin almost chronologically with Theodor Mommsen (leaving out poor Prudhomme as my library doesn't stock him, alas).

Name: Theodor Mommsen

Year Won: 1902

Read: "A History of Rome"

Original Language: German

Reason: "the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work, A History of Rome"

About: A History of Rome is a 2,000 page non-fiction chronicling the history of Rome from the origins of Rome to its fall. It's incredibly detailed, involving just about every dispute imaginable, reasons for why one event or another happened, biographies, trade agreements, war and negotiations. It's got it all...like...EVERYTHING.

It's a LOT. I read maybe 200 pages of it as it's just a LOT. Too much for me, honestly.

What I liked: Mommsen does a really great job not just of describing events, but explaining why they happened. He uses a lot of detail, including economic and census data, that makes it much less "Julius Caesar did so and so on such and such a date" and more "because there was a famine and this was a grain producing area, it made sense to launch an invasion". He skillfully weaves together the lives of luminaries with the economic and political conditions of the time. This isn't super unique now, but I imagine it was revolutionary in 1854 (when he released the first volume).

What I disliked: It's...dry. So like, I get that it's history, but modern retellings of history tend to use a lot of narrative non-fiction (which is far more pleasant to absorb as a lay reader). This is an advance that is clearly far in the future for Mommsen, so I can't fault him. But it didn't make reading this all that fun. It was more a fairly dry chronicle of the Roman Empire.

Would I read it again: No. I didn't even finish the full 2,000 pages.

Should it have won the Nobel? Probably. I'm not sure what it was competing with, but it is a MONUMENTAL work and probably was one of the first places in which history was told with as much an eye for politics and economics as Names and Places. With that said, it feels more like it deserves a Nobel Prize for History (I know, one such thing doesn't exist...) than a Nobel Prize for Literature.

Who would enjoy: If anyone is interested in a lengthy, detailed description of Rome, this will do it for you. I suspect there are modern volumes that involve more recent archeological history (and may be more fun in the retelling), but for complexity, I think it's this or Gibbon. (And if you love Gibbon, why not try Mommsen too?)

Next up, the guy with a lot of letters that don't exist in English: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

The Nobel Project

I've decided upon a new project. I intend to read literature by each winner of the Nobel prize in literature.

Reasons for doing this:

• It's a great way to read a diverse selection of writers from around the world
• Someone thought they were very good in order to give them a prize
• It'll expose me to lots of different forms of literature from over a hundred year span and a number of countries

A few rules:

• I'm only going to review things that I can acquire at my local library. (So no Sully Prudhomme, aka the first winner)
• I will read things in English,  unless possibly I find a good Spanish language copy, in which case I might read them in Spanish, but probably not
• I will review the books here based on both whether I liked them (as a reader) and whether I think they're good books (from hopefully a more "well, this did interesting things, even if I thought they were stupid" perspective)

So hopefully I'll find some great books. Maybe I'll just read a lot. Stay tuned for more!