Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
How easy it is to overlook the deprivations of past generations amid the self-absorption of our Instant Messaging world. What is too often considered a life crisis these days is a temporary interruption in cell-phone service.
Solveig Torvik's new multigenerational saga of her family is a stark and harrowing reminder of the tragedies and hardships that constituted everyday life until a time not that many decades ago. "Nikolai's Fortune" (University of Washington Press, 306 pages, $24.95) is a hybrid literary form used by the longtime Seattle P-I writer and editor -- it is billed as a novel, but that designation is largely the result of Torvik's invented dialogue, and the final portion of the book is actually a memoir of the author's upbringing.
Fifteen years of exhaustive research in the United States and Europe went into the first book by this native of Norway and showcase Torvik's skills as a much-admired journalist. But hewing so closely to the facts of her family's grim history in Scandinavia and the United States has its risks.
A novelist's reshaping of this material might well have produced a few more glimmers of hope in the narrative, some more admirable traits in the characters, perhaps even some instances of humor to help readers progress through the countless pages of unrelenting sadness.
Make no mistake: This is not the Scandinavia of sunny tourist brochures. This is the Scandinavia of forbidding reserve, gloom and fatalism as seen in the classic works of Henrik Ibsen, Edvard Munch and Ingmar Bergman.
"Nikolai's Fortune" is organized chronologically, with its three sections retold in the first-person voice of Torvik's grandmother (Kaisa), adoptive mother (Berit) and the writer herself (renamed Hanna). Emigration in hopes of a new life provides the bookends for this story, first from Finland to Norway, later from Norway to the United States, fueled in part by the family legend of a long-lost ancestor named Nikolai who was said to have struck it rich in America.
But the story of Torvik herself, the least detailed in the novel, appears to be about the only one that provides hope that the awful legacy of repeated family history can indeed be escaped. The other family women seem chained to the fates and mistakes of their ancestors -- from abject poverty to unwed motherhood, from children given up to relatives and friends because there was no food or space for one more, to violence and abandonment by lovers and husbands.
Add to that repeat instances of discrimination because of the family's usually hidden Finnish and Laplander roots, men of the family who succumb to alcoholism or wanderlust, plus promises of a better life elsewhere that turn to bitter dust. Even the immigration of Torvik's parents to America, the traditional redemption in such Euro-American family sagas, continues the grimness when her disheartened parents leave the States and go back to Norway without their college-student daughter.
The only comfort, or inspiration perhaps, in this novel of agony without ecstasy is the incredible perseverance mounted by its family women against the most hostile circumstances.
Kaisa is raped twice, becomes pregnant each time, but is resolutely unbowed by the ostracism of church and community. Berit guides her adopted daughter through the dangers and deprivations of the Nazis' five-year occupation of Norway during World War II, a harrowing time when "soup" was made from boiling water with nails. Hanna finally establishes a successful life in America, with little love or support from her parents.
In fact, the overriding theme of "Nikolai's Fortune" seems to be the harsh advice that Berit delivers to her 14-year-old daughter: "Life is full of disappointments, Hanna, so you must learn to depend only on yourself in this world. Never allow yourself to imagine that you can depend on anyone else. Always remember that there's no one you can trust, no one to depend on to help you but you yourself alone."
Torvik has crafted a well-written tale of her family's struggles, giving much real-life substance to familiar cliches about the gloomy Nordic character. But this novel-memoir still remains a dreary and dispiriting read.
Critic's note: This writer knew Torvik as a fellow staffer at the P-I from 1982 until her retirement in 2002.
To see more of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for online features, or to subscribe, go to http://seattlep-I.com.
© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All Rights Reserved.
