I finished Garman and Worse finally the other day. I had anticipated reading a lot while I was
on vacation at home to US to see family.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get ANY reading done until the plane ride
home. I usually get a lot done on
vacation, but this one didn’t really lend itself to reading for some
reason. Probably because I was with
family.
This book was so much more then what I wrote about in my
last post. Focusing on one aspect that I
didn’t really see coming was what it said about the life of women during the
time period, the book was published in Norway, 1885 . There are three young women whose lives we
experience. Our first women is Madeline,
at first a feisty young women we think is going to make a love match with a
fisherman. But of course, this wouldn’t
do. She is from a merchant family and
can’t lower herself to this level. She
is sent to live with the rest of Garman clan in town. Here she is taken under the wing by Fanny,
Madeline’s cousin-in-law. Fanny uses
Madeline to prop herself up by making her feel at once befriend and also
someone of a lower order. They both fall
for Delphin, who though he wants Madeline, let’s himself be flattered into an
affair with Fanny. Madeline secretly catches
them coming from an assignation and falls apart. Though she turns down a minister’s marriage proposal,
she ends up being tricked into the marriage as she struggles to deal with Fanny
and Delphin’s deception. Delphin runs
off when he hears of Madeline’s engagement and Fanny is left to continue her
little games with others. The fact that
Madeline is tricked into marriage so easily for someone who knew what she
wanted, shows what being in “society” could do to woman. Of course there is remorse at the end for
what could have been. At the end of the
book she sees her first love, Per, and his wife together and the life they have
set up for themselves. She can’t resist
running to Per when she knows he is alone and apologising for not being
stronger. He is very upset by this and
you can see that he still loves her.
The second young lady is Marianne, who sews for the Garman
household. We learn that she was once
very beautiful and though she tried to rebuff one of the young men of the household
she was impregnated by him. He was sent
off for bring shame to the family. She lost
the baby, but was always none as the “fallen” woman. In a bigger community she might have been
able to go somewhere else for employment.
But, her brother and father worked for Garman and Worse as boat
builders, so she was stuck working for the family that was part of her
downfall. She is very ill and eventually
dies. I can hardly bring myself to tell
you how that all ends, so you’ll have to read what happens at her death and
burial.
The last and only redeemed young lady is Rachel Garman. Throughout much of the story I didn’t like
her because she was cold and demanding.
I found myself more caught up in Madeline’s story line. At the end though, you find that she is the
only one that actually comes out well.
She had very demanding ideas of what kind of man she wanted. She thinks that the local school teacher who
has religious aspirations will be the one.
He will get in the pulpit and let the sinners know what they should do
and she was going to be so proud and then marry him. Lucky, for her, the head of the church gets a
hold of him first and warns him off the topic of his sermon. Rachel is mad about what she sees as a
character flaw in the teacher and goes off of him. All this time there has been Tom Worse in the
background. He is the grandson of the
Worse that started the firm with the original Garman. Tom though has set himself up in his own
business, I was never able to get it very clear but I think that when his dad
died the firm was taken over by the Garman’s with the Worse family still receiving
some, but not much, of the profit.
Anyway, when Rachel’s father dies she is placed in the guardianship of
Tom along with her younger brother. Her
older brother took over the business, so I assume Rachel’s dad must have
figured he had enough to do. In Tom,
Rachel has found an ally. Rachel goes to
him because she feels restless. She doesn’t
know what to do with herself and doesn’t want to just get married and be a
wife. Tom encourages her to go to a
friend of his in France and see if she can find any employment that she will
enjoy doing. This is what is so
amazing. He doesn’t just say, oh you
silly thing go do some charity work. He
wants her to choose what she is to do. She
does find her passion and her business acumen (which appears to be better than
her older brother). By the end of the
book Tom and Rachel get happily married, and I felt at least someone’s life
ended happily!
I also read Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, before I
left for the States. That will be
another blog post though. So now I’m
starting another Norwegian book The Family at Gilje by Jonas Lie. I also read a good review of Berlin: Imagine
a City by Rory MacLean, so I’ll see what that is like.
