The Christmas Oratorio by Göran Tunström

[Diane]

Rating: 4 stars


The story centers on the effects of a tragedy that caused three generations of a Swedish family to become dysfunctional. Central to the story is a husband's/son's grief after losing their wife/mother in a tragic accident before she was to sing Bach's oratorio. The prose is beautiful and somewhat lyrical, much like Bach's Oratorio. The book is also divided into six sections like Bach's Oratorio. Despite the beauty of the writing, however, the book is rather bleak and depressing.

[Amanda]

I gave this one 3 stars. I was kind of into the beautiful but melancholy vibe to the book. I was less interested in the parts about the son's romantic entanglements , but that's just me.

[Rosemary]

This novel follows three generations in Sweden after the tragic and somewhat ridiculous death of wife and mother Solveig Nordensson in the 1930s. Her husband never stops hoping to find her again, her son is left emotionally paralysed while the daughter is unaffected (this is where we are conscious this book was written by a man). It's also a wonderful evocation of small town life in Sweden in the 20th century.

A remarkable piece of writing although I'm sure I missed all the musical references and probably others.

[Patrick]

*** 1/2

One would wonder why such a bleak story would have as its title a famous work by Bach that was written to celebrate a festive period. With chapters mirroring in an almost antithetic way the six parts of the Oratorio, the novel is arranged in a circular way, perhaps to echo the cyclical and annual nature of the Christmas period. However, while the Oratorio starts with a birth, Tunström's novel begins with the death of Solveig, Aron Nordensson's wife, who gets trampled by a herd of cows while on her way to rehearse Bach's Oratorio. Her death ignites a string of absences, losses and grieving emotions that echoes through the lives of three generations of Nordensson men: Aron, Sidner and Victor. The writing can get lyrical at times, with touches of hopelessness; it's not the easiest of reads considering the bleakness, the obtuse references to verses of the Oratorio and to several historical Swedish characters.

[Gail]

Patrick's review captures the essence of the book so I will not attempt to write a summary which would not be as good. I did find the book to be tedious at times because of the nature of its walking the lines of obsession and mental illness. Many of our main characters and some of our secondary characters struggle, including Aron, Tessa, and Sidner. Even Fanny is caught in a web of dreams and not reality. I did enjoy much of the lyrical nature of the language and some of the ways in which the author played with the whole concept of tale telling. Selma Lagerlöf is everywhere, sometimes as a writer with insights, sometimes as someone putting up a front as a writer, and sometimes a person that lived one of her characters (wiping the horses in the night to rescue a madman). Werner Nelson begins to think of himself as Heisenberg (goes home to split the atom). Victor thinks of Sidner as Odysseus and wants to have more suitors for his mother to help his father triumph heroically. Dante is everywhere in the first half of the book and Odysseus is everywhere in the second half. Although Sidner plays the piano and Victor is a conductor there is relatively few references to music other than the arc of the Bach Oratorio. A complex, well imagined book.