Dina's Book
A Novel
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Set in Norway in the mid-nineteenth century, Dina’s Book presents a beautiful, eccentric, and tempestuous heroine who carries a terrible burden: at the age of five she accidentally caused her mother’s death. Blamed by her father and banished to a farm, she grows up untamed and untaught. No one leads the child through her grief, and the accident remains a gruesome riddle of death, with Dina left haunted by the vindictive spirit of her mother. When her father agrees to take her back after several years, his efforts to cultivate her have little lasting effect.
Tamed only by her tutor, who is able to reach her through music and draw out her gift for mathematics, Dina remains private and closely guarded, while her unconventional behavior and erotic power enchant and ensnare those around her. At age sixteen, she is married off to Jacob, a wealthy fifty-year-old landowner, who later dies under odd circumstances. Wrestling with her two unappeased ghosts, Dina becomes mute and then emerges from her shock to run Jacob’s estate with an iron hand . . . until one day a mysterious stranger, the Russian wanderer Leo, enters her life and changes it forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in mid-19th century Norway and infused with Scandinavian-style magical realism, this spellbinding novel calls to mind Eliot's Middlemarch and the film Babette's Feast. Willful Dina's character is shaped by her involvement in the grisly accident that kills her mother, after which she temporarily loses the power of speech and permanently distances herself from the strictures of upper-class life in remote, sub-Arctic Nordland. Wild and unmanageable, Dina is sent from home soon after the accident to be raised in a poor cotter's family. She remains mute for several years, until she returns to her father's house where she is taken in hand by a tutor who teaches her music and mathematics. At age 15, Dina is married off to Jacob, a wealthy older landowner. After Jacob's unexpected death (in another accident in which Dina plays a part), his forceful, unconventional widow takes over his estate, bending its people to her will. Though beset by ghosts and a nearly papable grief, Dina proves to be a survivor. Insightful, memorable characterizations, coupled with spare, unadorned prose, move the haunting narrative swiftly to its enigmatic finish. Wassmo was named ``The Author of the Eighties'' by Norwegian booksellers; she also won the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize. 25,000 first printing.
