this is excellent. hargrave really manages to put the reader in this bleak and cold and barren landscape, and to feel the tension and pull of the sea and the community and the disparate belief systems, to smell the salt on the air and really be in this place. she conjures a fiction for the place and the people that began the witch trials of the 1600s in the furthest north of norway. and she does it in such a compelling and beautiful way, even while just about every aspect of this story is hard to read about.

i thought the sexual relationship between maren and ursa felt pretty extraneous until the very end, and i'm not sure the book is stronger for it. but i also liked this so much that i don't think i care. but the very very end - what happened? did maren step off into the sea or into her future? I thought she was going to escape but the writing made it sound like she walked into the water at the end. i don't think she'd do that. i liked learning a bit about the sami and this place and time period. what a hard living they had there, and what a shock it must have been to arrive there from cities of the day.

"Grief cannot feed you, though it fills you."

"She does not send her mind flying away. She is only her body, and Maren's hand upon her, and in her, and she could weep with the kindness of it, the ache of it. She did not know, she thinks; she did not know it could be like this." ( )

I really liked this book. It's historical fiction, read for the lesbian book group. (the Lesbian contact is there, but light.) It is set in a fishing village in Finnmark, Norway in 1617, where two young women, Maren and Ursa meet. A freak storm drowns almost all of the villages men, including Maren's father, brother and fiancee. Hargrave really sets the stage, a bleak landscape and a hard life. We also learn about Maren's sister-in-law, Diinna, who is Sami; and a little about the relationships between the Sami and the Norwegian.

Unfortunately this is just before the Norwegian witch trials. The king sends a commisioner, Absalom Cornet; who has a record of "successful" witch-hunting. Cornet brings with him his new, young and pretty, Norwegian wife, Ursa, who befriends Maren.

Most of the book is pretty traumatic, actually, because the witch hunts were awful. But I couldn't put the book down.

Here's a passage:

“The day is impossibly bright: the sort of crystalline clarity that comes when winter still sits in the air. They have already entered at the narrow mouth of the fjord, and the cliffs rise sheerly either side, a clean hundred feet, the black rock raked with lines of lighter grey. The sea is green and glitters with chips of ice, and as soon as the wind bites at her face and brings up its blood, chilling her lungs, she feels better than she has since she left home." ( )

Vardø è quel posto che vai a cercare su Wikipedia perché è così a nord che devi sapere se esiste davvero o fa parte di qualche posto mitico tipo l’Iperborea. Ebbene esiste e vanta di essere il comune natale di John Norum, il chitarrista degli Europe. Pensa un po’.

Purtroppo nel XVII secolo è stato anche teatro di una terribile caccia alle streghe, che portò alla morte di più di novanta persone, sia norvegesi sia sami, in prevalenza donne, ma anche uomini. E proprio dagli eventi che scatenarono quella caccia – una terribile tempesta in mare che uccise decine di uomini e un re desideroso di giocare al solerte emissario di dio – prende avvio il romanzo.

Nel complesso è stata una bella lettura e anche molto coinvolgente, a mano a mano che l’autrice mi faceva conoscere le abitanti di Vardø. Tuttavia ho avuto l’impressione che la storia venisse retta unicamente dalla reazione emotiva che suscita leggere di persone incolpate ingiustamente, torturate e infine bruciate sul rogo. Se poi ci aggiungiamo anche il terribile rapporto tra i generi all’interno dei matrimoni descritti, non è difficile parteggiare per le cosiddette streghe e odiare a morte i loro aguzzini, insieme alle loro accusatrici.

Alla fine, mi è sembrato un po’ pochino rispetto al potenziale della storia: mi è mancata la sostanza in un tema – quello della caccia alle streghe – ampiamente indagato e che ha bisogno di un maggior impegno letterario per arrivare davvero allǝ lettorǝ. ( )

Heartbreaking. This is a great historical fiction about women fighting for their right to survive against an uncaring nature. It's also about making decisions while holding close to your most loved ideas and desires.

Normally, I am reluctant to pick up novels that feature a romance. But the story in this was so strong, I went against my own proclivities. The story surrounding Ursa and Maren moved slowly and realistically for the era in which they lived. Their feelings for each other were intense and dangerous. Their friendship and love ultimately feeds into the paranoia which ultimately consumes the village. I loved their relationship.

The men — All of them: Leading through fear ultimately fails. Even if we are silent, the scales will fall from our eyes. And we will see why you persecute us.

At the beginning, I naturally tried to place the era and how the characters looked. Then I remembered Shakespeare died only a few years before the action of this book. These weren't the Elizabethans, although their dress was still similar. This was into the Jacobean Era with the intrusion of the King James Bible. It's funny how a new translation of an ancient book can cause one small phrase or sentence to cause so much misery and death for so many people. That requires the devotion and faith of masses of people.

By the end of the book, I could only think of how these things happen, these witch hunts. All you must have is authority, fear, and a changing society. We've all seen it happen, this call to burn groups of people at the stake. It will happen again, with other targets. All we can do is rely on our common sense of decency.

This isn't a great summary of my thoughts. I've got lots of other thoughts about feminism and what it means to be a woman surrounded by a society of authoritarian men. But, I'll be here all morning if I start that. ( )

First book of the year and I'm absolutely crying. ( )