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The Willow King

Meelis Friedenthal,

Matthew Hyde (Translator)

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Feb 08, 2025 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it really liked it

Shelves: genre-litfic, zchallenge-eu, 4-star, a-read-gelesen-2025, author-man, author-white, a-reviewed, europe-estonia, genre-historicalfiction, theme-mediaeval-world

In parts, this was heavy going, slow, moving in circles, the prose thick with description, nothing much happening, endless inner workings of the main character Laurentius who seems to descend more and more into a feverish illness. Plus the endless rain in this muddy, somewhat forsaken town in the north of Europe (Estonia/Livonia; the town is Dorpat/Tartu) and the grim starvation of the local peasantry.

But what really impressed me was the real sense of being transported back in history. There are In parts, this was heavy going, slow, moving in circles, the prose thick with description, nothing much happening, endless inner workings of the main character Laurentius who seems to descend more and more into a feverish illness. Plus the endless rain in this muddy, somewhat forsaken town in the north of Europe (Estonia/Livonia; the town is Dorpat/Tartu) and the grim starvation of the local peasantry.

But what really impressed me was the real sense of being transported back in history. There are here none of the trappings and trimmings of 'historical fiction', no dwelling on costume and quaint custom, no overt mention of dates or famous people. Most impressively, though, there is almost no trace of 21st-century modern thinking. We are plunged into a late 17th-C. world in which rational science (Newton, anatomical dissections) exists side by side and in fact, intertwined with what we would deem to be irrational (witchery, resurrection, humours, alchemy, bloodletting). What I found truly fascinating (and it's explained again in the author's note at the end) is the way in which witchery was believed to be a type of infection, and the link between a hysteria about witches and today's hysteria about infectious diseases (the book was written before the 2020-22 pandemic but the author's note mentions swine flu and HIV).

In its rigorous inhabitation of the 17th-C. mindset, beliefs, feelings, sense of one's body, sense of the world, this book reminded me of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and of the Ingmar Bergman film 'The Seventh Seal'. It is very rare to find such truly historical writing. The cover bears a quote from the Huffington Post (Italy): "A little gem of magical historicism." And that it is. Not so sure about the magical as the irrational is, as I mentioned above, completely part of the rational in this world.

What transports one into that world from page one (and it's kept up throughout) is the overwhelming presence of all the senses. Smell, especially, and taste, often in books situated in fourth and fifth place, is at the forefront always, and the way Laurentius feels sick with the black bile is almost enough to nauseate the reader themselves. A truism of narratology is that the descriptive pause momentarily halts the action, and it is certainly the case that the details of smell, taste, sensation slow down the diegesis here to the extent that I mostly thought this was a wandering kind of plot, going nowhere slowly. But different strands do get pulled together at the end (of sorts).

Anyway, my mind feels scrubbed of the industrial age. Huge respect to Meelis Friedenthal for this feat. Not so huge respect to the translator; I can't help thinking that the word 'surreal' on p.256 crept in there via translation as the rest of the book is so meticulously steeped in pre-18th-century vocabulary. I shall need to dig up the Estonian original somewhere and check!

Read for my ongoing Quest to Read the World. Country: Estonia. Ticked. ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Mar 06, 2018 Terri marked it as around-the-world · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction

Jan 02, 2020 Wanda marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, 0005-new-river-coop, zz-europe

Apr 28, 2020 Pantteri marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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