Monday, September 26, 2011

Book Review: Katrina

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Title: Katrina


Author: Sally Salminen

Translator: Naomi Walford

Date: 1937 (English)

Publisher: Farrar & Rinehart (English)

ISBN: none

Length: 367 pages

Quote: "'Ay, Sanna--pick flowers always,' she whispered inaudibly."

Back when "Katrina" was a human name and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was considered a great novel, this book was considered worth translating into several languages. Resemblances to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn would seem too many to be coincidental (Sally Salminen's ill-fated young couple are called Katrina and Johan, Betty Smith's are called Katie and Johnny), but Katrina was published first.

The same things happen to both couples; the stories end differently, suiting the cultures in which they were published. Both cope with malicious gossip, resentment of the heroine's energy and intelligence, a foiled rape, a boating accident, lots of untimely deaths, hopeless poverty, and the way the heroine builds up the ego of a man she's able to love only in a compassionate, almost motherly way. Katrina is, technically, a farmer rather than a charwoman (although she does a bit of charring), and Johan is a chatty, happy-go-lucky extrovert rather than an alcoholic, but you get the idea.

However, what made A Tree Grows in Brooklyn a distinct (and more successful) novel is probably the cultural flavor. Katrina stays with the heroine to the end of her life, and although she's earned a few successes and Salminen lets her enjoy them, a novel that fails to end before the main character's life does is always a sad read. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is sometimes considered positively inspirational because it ends with Katie still fairly young and looking forward to happier years.

[Note: When I posted the observation about novels where the main characters die being sad reads in the Yahoo review of this novel, Charlotte Kuchinsky didn't argue with me, but posted this short story:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/7992361/a_life_well_lived.html?cat=44

If I could afford to buy and publish the story here, I would...but I still think it's a sad read. We need nice characters in this world.]

Then, too, there's the detail that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is told primarily through Katie's daughter--who is not much of a heroine, but who is able to appreciate her mother's heroic qualities in a way that could become maudlin in an impersonal voice or unbearably self-centered in Katie's own voice. Katrina's daughter dies, and although her sons grow up to have what might have been told as happy stories, their stories are told through the voice of their longsuffering, somewhat self-pitying mother, whom they grow up and leave.

Considering that one novel ends with a wedding and one ends with a death, the emotional quality of the endings is remarkably alike...then again, the whole genre of Socialist Realist fiction was all remarkably alike.

And how realistic was it? Selma Lagerlof was a Swedish farm girl who wrote about the hard times, and the good times, of Swedish farm families. Her books weren't nearly as gloomy as Katrina. Then again, Lagerlof wrote from mainland Sweden, and Katrina is set on a small, crowded, isolated island where poverty might actually have been harder to escape from.

The tuberculosis motif is probably true to life. Every book I've ever read about Sweden at this period (admittedly that's only about a half dozen books) mentions it. Everyone had the disease; the only question was whether they'd resist it long enough to die of something else first.

This book is not recommended to anyone looking for a cheerful read. It might appeal to someone looking for a good cry, or, more likely, to someone looking for insight into the popular appeal socialism had at this period, or the history of Sweden or of Aland island.


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