Customer Reviews

The Queen's Tiara (Great Swedish Classics)

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This is a lovely romantic story by a Swedish author; it was written in the 1800s. However there is a previous translation by Yvonne L. Sandstroem, titled "The Queen's Diadem." It was published in 1992 by Camden House of South Carolina. Unforunately, the 250-page trade paperback was priced at around $50, and for that reason it never received much popularity.

The Queen's Tiara is a great novel. It took me a little while to get into it (I find that a lot with 'the Classics') but once I was in I was hooked. It's an exciting story with a fascinating lead character in Tintomara the androgynous amoral heroine (you have to read the novel!). It is done in a mix of prose, dialogue and letters, ahead of its time in many ways. Well worth a read.

I'm sometimes a language purist, I don't like to toss around the word "unique" lightly. But this classic book (I had to read it for my major, that makes it a classic) really is unique for its time, 1834. For one thing, there's the kaleidoscopic format: it starts out as a fairly standard 19th-century epistolary novel, telling a story of romantic jealousy by means of letters between two sisters and their young men; it then turns to straight narrative and brings in political intrigue, includes some song and poetry, and after a while settles into mostly drama format--pure dialogue, that is, with scarcely any narrative text. And then there's the historical elements: the assassination of King Gustaf III of Sweden(!) at a masked ball(!!) in an opera house(!!!)--the most historical parts of the story become its most fantastic.

But most of all there's Tintomara, the androgynous figure with whom each of the four young leads falls in love--the metaphor within the book is the card, the five of hearts, one heart in the center and one in each corner, which get erased one by one. (Let's just say that the card metaphor goes beyond mere foreshadowing to become lampshading.) Tintomara his/herself is an androgyne, both sexes in one, and as such complete and not needing anyone else; a catalyst, causing others around it to fall in love without falling in love itself. I rather think Almqvist uses the drama format so much because it allows the characters to assign a gender to Tintomara, but frees the author from committing himself.

I first read this in the original Swedish some 35 years ago, and it was rather hard going in another language--Almqvist's allusive and circumlocutory style is even more confusing than the randomness already described. Indeed, I was quite surprised to find out how much it turns out I had read correctly and still remembered accurately, my recollection of it seeming so unlikely.

I don't know of any 19th-century treatment of gender ambiguity that begins to compare, especially in terms of sexual tension. A little hard to give a single rating to: the uniqueness and the lasting impression it made argue for greatness; the dated and inconvenient style and language make it more "interesting" than "fascinating."