(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing)
Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius (translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles)is that most universal and yet achingly specific kind of novel.
At once a coming-of-age tale of one young Sámi woman battling to find in place in a world that holds obstacles and antagonism within and without, sometimes violently so, she is also the member of the Indigenous people group of northern Europe, traditional reindeer herders whose sense of culture and place and indeed very right to exist is constantly called in question by far too many the people of the three main countries their lands straddle – Norway, Sweden and Finland (some live too on the Kola Peninsula in Russia but Scandinavia, and specifically Sweden is the focus here).
An arresting depiction of one key, strong-willed and brilliantly capable girl-then-woman Elsa – Stolen is separated into two equally fascinating and immersively compelling halves, both of which paint a raw if beautiful picture of a rich and fulfilling life that is constantly attacked by people who think Elsa is too much, too loud, too everything.
And yet what Elsa has is passion, massive amounts of passion.
While some of the men around her question her place in a rapidly shrinking world, beset not just bigotry and outright hatred but by climate change which has all but placed a ticking clock of survivability on their lifestyle, Elsa holds true to her love of reindeer, of the rich advantages, tangibly material and gloriously not, they bring, and to a culture that she firmly believes has a right to exist without harassment, official legal and policing neglect and sometimes downright hostility, and without the unending hatred of unthinking people who do not care to think and feel about their effects on those they attack.
She threw herself under the covers and squeezed the rough duvet, which was new and uncomfortable. She hadn’t lied. Not saying anything wasn’t the same as lying. All she had to do was remain quiet.
Brilliantly expansive and visually alive with so much detail and love for the world it depicts, Stolen begins its story above the Arctic Circle where gutsy, passionate Elsa lives with her family, the rhythm and fullness of which is governed by the movement of their herds across a landscape which is begin to act in unsettling mysterious and unheard of ways.
But while climate change is a slowly-building threat, a more immediate one continues to present itself with opportunistic people killing reindeer with little to no official consequences.
They literally get away with murder of a most precious resource, an horrific crime that Elsa comes into direct contact with when, as a free-spirited nine-year-old who thinks nothing of skiing across the countryside to the corral which holds her family’s reindeer herd, witnesses a local sociopathically troubled hunter butchering her precious reindeer calf.
Elsa knows precisely who this person is, and he her, but is far too afraid to tell anyone, admitting that she was witness to the crime but unable to say who committed it, far too scared of the trouble that will bring in a society where the law treats the concerns of the Sámi with nothing even closely to the importance it should.
(courtesy National Nordic Museum)
This crime remains with Elsa as she grows up and when we join her again in the back half of Stolen as a woman on the cusp of her twenties, she is holding it corrosively close to her heart as she battles to not simply stop what the book’s blurb terms an “ever-escalating wave of prejudice and violence against her [people]” but the age-old traditions within her own people which cannot countenance a woman as a reindeer herder with the same rights men traditionally hold.
Hers is a lone and at time terrifying battle, but what makes you love Stolen all the more is how much power and tenacity Laestadius invests in her protagonist who is scared and at times wholly shaken to her core, but who knows that if she doesn’t take a stand, nothing will change except to get catastrophically worse.
The target of a sustained campaign of harassment by the man she saw butchering her calf a decade earlier, Elsa, though beset by an even greater level of threat and intimidation than before, finally snaps and pushes despite the ever-present shame and anger at her powerlessness as a child, pushes harder and harder to bring down a towering wall of prejudice that not only presses in from without but within.
She is a woman under siege and though Laestadius is honest about how humanly Elsa reacts to the terrors within and without, she also paints an arresting picture of a woman who is tired of cowering and who will stop at nothing, no matter what comes against her, whether its police indifference, expletive laden texts or the judgement of friends who thinks she shouldn’t push beyond what a Sámi woman is allowed to be, to fight for a life that should be valued far more than it is.
Indeed, a fresh scratch, longer and deeper this time, all the way across the passenger door. She ran her finger along the white groove.
Stolen is that most rare and precious of novels.
It dives deep into a world under threat and sustaining great loss on all kinds of fronts, carrying potent messaging against the evils of prejudice and bigotry, with all the epic intensity that carries, but also manages to be intimately caring and thoughtful about the life of one brave, determined young woman who knows she is a David against a societal Goliath but who cannot recoil from a battle she can never really step away from.
Throughout Stolen we are treated to rich descriptive passages, emotions danceably light but mostly burdensomely intense, and characters who are fulsomely realised and depict the full spectrum of modern society in all its brokenness and richness.
A powerful call to an often caring world to think beyond old assumptions and their darkly harmful expression, Stolen is a clarion call to empathy and understanding of a whole people (who themselves need some inward examination and change) but even more importantly of one young woman who wants the world that she loves and adores in all its rich glory to survive, grow and prosper but to do so without intimidation, hatred and attack and to be valued as an equal part of a country that, if it cared to listen, would have much to learn from those it caustically shuns.
Stolen has been adapted as a movie, now available on Netflix.