The Stone Nest by Hella Wuolijoki
The Stone Nest by Hella Wuolijoki
For lack of better information, I have this listed based on the Romanian adaptation of a play that I do not know what is called like originally and anyway I did not like- 6 out of 10
Not exactly a spoiler alert, since I will not say anything about the end of the play, or indeed much about it at all…
But an alert is in order anyway, for I guess that these notes will be much more of a view on Scandinavian ways.
The play itself was not much to my liking and it may come down to my unenthusiastic opinion of the Nordics.
They seem to be all the rage and they dominate world rankings for almost anything, from GDP per head to happiness levels.
- May this be a case of hidden envy?
Perhaps, but I am not that thrilled with the Nordic miracle.
I have worked for Radio Sweden in 1990, for some months and for Helsingin Sanaomat and found the correspondents cold.
Very, very cold.
When I think of their weather it makes sense but it does not exactly make them very endearing, at least for this reader.
The thing that puzzles me is their happiness level, which is sky high and in contrast with some of their suicide rates.
I probably have some figures and statistics wrong, but I am inclined to say that life in such cold latitudes would not be very attractive to me.
I will mention a few words about this play, even if –like the places where it takes place- I did not warm up to it.
It deals with a situation that was specific to another age- it seems like another era, because I have to grant the Nordics that they are well ahead of the rest of the world in terms of so many policies that deal with people.
In Scandinavia they have had paternity leave for…40 years!!
It is well known that women enjoy such rights like nowhere else on the planet, not to mention Saudi Arabia.
By the way, Saudi Arabia and fellow enlightened leaders have recently excluded the female foreign minister of a Nordic country from a conference.
The minister –was it Denmark? - was too outspoken in favor of women’s rights for the very outdated tastes of the sheiks.
In this play however, the people of days gone by were just as bigoted as the Saudis of this age, for they oppressed a woman for her liberalism.
She has an affair and this is anathema in a society where a woman has to be wedded or else see no man.
At times, the adaptation that I listened to offered some thrills, like the time when the wife comes with an ax to the house of her husband’s lover.
With a known move and a sense of déjà vu, he jumps off the window and the village is off on some kind of trial of the evil woman.
Post reading, I had to smile…twice
First of all, when I looked the author up on goodreads and found only works that sounded like:
Second- when I learned that the author was married with Lenin’s personal friend.
You could object and say that the people we marry do not always represent us, but still this explains to some extent why I did not like this work.
- What does this have to do with the play?
- Not much, or is it nothing?
- But hey- I warned you, didn’t I
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