Two Novels

Let us go back to the year 1922 – perhaps the year that was to change the course of world literature more decisively than any other in the entire twentieth century – and to the publication of the complete version of a novel that had appeared in part over the immediately preceding years, a novel written on a vast scale and remarkable both for its minute reconstruction of the mundane realities of day-to-day life in an earlier period and for its depiction of the most intimate psychological currents, especially those that swirl around the vortex of sexual desire – offering, in this respect at least, one of the fullest portraits of a marriage ever to have been written. The author of the novel I have in mind was not, as might be assumed, an Irish expatriate in Paris but a woman who lived most of her life in Norway and set her fiction in that country: Sigrid Undset, whose three-volume novel Kristin Lavransdatter was published between 1920 and 1922. The historical world she recreated was as far from early twentieth-century Dublin as one could imagine: it was that of fourteenth-century Norway, seen primarily through the eyes of a girl, and then woman, of strong passions and equally strong moral sentiments. Although this work gained international esteem between the wars – Undset received the Nobel Prize in 1928 – and remains both highly regarded and immensely popular in the Scandinavian countries, it has had nothing like the world-wide success of the other work which my first sentence could equally well have been describing.

Why these very different fates for Ulysses and for Kristin Lavransdatter, appearing in full as they did in the same year (the year, incidentally, that both authors turned forty)? The simplest explanation would be just that one is a better work than the other, but any such judgement of quality presupposes a cultural basis for the criteria being applied, and it's that basis for judgement in which I’m interested. Readers who don't know Undset's novel will have to take my word for it that it's not in any obvious way a markedly inferior aesthetic production – it's huge in extent (its three volumes total well over a thousand pages in the Penguin translation), meticulously detailed, strongly yet intricately plotted, and, as many readers have testified, powerfully moving in its depiction of human characters and their relations.