A
woman's frustration and manifest determination to
overcome and
rule those who would rule her.
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Chapter Samples |
Longing For Loneliness... In a Swedish nursing home in the 1950s, family secrets are reluctantly related by an grumpy, octogenarian, to her somewhat timorous, long-lost, American cousin. The story traces the life of her mother, Anna-Stina, a single-minded vallkulla (see chaper one for definition). Employed in a northern Swedish summer pasture as a young woman, she is assaulted and raped by a visiting minister and bears his child. Caught without a husband or father for the child, Anna-Stina struggles with church and community to find legitimacy for an oäktabarn (illegitimate child) in a society with little tolerance for the sins of these free-spirited vallkullor...mystical women of the forest. Bearing three more illegitimate children, Anna-Stina flings her defiance in the face of the church and the community and paying dearly for her pride. Remaining blind to the pleas of her lover, a wealthy, local squire and father to three of her children, she stubbornly refuses the demands of the church to reveal the father's name and wed. She vows that, until her rapist confesses his transgression before his congregation and then marries them himself, she will remain silent. As the mystical story unfolds in the old woman’s tale, the young narrator begins to see seeds for a novel and a strong friendship begins to grow between the unlikely pair. Before long the narrator even finds himself involved with the old cousin’s physician, who has a secret of her own and teaches him about love, Scandinavian style. A concurrent love story unfolds, spanning a hundred years of each century, weaving between the past and the present as the twin plots progress and reverse through the fascinating folklore of the dark, northern Swedish forest. At two years of age Anna-Stina looses her first child, little Augusta, to pneumonia. Claiming her unfit, the church attempts to adopt away her second child, tricking her and stealing her child. But the kidnapping goes wrong in a terrible accident when little Per Gustaf drowns before the eyes of a whole community. Blind with tears of sorrow, carrying the child’s body, Anna Stina flees deep into the forest, returning to her high summer pasture where she secretly buries the infant in an unmarked grave. Grief stricken, she roams the forest pastures for a week, frightening the animals and other milkmaids, who believe she is Rånda----the mythical woman of the forest. Recognizing her at last, they send for her squire, Karl, who rescues her and takes her home at last. Returning yearly to the spot in later years, Anna Stina introduces her later children to the secret grave of their sibling. Both the tenderness and strength of the characters, especially the women, will touch the reader again and again with the poignancy of repeated tragedy and spiritual reward. But Anna Stina soon finds her oldest son repeating the sins of the father and she must unknowingly choose between hypocrisy and her first grandchild. The controversy spans two, parallel centuries as the plot moves toward the second generation, around the 1880s. Traumatic circumstances force the eventual emigration of an entire family. Eventually the secrets and the true parentage of the narrator’s grandmother, buried for a century in the promise land of Amerika, are revealed when the narrator returns to Sweden to find his troubled heritage. There, he recounts to the old woman, the suffering and persecution which followed the forsaken grandchild to America. The dual plots are sprinkled with humor within the relationships of the characters, as life can be best survived with, at least, an equal smattering of joy in its ratio to sorrow. Bitter-sweet, poignant, informative...but most of all, entertaining---best describe this epic novel. ©
2007 Smultron Publications, All Rights Reserved
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