The Wild Orchid

This is an excellent book, which along with Undset's other works, such as The Master of Hestviken, Kristin Lavrnsdatter, The Faithful Wife, etc., might be put on the same reading list with the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Guy de Maupassant, Chekhov, Jane Austen, etc., or those writers whose books are personal guides through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, hence, they impart life changing experience. I, in fact, regard Sigrid Undset as a female, Catholic version of Fyodor Dostoevsky.The Wild Orchid and its second book The Burning Bush, contain the story of a man attempting to do what seems impossible by fallen worldly standards: to love the perfect truth more than his own will and a very imperfect woman."A man must be able to BEAR the truth--that's the thing. But that he shall love the truth is too much to ask. If the truth is anything but a person. And that person is such that he is worth loving more than all a man can lose here on earth, more than the mortal life of every single man. So that the man who has discovered him runs after the scent of his garment, as King David expresses it--and makes straight for the herd of this world's truths as if they were no more than Our Lord's private royal tigers." (page 42, The Burning Bush).As with many of Undset's books, we see how the actions of fallen man bring him down (often they may seem so damningly foolish to us up on our high horses as we read!), and how the struggle to accept grace works to redeem him, or not, when it is rejected.Similar to Don Quixote, or films such as Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, where a man lives by a seemingly archaic samurai code, The Burning Bush shows the much deeper-seeming absurdity of those who try to follow the Catholic faith in a world where "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Only through doing this can he, and we, learn what this faith actually is...

I have never been let down by a Sigrid Undset book. I like the way she thinks and portrays life. The dialogues of Paul about the Catholic faith are very interesting.