The Woodcarver and Death by Hagar Olsson

Melancholy and the infinite sadness

From reading the introduction to this book, I learned that the nation of Finland has a minority Swedish population that has produced a considerable body of literature in the Swedish language. Author Hagar Olsson was born into this Finland-Swede community and became one of its prominent modernist writers. Her novel The Woodcarver and Death was published in 1940. It was translated into English by George C. Schoolfield and published in 1965 as a volume in the University of Wisconsin Press’s Nordic Translation Series. The UW Press has since released the books in this series as open access publications, available for free download from the website of the UW Libraries. This provides an opportunity to freely sample some works by modern Scandinavian authors who aren’t very familiar to English-language readers.

In The Woodcarver and Death, there isn’t much woodcarving going on, but there sure is much contemplation of our ultimate demise. The story opens in the home of a young woodcarver named Myyriäinen who lives with his mother. She works in a factory, and he carves little wooden figures that he sells. The father/husband of the family is deceased. The mother worries about her son because he doesn’t seem to have any friends, doesn’t talk much, and doesn’t do much other than carve wood. He appears depressed, and she worries that he may be suicidal, though her concerns remain unsaid. One day the boy decides to leave home and embark on a pilgrimage to his birthplace in another region of Finland, hoping that he might discover some meaning to life. He is undergoing an existential crisis and obsessed with thoughts of death, the pointlessness of life, and the futility of religion. The book calls to mind some of the soul-searching wanderer novels of German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse, such as Siddhartha or Narcissus and Goldmund, but drearier and less interesting. Myyriäinen meets up with a group of pilgrims heading to a holy site to cure their illnesses. Among the crowd he befriends a father and his dying daughter. Although Myyriäinen doesn’t believe in religious miracles, he is touched by the faith of these pilgrims and decides to accompany them on their journey.

From reading Schoolfield’s introduction, one gets the idea that you need a doctorate in Finland-Swedish studies to understand what’s going on in this novel. Most of the story takes place in Carelia, or Karelia, a region on the border of Finland and Russia. Not long before Olsson published The Woodcarver and Death, Carelia was taken by the Russians in the Finnish Winter War of 1939 to 1940. Schoolfield informs the reader that Carelia is a region much romanticized by the Finns, and Olsson, as “the holy place of Finnish culture.” In this novel, Carelia serves as a bastion of the Eastern Orthodox faith. The essential purpose of the novel (as Schoolfield tells me) is for Olsson to champion the Eastern Orthodox faith as a superior alternative to Catholicism. Rather than focusing on the suffering of Christ, the Orthodox faith has a healthier attitude toward death (in Olsson’s opinion) as a natural part of the cycle of life.

Of course, I wouldn’t have gotten all of that if Schoolfield hadn’t spelled it out for me. For the typical English-language reader, this is basically a coming-of-age novel about a young man looking for the meaning of life. This young man just happens to be more morbid than most. Olsson demonstrates literary skill in her drawing of characters and in crafting the emotions and conflicts stirring inside Myyriäinen’s mind. For my taste’s, however this novel was a bit too contemplative, to the point of navel-gazing. This is not one of the better works in the Nordic Translation Series. It may be very meaningful to a Finnish or Swedish audience, but much is lost on the foreign reader.
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