Sturdy Scandinavian Women

Formerly called Lapps by outsiders, the nomadic reindeer pastoralism of the Saami people resides in arctic regions of Europe, stretching from Norway, across Sweden and Finland, to Russia. The story of God's Mercy is a seductive journey, probing the interplay between Scandinavian and Saami cultures and spaces. Two cultures, two languages, two natures…touch, merge, diverge, overlap, and even ignore each other. There emerge, in time and across space, interstitial forms of beliefs, practices, and communication not dependent on juxtaposition or hybridity, and there emerge too the insidious hierarchies naturalized in social class. We face in this novel a proliferation of differences, not shapeless homogenous societies.

Imagine a midwife as protagonist in early-twentieth-century Sweden. Hillevi Klarins, trained in the urban center of Uppsala, opts to launch her professional career in a northern hinterland among expanding Swedish farmers and the indigenous Saami inhabitants. Hillevi's move north might seem idealistic or adventurous were it not for the reader's awareness of her mundane motivation, namely, getting herself into position before her lover and intended husband should be transferred to that same outpost parish. That union never materialized. In the north, Hillevi, like an amateur ethnographer, began accommodating to the peasant and pastoralist cultural practices. She studiously documents the rural Swedish and Saami survival skills, midwifery practices, yoik chants, Swedish songs, recipes, and frontier wedding feasts as they might appear in an anthropological treatise. Through several generations, Hillevi will come to oversee the births of new bodies and witness the deaths of others. As Hillevi muses, "It's all about who manages to live the longest."

Midwives, like nurses and more so than doctors, have always understood the interplay of accident and necessity when it comes to life and death at any age, and in those days, giving birth was a life-threatening ordeal for both (or all) parties. At the same time, preparing a nursery for a prospective infant could invite bad luck. In many societies, midwives have been at risk of being accused of witchcraft. Hillevi herself came to be respected, but also suspected, and even feared, as she mediated the dreams and expectations of her Swedish and Saami families.

Hillevi's own expanding family ties and some of the novel's nomad characters wandering into other cultures, languages, and countries will extend to two further books in the Wolfskin trilogy by Kerstin Ekman. That family genealogies appear neat and linear reflects an ideology; kinship diagrams have to presume that paternity is clear, even when the mother herself may not be certain. Hillevi observes that a mother is never free—not even free to share her knowledge of the workings of culture and how it's transformed as tradition percolates through exigencies to quotidian experiences.

Besides parturition, another most significant kink in genealogies occurs through the fostering and adoption of children and through adults converting their alignments for whatever reasons. Hillevi felt herself a class-based Swedish "half-breed." Later, she adopted an orphaned Saami child, Risten (or Kristen, as she would be known in Swedish). Risten's mother's family had seasonally camped near the so-called Mount Giela. This imaginary name could be translated as "language" or "snare" mountain. A Tower of Babel, perhaps, or a site of entanglement? Risten's father's identity can only be suspected, but it is clear that she, too, is a "half-breed."

This novel reveals itself in two voices: Saami and Scandinavian; the auxiliary first-person narrative from Risten and the omniscient third-person accounts of everything else, neither set of revelations being either temporally linear or spatially logical. Risten's narrative overlays the basic story about her stepmother, Hillevi. Even though Risten poses many questions she seeks to understand about herself, her narrative helps fill in the cracks of the master narrative while also fueling its forward motion. Faded rosemaling emblems punctuate the segments of chapters of God's Mercy, and longer strings of eight initiate separate chapters. Rosemaling is the traditional Scandinavian decorative painting...