The Willow King
SynopsisPlot
Wrapped into his long coat against the incessant rain and accompanied by a strange parrot, the young Dutch student Laurentius arrives in Estonia on an icy day at the end of the seventeenth century. On the run from a dark past and suspected of heresy, he has fled to Tartu, 'The City of the Muses', to study at the famous university. Laurentius has been searching obsessively for a cure for the mysterious melancholy which torments him, and is desperate to understand where the soul comes from, and how it relates to the body. But the more he searches, the more he is attracted to the world of instinct, superstition and magic of the peasants in the surrounding countryside. A world which he knew as a child, but which now persecutes him in dreams and visions which increasingly blur with reality.
Story
About this book
At the close of the seventeenth century, a young Dutch student named Laurentius arrives in Tartu, Estonia, on an icy day, carrying little beyond a rose-ringed parakeet and a burden of suspicion. He has fled accusations of heresy and enrolled at the university to study the body, the soul, and the boundary between them. His questions belong to a time when bloodletting, dissection, and the evil eye shared one intellectual space.
Tartu in this era is a small university town ringed by a countryside gripped by famine. The poor press against the city walls, and executions and dissections draw crowds. Laurentius searches for a cure for the melancholy that follows him, yet his inquiries pull him toward the folk beliefs of the rural people, a world he knew as a child. Feverish dreams of a crowned king blur into his waking hours.
Meelis Friedenthal, an Estonian writer, places the novel in a moment when early modern science and inherited magical thinking occupied the same ground, often within one person. Paranoia, hunger, and the search for the seat of the soul run alongside each other, and the border between observation and vision stays unsettled.
