Back Reviews Reel: August 2015

The travel destinations of My Reading Summer of Nordic White Nights in August 2015 were Scotland, the USSR, the USA, and Sweden. Two of my reads were classics, though very different ones. While the historical English novel The Galliard by Margaret Irwin retells the legendary love story between Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, and James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Soviet recipient of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, powerfully evokes the daily fight for survival in Stalin’s GULAGs in Siberia. The contemporary reads on my tour brought me closer to the Arctic Circle. The American novel And She Was by Cindy Dyson reveals the cruel history of the Native Aleut population on the islands off the Alaskan coast after their discovery in 1741 and in Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell a retired surgeon is forced to face his past.

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Released in 1941, The Galliard by Margaret Irwin certainly helped readers to escape for a while from the horrors and hardships of World War II overshadowing their everyday lives. The book is at the same time a romance with a strong fairy-tale touch and a historical novel based on proven facts. The protagonists are the Scotsman James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, and Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots. Theirs isn't a love at first sight because when they meet at the Royal Court in Paris in 1560, he is too rough to attract her and she is too child-like to appeal to him. And yet, they fall in love before long and after the Queen’s return to Scotland they go through the turmoil of Protestant rebellion and court intrigues supported by her enemy on the English throne, Queen Elizabeth I.
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The daily routine described in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, is typical of a GULAG in wintry Siberia during the final years of Stalin’s terror regime as the author himself experienced it. Following his release from a German prisoners’-of-war camp, Ivan Denisovich (like many others) was charged with espionage and sentenced to ten years in one of these forced labour camps scattered all over the Soviet Union. Somehow he managed to survive already eight years of cruelty, hardship and penury systematically inflicted on the inmates, but every morning is a new challenge in the truly Darwinian fight to stay alive and to hold on to his humanity for yet another day. And this day starts all but promising.
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In July 1986, the protagonist of And She Was by Cindy Dyson strands in Dutch Harbor on one of the islands forming the string of the Aleutians in the Bering Sea because without giving it a second thought she followed a young fisherman whom she just got to know on the mainland. She finds a job as a waitress, but with her man away on a trawler for days on end there isn’t much for her to do during her spare time and she begins to read about the islands’ history. Trying to find out more about some mysterious graffiti in the bathrooms at her working place and at home, she is about to trespass the cultural barrier between herself – the stranger, the woman of European descent – and four native Aleut women who want to prevent her from discovering their century-old secret.
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“Good shoes help a person to forget about his feet”... and as shows the novel Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell they can even make a man happy at long last. This is especially true when they are a present from a never known of daughter in her late thirties who claims a role in her father’s life and when they are made by an ancient Italian master shoemaker who hides away in the vast forests of Northern Sweden listening to Italian operas. But first the former surgeon has to pass through a long and painful catharsis to atone for his mistakes of the past, including the one made during a routine surgery that urged him to retire to the small island off the Swedish east coast where he grew up and where he has been living as a recluse already for twelve years.
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