A review by jeninmotion
Gunnar's Daughter by Sigrid Undset

adventurous emotional sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

So this whole book surrounds
how Vigdis and Viga-Ljot's extremely doomed love affair went extremely bad due to rape, which...yeah.
The issue is that while the central part is 1000% damning, you then watch a really human portrait of victim and victimizer in a vastly different context than the modern American one where the victimizer knows he did wrong and suffers, and the victim is able to say "boo-hoo, baby had a sad, can we talk about
how I gave birth on an icy night, tried to expose the child to the elements, saved our baby from a fiery death and lost three fingers to gangrene from it while being sexually harassed by every famous man in Norway?
" and Undset gives that to her while also giving Ulvar the agony of knowing that his mother's victimizer is a lot more complicated than that act and how much trauma harmed both Vigdis and Viga-Ljot. And I'd probably be much harder on this book if it was published past about 1965 but it's from 1909, in translation and clearly based on Norse epic tropes rather than more modern uses of sexual violence.

It reads very old-timey, but again - published in 1909.
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