BOOK REVIEW : ‘Ball’ a Spin Through Time, Space
The Gold Ball, by Hanne Marie Svendsen; translated by Jorgen Schiott (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 245 pages)
The art of storytelling is a long-established tradition in Scandinavia, beginning with the Icelandic family sagas of the Middle Ages and followed in our own century by Selma Lagerlof, Knut Hamsun, Johannes V. Jensen, Halldor Laxness, and Isak Dinesen--all but the latter basically storytellers in the guise of novelists.
A fertile imagination, highly self-conscious attention to the narrator, curious sense of humor (all Scandinavian literature is not as dour and depressing as Ibsen and Strindberg), often-stark realism blended with a penchant for the fantastic, and large gallery of colorful characters subservient to the demands of the story: these are the common features of the Scandinavian tradition at its best.
At the center of the story lies an imaginary island, the name and location of which remain a mystery, for in “The Gold Ball,” the limitations of time and space are suspended, leaving readers to seek their own bearings. The island is a microcosm of life, life as a repeated series of births and deaths, of arrivals and departures, of loves and jealousies, a life exposed to the vicissitudes of weather and fate. It is obviously a very primitive and brutal mode of existence, untouched by history, in which extraordinary events succeed each other seemingly without order and meaning, until we suddenly find ourselves in a modern world of refrigerators and washing machines, a number of centuries having rapidly rolled by.
As far as the inhabitants of this fabulous island are concerned, their often-eccentric lives are chronicled in brief stories within the story. As in the old Icelandic family sagas, such lives are often etched in the collective memory because of a single remarkable event, as in the case of one Aksel who had an extraordinary and “beautiful death” being hit by a rock from somewhere in outer space one night as he went out to relieve himself. Then there are also the lives of mysterious strangers who visit the island, like the man with the gold ball, or Guido, “the master of mosaics,” whose main function in the story is to bring an element of magic and beauty to this bleak and wind-swept place.
At the still center of this wildly spinning wheel, the operation of which is only controlled by the storyteller, is a woman named Maja-Stina, the author’s ancestor and possessor of the magic gold ball, whose life we follow from the beginning to the end (and beyond, for she is reborn) and with whom the narrator discourses playfully about the nature of her story and of storytelling as such.
“The Gold Ball” is a story with many twists and turns that takes the reader for a dizzying spin through time and space. At the end of the book, in a chapter appropriately titled “And Here the Story Begins,” we are left without a conclusion and a reminder that like the gold ball, or the spinning globe itself, this story’s beginning is the end and its end is the beginning. At this point the reader might well wonder what to make of this circular tale. This reviewer can only suggest an answer dictated by the conventions of the genre itself.
In the end “The Gold Ball” is a celebration of the art of storytelling, of the power of the story to create new worlds through the free and unhindered play of the imagination. If “The Gold Ball” is “about” something, then that something is undoubtedly time and its many dimensions. Anyone expecting a moral, religious, or historical vision here is bound to be disappointed.
“The Gold Ball” richly deserves the lavish praise it received on its 1985 publication in Scandinavia, for it is a captivating, moving work by a writer who was until recently known only for her nonfiction. Although firmly embedded in a Scandinavian tradition of storytelling, its delightful sense of humor and playful handling of time and history should guarantee its appeal to readers who enjoy the equally magic realism of such celebrated Latin American writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez.