Otrohetens lockelse: En bok om aktenskapet.

Schoolfield, George C.

The trajectory of Merete Mazzarella's career has been somewhat unusual, although she is scarcely the only Scandinavian scholar to swerve back and forth between academic and creative writing - the practice has been followed in Finland for decades: see V. A. Koskenniemi, Alma Soderhjelm, "P. Mustapaa" (Matti Haavio), Lars Hulden, Markku Envall. In all these instances, the "professional" and the imaginative endeavor have been kept apart; in Mazzarella's, the two lines have drawn steadily closer. At first, the distinction was clear: the dissertation about Eyvind Johnson's Strandernas svall (1981) on the one hand, autobiographical and fictional works (1979, 1981, 1983) on the other. But by 1985, in her study of Finland-Swedish woman writers, symptoms of impatience with academic practices appeared: chapters were in fact individual essays, a scholarly apparatus was missing. This apparently cavalier attitude - which made for easily read texts - was continued in the books on "the narrow room" of the Finland-Swedish memoir tradition (1993; see WLT 69:l, p. 168). Bedazzled by Mazzarella's insights, the busy researcher was still mildly irritated by the absence of notes, indices, even tables of contents, all of which would have made his lot happier. Meanwhile, Mazzarella produced another novel (1987) and several volumes of a very personal nature (1990. 1992, 1994; see WLT 66:1, p. 150, and 67:4, p. 848), in which her own reflections and reactions held center-stage.

In Otrohetens lockelse Mazzarella has moved, as she says, quite boldly into "the borderland between literary research, cultural journalism, and belles lettres." Believing that literary research should address existential problems, she assaults the perils of marriage and, more particularly, the temptations of adultery (and the problems of the other woman) head on, analyzing a great number of texts but supporting her arguments and questions - she is an extremely interrogative stylist - with numerous references to sociologists (the distinguished Edvard Westermark, a homosexual who wrote a history of marriage), feminists or semifeminists of several denominations (Ruth Brandon, Helen Gurley Brown, Erica Jong, Gloria Steinem, and so forth), sexologists (Elina Haavio-Mannila, Dr. Kinsey), marriage counselors (Dagmar Almqvist-O'Connor, Wallerstein and Blakeslee), and a host of others. Presumably wanting not only to cast her reference net as wide as possible, but also to catch the largest possible audience, she makes extensive use of a skill developed in her literary-historical books, where, as she correctly said, she presented texts unlikely to be well known to her readers: there her plot summaries were accurate, clear, deft, and witty. Here they still are, but the reader feels that he is suddenly transformed into an undergraduate, taking a theme course on comparative faithfulness-and-unfaithfulness in world literature. Hector and Andromache, Odysseus and Penelope, Tristan and Isolde, Abelard and Heloise, Paolo and Francesca, La Princesse de Cleves, Pamela, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, The Seducer's Diary, Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Awakening, Chekhov's "Lady with the Dog," and so forth all appear.

In the twentieth century, things continue at a fairly high literary level for a while with Den allvarsamma leken (what a pit), that Soderberg's masterpiece is not available to anglophones!) and The Age of Innocence (what a blessing that the movie made Europeans aware of the novel!). But quality descends, as Alexandra Kollentay and Alma Soderhjelm are introduced at length, and eventually the discourse lands at the unspeakable Suzanne Brogger and assorted nobodies. Of course, it is fun to watch Mazzarella skewer The Bridges of Madison County, but she treats some Scandinavians (e.g., the loose-lipped Yrsa Stenius, the unavoidable Christer Kihlman with the shopworn triple-sex of Manniskan sore skalv) more respectfully than they deserve. Less, in this clever and often memorable torrent, would have been more; now the reader - no longer an imaginary undergraduate but a desperate veteran of marital wars - is the patient, at first fascinated but eventually exhausted, of a brilliant, cheery, and untiring therapist, determined to call on whatever means, including humorous anecdote, apothegms, personal experiences (more and more the case in Mazzarella's books), to set him right, or at least to make him feel guilty.

All is entertaining, all is intelligent; but the patient (a literary scholar) may want to cry "stop!" at this or that idea, hoping for further elucidation - for example, the importance of scenes set at the opera in several novels of Mazzarella's display. Further examples from Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish literature of the late nineteenth century come quickly to mind. And where, in Mazzarella's catalogue, is the incomparably dispassionate Theodor Fontane? Yet their adduction, of course, would have swelled the flood even more. Perhaps these and other belletristic considerations of the sublime and squalid theme will be taken up in a sequel, where the mixed genre is abandoned for something closer to mere but lasting literary research.

George C. Schoolfield Yale University