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Summary
Summary
As a child, Solveig Torvik heard stories of a lost, mysterious great-grandfather who left Finland for America to make his fortune - leaving Torvik's great-grandmother and his unborn daughter behind. As a reporter, Torvik determined to discover the fate of the man who followed his dreams to Oregon. She uncovered not only the story of one man, but also the saga of an entire family. In Nikolai's Fortune , a tale of Scandinavian women, the journalist turns fact into fiction and shares the tales of her ancestors as she imagines they would have told them.
Nikolai's Fortune is a heartbreaking, multigenerational epic, chronicling family secrets and sufferings against the backdrop of Scandinavian history and culture. Blending memoir and historical fiction, grandmother, mother, and daughter each share their own story: Kaisa, of her mother's love for Nikolai and her own 500-mile trek at the age of twelve from impoverished Finland across the snowy mountains of Lapland; Berit, of child slavery and an obsession with seeking out her grandfather's fortune for her mother; and Hannah, the voice of Torvik, of her childhood during the Nazi occupation of Norway and her family's emigration to Idaho.
Through detailed historical research into census, church, and weather records, as well as academic and museum sources, Torvik recaptures a dramatic story nearly lost to memory and inherits something worth more than a fortune in riches - a sense of her family history, ethnic background, and the generations of remarkable women who came before her.
Norwegian-born Solveig Torvik was a reporter, editor, and columnist at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for thirty years. She was also a reporter for United Press International in Salt Lake City and for the San Francisco Chronicle , and an editor at the San Jose Mercury News.
Author Notes
Solveig Torvik was a reporter, editor, and columnist at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for thirty years. She was also a reporter for United Press International in Salt Lake City and for the San Francisco Chronicle , and an editor at the San Jose Mercury News.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
A brooding, often beautiful tale of life in the Far North and the immigrant experience. A former journalist, the author knows how to work a source and analyze the data, but family stories are another matter, particularly in a family of abundant secrets. Her kin were bound together, she writes, "by an unacknowledged credo: if a thing remains unspoken, it does not exist; if pain is given no voice, it lacks power to harm." Both principles are at work in Torvik's first novel--billed as fiction, it seems, only because certain liberties have been taken when the facts have not been available. The hinge of the story is great-grandpa Nikolai, who, much to the chagrin of these status-conscious Norwegians, hails from Finland. "Being a Finn was shameful, I knew, though it wasn't clear why," the author comments, and Nikolai lives up to this perception by leaving his wife and unborn daughter behind to go off to America to make a fortune that became the stuff of legend. Not everyone back home shares his certainty that great riches are to be found along the salmon-heavy Columbia River, but they're all interested, especially because so many live in grinding poverty. Suspicious of each other as much as of outsiders, the close-lipped clan keeps its secrets. "Most people don't ask," says Berit, whose story forms the middle section of the three-part narrative. "They don't want to hear the truth. They can't bear to hear it." The taciturnity serves the family well under the Nazi occupation of Norway, but nagging uncertainty over Nikolai's disappearing act, and whether he indeed became rich, provides the occasion for a parallel journey, as Torvik's parents emigrate to the United States, leaving it to her to sort out how to become an American teenager and to reckon with the unsettling discoveries she makes in a new land. Cheerless but memorable; an update of Knut Hamsun and Ole Rölvaag with more whispers than cries. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.