Olga Ravn creates a poetic, slightly experimental novella set in the 1600s, conjuring images and moments from factual witch trials of several Danish women held in the early to middle 1600s.
The narrative is told through a detached voice, that of the wax child. The wax child was constructed by one of the women on trial, Christenze Kruckow. The wax child bears love for Christenze as far as an inanimate object can, and the night of the wax child’s construction is frequently referenced, with heat and nostalgia. The connection between the Wax Child and Christenze is woven through the moments leading up to the trial and its aftermath. It's a fascinating device through which to tell the story.
The child’s voice replaces that of the omniscient god-like narrator, and the author goes to some pains to explain via the Wax Child itself how it knows things, yielding lush and creative poetic prose. It also sets up the “truth” that the supernatural is real, that the magic Christenze used to fashion the Wax Child worked. Works of her hands survived beyond her death and have greater power than the petty men who murdered an intelligent, life-loving woman. Interestingly, though the wax child is a creation of sorcery, supernatural and an object, it should be the least reliable narrator, yet its poignant, lyrical voice tends to make the reader feel as though it could not lie, and has nothing to gain, thereby making them the most reliable narrator.
At times, the Wax Child seems like a child, seeking mother and or nurture. At other points, it speaks about Christenze like a spurned or unrequited lover. Almost every word and phrase of the tale is beautiful, affecting. At times, it spirals into curlicues of embellishment. The frequent mentions of foliage and plants makes me think of an embroidered runner or an illuminated manuscript. Standout phrases like “It is the third of May, 1621, the hawthorn is blossomed, the alder buckthorn tree and the purging buckthorn tree are blossomed, and all the white trumpeting flowers cast their mouths towards the bay” elevate the work. In counterpoint, the language is also often frank and lean, perhaps even clinical. How else could an object describe the misdeeds of men, but with detach?
There isn’t a lot to the plot of The Wax Child. Some women who gathered and gossiped and quarrelled and communed together were subsequently targeted and tried and executed. There are no surprises as to their fate and there is no effort to whitewash or idealize the women as being staunch pillars of their community/doting mothers etcetera. Christenze is of course the most suspect of all who know her because she chooses not to marry and values her freedom. We can surmise that such women have been the cause of consternation for many societies through time, and have frequently paid the price for their individualism with their lives.
Men are not… great in this story. They are largely absent, or buffoonish or cruel. Or, as a damning passage points out, concerned with chilling realities:
“Ale for the executioner, two nights: 2 marks. Reasonable, by any account, they say. Wait, there is more, they say: For five barrels of tar: 5 marks. A ladder for the girl: 20 shillings. For the executioner for putting her to her death: 9 daler. Payment to a man for assisting in her nighttime capture: 4 daler, they say. No paltry sum, they say.”
This was one of many aspects of the book I appreciated. It brought to mind the ledgers of the SS detailing the spoils of the Holocaust, or their tallies which showed the Reich was running out of money to buy enough bullets to execute individuals. With this passage, in The Wax Child, I believe Ravn has perfectly distilled utter evil.
I find the stylistic choice of refusing quotation marks and even carriage returns interesting, if challenging. Standard quotations belong increasingly to antiquated works or the world of mass market novels, perhaps as a way to set a literary work apart from mass market pieces. I can find it intrusive, at times confusing and don’t experience any added “intimacy” with dialog when it is stripped of quotation marks, as some argue. I am in the camp of making reading as clean and straightforward as possible to deliver story neatly to the reader. Because Ravn’s work is daring in its choice of narrator and approach, the stylistic choice isn’t prohibitively jarring. Content over form will always my choice. I’m all for being violent and original in one’s art and regular and orderly in one’s prose layout, to paraphrase Flaubert. Ravn earns violence in stylistic layout with the violence and daring in her overall piece.
The Wax Child meditates on themes of the seasons, the fleeting life of plants, and the frank, unblinking gaze on all creatures, foxes, and their prey among them, that live brief lives in this world.
By using the distant voice of the unspeaking Wax Child, relating the longings it should not have since it has no soul or heart or quickness, we are invited to think that those who justify killing women for their otherness or refusal to conform are godless and that there is some spirit moving through the hair and bones and nails of the soil. Some other, ineffable…. something. A something that makes a life cut short thanks to ignorance and intolerance, nevertheless lyric and meaningful.
About the Author
OLGA RAVN is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary authors. She is also a poet, a literary critic, and an editor. Her novel The Employees was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and longlisted for the National Book Awards and the Dublin Literary Award. It has been published in twenty-five territories, and film rights have been sold. Her novel My Work won the Politikens Literature Prize and led to changes in Denmark’s maternity laws. It was published in English in 2023 to great critical acclaim. Ravn’s work has also been published in the New Yorker, Granta, andThe Paris Review. Her latest novel, The Wax Child, based on a series of real witch trials from the 17th century, was published in Denmark in September 2023.
MARTIN AITKEN has translated the work of contemporary Scandinavian writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He was a finalist at the US National Book Awards 2018 and received the PEN America Translation Prize 2019 for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love. His translation of Olga Ravn’s The Employees was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. Aitken lives in Denmark.
About the Reviewer
Emily A. Weedon is the CSA award–winning screenwriter of Chateau Laurier and Red Ketchup, and the author of the epic dystopia Autokrator. She played Lucy in two separate productions of Dracula, and growing up probably checked out Dracula and other vampire books more than anyone else in the Coe Hill library, so it was inevitable that she would write a novel about vampires. Hemo Sapiens is her second novel. She lives in Toronto.
Book Details
Publisher : Book*hug Press
Publication date : Sept. 30 2025
Language : English
Print length : 224 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771669721
ISBN-13 : 978-1771669726