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)