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Dina's Book, originally published in Norway under the title "Dinas bok", 1989
An award-winning author in Norway, Wassmo was born in the north of the country and vividly depicts its wild coast and sea in this arresting novel set in the mid-19th century. It's the story of Dina Holm, a rural sheriff's daughter, whose life is irrevocably scarred by the tragic death of her mother when Dina is still in early childhood. An appalling death by boiling lye for which Dina is involuntarily responsible. Thereafter the mother, Hjertrud, is forever present in Dina's mind, inescapable, like a ceaseless haunting. The guilty child, who cannot of course be blamed for the accident and has become mute, is then fostered by the sheriff with a peasant family and grows up without education and discipline. Silent Dina becomes wild, eccentric, and uninhibited. When she is brought home to live again with her father, an attempt is made to civilize her. Mr Lorch, her tutor, engages her attention and affection through music, and Dina learns to play the cello. Dina regains her speech. At the age of sixteen she is sought in marriage by Jacob Grønelv, a mature friend of her father, who is attracted by her healthy beauty and artlessly earthy sensuality. Jacob, a widower, is the owner of Reinsnes, a large coastal estate and trading-post which he runs with his elderly mother Karen and his two foster-sons, Niels and Anders. Jacob's own son Johan by his first wife is studying theology and preparing himself to take charge of a parish.
Dina's entrance into this wealthy household, long settled in its proper ways, naturally creates an upheaval, but she is able by the sheer force of her personality not only to carve out a place for herself, but eventually to take charge of everyone's life, masters and servants alike. Jacob, who has bitten off far more than he can chew, is quickly overpowered by his young wife's energy and sexual obsessiveness. It proves impossible to confine her to housewifely duties. She inflexibly continues her unladylike behaviour, smoking cigars with the men after supper, drinking wine alone in the summer-house on frigid winter nights, and playing the cello at all hours whenever the mood strikes her. Talented in mathematics, she teaches herself accounting and steadily involves herself in her husband's business affairs, becoming competent enough to run the whole estate herself after his death.
His death. It is with this event that Dina's Book opens in a hallucinatory prologue that the startled reader quickly realizes is the chronicle of an unusual murder disguised as a sleigh accident. Who is this woman? Why has she done this? For Jacob has now joined Hjertrud in Dina's visionary mental world and Dina herself has fallen silent once more.
In the subsequent narrative describing Dina's past the reader comes to understand the root-experience of Hjertrud's death and its devastating effect on Dina's mentality. Learning that Jacob was possibly about to die anyway from gangrene helps the reader temporarily suspend judgment on Dina's shocking act until more information and insight can be gained. But it is an unsettled and uneasy reader who reads on in Dina's Book, for it becomes apparent that Dina does not like people to leave her. And, after all, Hjertrud has stayed.
Thought to be too distraught to attend Jacob's funeral, Dina is left alone at Reinsnes while the family conveys his body to the churchyard. There she immediately indulges in a burst of bizarre activity, seducing Tomas the stable-boy and sliding naked down the banisters to filch from the platters of funeral meats laid out for the guests. Some months afterwards, her speech recovered, she is found to be pregnant and gives birth to Benjamin, who she claims is Jacob's son. And perhaps he is. Dina is an erratic mother and the boy's upbringing is largely left to the Lapp servant-girl Stine, who under the protection of the household is raising the illegitimate child she bore to Niels. Later Dina will high-handedly contrive a marriage between Tomas and Stine, Niels having flatly refused to marry a Lapp or even acknowledge the child.
As time passes, the household and the neighbourhood become accustomed to Dina's often inappropriate and outspoken conduct, devoid of social niceties and polite conventions. So does the reader. It's just a harmless quirk, an expression of her original, refreshingly unfettered personality, rather enchanting really. So skillfully does Wassmo invoke the reader's sympathy for Dina that it is easy to forget she can be dangerous. And it seems as if she is dealing with her undeniable mental problems, hopefully overcoming them. Yet when her old tutor Lorch dies abroad and wills her his cello, she adds him too to her gallery of haunting personages whom only she can see and hear. Hjertrud, Jacob, and Lorch are always with her.
All goes reasonably well for several years during which Dina's primary occupation is overseeing the Reinsnes estate and controlling the work of Niels and Anders. Although Anders the ship-captain is staunchly loyal to her, Niels resists her intrusion into his keeping of the books. He has been embezzling from the estate for years, and when Dina gains proof and confronts him, he commits suicide. Jacob's son Johan, the pastor, has been paid off and put off: paid his share of Jacob's inheritance and mastered by Dina's uninhibited sexual maneuvers.
Meanwhile Dina has fallen in love. Virile, green-eyed Leo Zjukovski is a Russian expatriate involved in political conspiracies which keep him roaming hither and yon. He is not very forthcoming about them, either. A man who goes his own way and keeps much to himself. But he loves Dina and willingly visits Reinsnes if it happens to be on his mysterious itinerary. Dina is not the woman to settle for the crumbs of Leo's life. Even her mother-in-law, old Karen, approves the notion of Dina's remarriage to Leo. Lovelorn, she goes so far as chasing about the Norwegian coast on Anders' ship, seeking Leo or news of him. During a stormy voyage she aborts a fetus, Leo's child. "It was safer with Hjertrud too...Because you wouldn't come!" she cries to an uncomprehending Leo during their final meeting at Reinsnes.
And Dina knows how to make Leo stay with her for good, safe forever in Hjertrud's lap. Her son Benjamin witnesses the impetuous deed and as the horrified boy approaches, "his face jagged with pain," the story abruptly stops. Silence.
This remarkable Scandinavian melodrama is told in lucid, spare prose in a sustained narrative of great power, with only a few excesses of tone or lapses into banality. Each chapter is headed by a citation from what Dina insistently calls "Hjertrud's Book," the Bible she remembers her mother reading. Although the climax is predictable on the basis of what we learn of Dina, the reader goes on hoping until the end that she will be redeemed. Wassmo has written a novel that no serious reader will easily put out of mind.
© Wordreign, July 1999
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