The Kingdom of Little Wounds by Susann Cokal (review)

Court life in sixteenth-century Scandinavia is brought to exquisite and horrifying life in this tale of three fictional women: Isabel, the unstable, syphilitic queen; Ava Bingen, the demoted seamstress struggling to improve her station; and Midi Sorte, the bitter black slave whose tongue has been cut in half, rendering her mute. Midi and Ava tell their own stories, Midi having been taught to write by the court historian who has fallen in love with her, and Ava, a favorite raconteur in the palace nursery who threads her account with wisps of fairy tales, some of which are expanded in interstitial chapters throughout the book. The events at court are recounted in richly detailed prose that renders immediate the sights and smells of a time when science was deeply intertwined with superstition and politics was a blood sport. Queen Isabel has passed syphilis onto her young children, but their symptoms are exacerbated by the cures that she and her doctors have devised; Midi and Ava are vulnerable to Nicolas, a man with ambitions that he ruthlessly pursues until he has nearly achieved his ends. The women endure threats, brutality, rape, and shocking invasions of privacy as a matter of course and yet emerge canny and wise, reshaping history as the story of their own survival and self-interest in a world where they are seen as mere functionaries—if seen at all. The novel demands and rewards full immersion in its account of the everyday life, beliefs, and medical practices of the royals, and readers will definitely come away with a (dis)taste for the cultural history of the Renaissance. The author’s note is as playful as it is informative regarding what is true and what is fabricated as Cokal skillfully and unapologetically blurs the lines between fairy tale and history.