Well, you might now it by a different name, because The Violin of the Madman (Il Violino del Pazzo) is just the Italian title for Selma Lagerlöf’s 1899 novella En herrgårdssägen, usually translated into English as The Tale of a Manor or A Manor House Tale. It is a sort of fairy-tale about art, social duty, mental breakdown, and… redemptive love, I guess?
I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Some passages feel a bit rushed, as if there were supposed to be connecting chapters that didn’t quite make it, and I wanted to beat the second half’s main character on her head with a stick but, hey, it’s just me: I dislike virtuous poor girls who are as stupid as a rock.
Aside from that, charming atmospheres and some touching reflections on the healing power of music, for sure. The protagonist for the first half is Gunnar Hede, a young student at Uppsala whose true vocation is playing the violin. Music gives his life meaning, but he inherits responsibility for a declining family estate and is pressured to abandon art for practical work: he becomes a peddler, like his grandfather before him, earns some good money and eventually enters into some ill-fated enterprise involving goats. The other half of the story is Ingrid, a talentless young woman travelling with itinerant performers and her blind grandfather, a violinist himself.
Lagerlöf treats Gunnar’s breakdown not merely as an individual illness but as the consequence of a life forced away from its deepest calling, which is a nice reflection, but it remains unfortunately a bit shallow for contemporary sensibilities.
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