Back in October I said I was starting a Nobel Prize reading project, sampling literature laureates from every decade. It’s been over a month, but I’ve finally finished a couple novels by the first female winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (and the first female member of the Nobel-awarding Swedish Academy), Selma Lagerlöf. I found the novels both delightful and surprising.

I don’t read Swedish, so I read the novels in translation, from The Greatest Works of Selma Lagerlöf, which I got free for Kindle. Out of the greatest works, I read Jerusalem because it was mentioned often as a reason for her Nobel win and Miracles of Antichrist because it had a badass title.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lagerlöf’s writing style. I know nuances of word choice and shades of meaning get lost in translation, but her deceptively simple style is preserved. She writes in vignettes; each vignette is a turning point in a character’s life and teaches you something about that character’s personality or world view. She doesn’t spend much time explaining her characters’ deep thoughts and feelings over time, but once Lagerlöf has lined up all a character’s turning points, surprising depths are revealed. What feels on the surface like cute little fables turn out to be complex myths. Lagerlöf’s seamless mixing of the ordinary and the supernatural reinforces this mythic feeling and particularly appealed to me. Her characters live in a world where threats from trolls, visiting your ancestors in vision, and saintly miracles are ordinary and expected parts of life. I found this charming and deeply resonant.

Because of the vignette-based writing style, these novels are difficult to summarize. Thematically, they’re both about the conflicts between traditional Christianity, traditional ways of life, and the exciting new sects and philosophies that were spreading at close of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th. Jerusalem is inspired by a real event–in 1896, thirty-seven people in a small farming community sold their farms and possessions and followed their leader to join a religious commune in Jerusalem. Lagerlöf visited this colony and became fascinated by it and its inhabitants. Her fictionalized account begins in a traditional Swedish farming village; we get to know some of the inhabitants and watch their reactions as a man named Helgum arrives with some new religious ideas and gains his first converts. We see the little group’s struggles and triumphs, as well as their strained relations with the rest of the town, and the book ends as they board the train for an uncertain future in the Jerusalem colony.

(I should tell you here that Jerusalem has a sequel that describes the group’s life in the Jerusalem commune. Some online sources talk about both as one “book in two parts” but my Greatest Works only includes the first book and I can’t find an English version of the sequel online. It looks like I’d have to track down a paper copy in a used bookstore or on eBay. If I get to that I’ll let you know but for now I’ll just stick to the first book.)

It’s hard not to read Helgum and his followers as a creepy cult. Helgumists separate themselves from friends and family, give all their money to the group, rely heavily on Helgum and his charisma for direction in life, and are sometimes real dicks to neighbors who stick with their regular old church or, God forbid, still believe in fairies or trolls. I half expected the Helgumists to start stockpiling guns or commit mass suicide. This book was written before Jim Jones and the Branch Davidians and true crime podcasts, though, and Lagerlöf clearly doesn’t expect us to think this way. The story she’s telling is more complex than that. The Helgumists are flawed and human and moving to a Jerusalem commune might be a big mistake, but they’re also sincere and committed to each other and maybe they’re right to live in community and help each other so fully. She wants us to reserve judgement. Once you get past the knee-jerk “OMG they’re all joining a cult!” reaction, this book invites you to consider the large questions at play even in small personal decisions. The weight of tradition struggles against the romance of new ideas, and when you need to know what your duty is or how best to treat the person in front of you, it can be impossible to know what to do.

Even though my perspective and context are a century and a continent away from Lagerlöf’s, I enjoyed Jerusalem and wanted to try another of her novels. The Miracles of Antichrist is right after Jerusalem in Greatest Works and was also inspired by a true event (or at least a real legend) so I read that one. It gave me a whole new perspective on Jerusalem and its themes, as well as being interesting in its own right.

Miracles of Antichrist is inspired by Italian legends of false relics and the idea that the Antichrist would do the miracles of Christ but lead people away from God. The novel actually starts like a folktale–there’s a monastery with a statue of baby Jesus that’s very powerful and miraculous, and an Englishwoman wants it so badly that she has a copy made and manages to switch it with the original. Eventually the deception is revealed in a miraculous way and the false Jesus statue begins to make its way around the world spreading disaster and false miracles. It turns out the moral of this introductory tale is “socialism is bad.” I’m not exaggerating. Here’s the exact quote:

“But the man who had been taught during the fight by the image began to proclaim to the world a new doctrine, which is called Socialism, but which is an Antichristianity. And it loves, and renounces, and teaches, and suffers like Christianity, so that it has every resemblance to the latter, just as the false image . . . has every resemblance to the real Christ image.”

I was a little rattled by this blunt moral right at the beginning of the novel but I plowed ahead anyway. The rest of the novel follows the statue to the town of Diamante on the slopes of Mount Etna, where it miraculously helps the townspeople solve problems, build a railroad, save a local church, and eventually brings together the long-suffering Michaela and her true love Gaetano. This is apparently bad, because in the process everyone kind of becomes godless socialists, and we realize that all the time this town was asking for miracles they never asked the statue for forgiveness or entry into heaven. They were too concerned with surviving this life to worry for their souls.

It was actually a charming story with some pretty entertaining saintly miracles, but the big “don’t let Socialism turn your eyes from heaven” message felt pretty hamhanded and even a little reactionary in today’s world. At the very end there’s a short scene where a priest is lamenting the spread of Socialism and the mischief this false Christ has done, and the pope basically says that this is the next step toward the apocalypse and the church should probably not fight it too hard. This ending felt odd to me until I realized that perhaps this is what Lagerlöf feels like the Jerusalem colony is doing–communal living, sort of socialism, but with Jesus at the center of it. It makes a kind of sense. Weird, culty sense, but she’s not the first person to think this way. When you look at it this way, it’s entirely possible that she would love socialism if it weren’t so atheistic.

Selma Lagerlöf did not succeed in convincing me to join a cult or to fight the godless socialists. The overarching themes here felt quaint and irrelevant. Today they feel kind of reactionary, but I’m not sure they would have felt so to readers back then. In any case, Lagerlöf was involved in the women’s suffrage later in life, mostly at the urging of her secret girlfriend Valborg Olander, so she was never exactly the poster child for conservative politics. I’m willing to see her as a product of her time, ahead in some ways and behind in others.

In spite of the old-fashioned themes expressed, many of the individual vignettes were beautiful and surprisingly deep, with profound moments of forgiveness and compassion throughout both books. There were a few powerful moments when characters tried to balance personal authenticity against community and tradition, and there were several memorable and interesting characters. On the whole, they were pleasant and thoughtful reads. It was an auspicious start to my Nobel Project. I look forward to my next selection, Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. I expect he could not be more different from Lagerlöf.