The Burning Bush

Paul Selmer #2

by Sigrid Undset

{ 15.34 x 23.59 cms} Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden Leaf Printing on round Spine (extra customization on request like complete leather, Golden Screen printing in Front, Color Leather, Colored book etc.) Reprinted in 2017 with the help of original edition published long back [1932]. This book is printed in black & white, sewing binding for longer life, printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents. As these are old books, we processed each page manually and make them readable but in some cases some pages which are blur or missing or black spots. If it is multi volume set, then it is only single volume, if you wish to order a specific or all the volumes you may contact us. We expect that you will understand our compulsion in these books. We found this book important for the readers who want to know more about our old treasure so we brought it back to the shelves. Hope you will like it and give your comments and suggestions. - English, Pages 481. EXTRA 10 DAYS APART FROM THE NORMAL SHIPPING PERIOD WILL BE REQUIRED FOR LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. COMPLETE LEATHER WILL COST YOU EXTRA US$ 25 APART FROM THE LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. {FOLIO EDITION IS ALSO AVAILABLE.} Complete The Burning Bush 1932 Sigrid Undset

Genres: Fiction, Scandinavian Literature, Literature, Historical Fiction

473 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Sigrid Undset was a Norwegian novelist whose powerful, psychologically rich works made her one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century. Best known for her medieval sagas Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928 for her vivid portrayals of life in the Middle Ages, written with remarkable historical detail and emotional depth.

Born in Denmark to Norwegian parents, Undset spent most of her life in Norway. After her father's early death, she had to forgo formal education and worked as a secretary while writing in her spare time. Her debut novel Fru Marta Oulie (1907) shocked readers with its opening confession of adultery and established her bold, realist style. In early works like ,i>Jenny (1911), she explored modern women's struggles with love, freedom, and morality, often critiquing romantic idealism and social expectations.

Though she gained recognition for her contemporary novels, Undset felt increasingly drawn to historical fiction. This shift led to her masterwork Kristin Lavransdatter, a trilogy published from 1920 to 1922, which follows the life of a woman in 14th-century Norway as she navigates love, faith, motherhood, and spiritual growth. With its intricate character development and deep moral themes, the trilogy brought her international acclaim and remains a cornerstone of Scandinavian literature.

In 1924, Undset converted to Roman Catholicism, a profound personal decision that shaped her later writing. Her tetralogy,i>The Master of Hestviken (1925–1927) centers on a man burdened by unconfessed guilt, offering a deeply spiritual and psychological portrait of sin and redemption. Her Catholic faith and concern with ethical questions became central to her work and public life.

A vocal critic of both communism and fascism, Undset fled Norway after the Nazi invasion in 1940. Her books were banned by the occupying regime, and she lived in exile in the United States during the war, advocating for Norway and the Allied cause. The loss of her son in the war deeply affected her, and although she returned home after the war, she published little in her final years.

Undset’s legacy rests not only on her historical novels but also on her fearless exploration of conscience, duty, and the human condition. Her characters—especially her women—are fully realized, flawed, and emotionally complex. Her writing combines psychological insight with stylistic clarity and spiritual depth, making her work enduringly relevant and widely read.

Reviews

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work was meant to be read following her earlier book The Wild Orchid, as a continuation of the story of Paul Selmer. I think these must have been intensely personal books for Undset, for she, like her character Selmer, was a convert to the Catholic faith. A non-Catholic may find the books difficult reading, in spite of Undset's unmatched literary power, because of the grappling of Selmer's soul with the philosophical and theological arguments for faith, as well as his growth in that faith through suffering and temptation. A cradle Catholic might at times find it all a bit tedious. But as a convert reading these beautiful books, I found it all moving and quite, quite true.

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

ENGLISH: Second part to Undset's The Wild Orchid, starting where the other book left the plot. Actually these two books make a single novel in two volumes and five parts, in the same way that The Lord of the Rings is a single novel in three volumes and six parts. It makes no sense to read one of these two novels without the other. My rate for the full novel is 3,5 stars, therefore I have given 3 stars to the first part and 4 to the second, but my actual rating for both is the average.

The following quote is very apposite today and especially in Spain: when a people forgets its heroes or tries to depreciate them, instead of showing them honor and gratitude, it condemns itself to insignificance and cowardice and loses the instinct to defend itself against all that is inimical and alien to its nature.

Another quote i liked: An eternal life which is anything but uninterrupted insight into God-is hell, as one must discover sooner or later.

ESPAÑOL: Segunda parte de The Wild Orchid de Undset, cuya trama comienza donde la dejó el otro libro. En realidad estos dos libros forman una única novela en dos tomos y cinco partes, del mismo modo que El señor de los anillos es una sola novela en tres tomos y seis partes. No tiene sentido leer una de estas dos novelas sin la otra. Mi calificación para la novela completa es de 3,5 estrellas. Por eso le he dado 3 estrellas a la primera parte y 4 a la segunda, pero mi calificación para ambas es la media.

La siguiente cita es muy oportuna hoy, especialmente en España: Cuando un pueblo se olvida de sus héroes o trata de menospreciarlos, en lugar de ofrecerles honor y gratitud, se condena a la insignificancia y a la cobardía y pierde el instinto de defenderse de todo lo que es hostil y ajeno a su naturaleza.

Otra cita que me ha gustado: Una vida eterna que no sea una visión ininterrumpida de Dios, es el infierno, como hay que descubrir tarde o temprano.

[LeeAnn Balbirona · Rating 5 out of 5]

As good as Kristin Lavransdatter for telling many stories and showing the moral development of a basically good person who makes just a few compromises that end up making a disastrous life. Set in the early 1900s (and written in 1930), Paul Selmer is a hero who struggles as a convert to Catholicism, a minority sect in Norway. He struggles in his unhappy marriage to love his difficult wife and accept his faults as a husband. He struggles to maintain friendships and family ties in a time of rapidly crumbling morals and the obvious devastation caused by divorce and infidelity. He struggles as a parent to raise his children in a faith he is also learning. Great drama, social commentary, historical setting, and realistic depiction of internal suffering and spiritual growth. Recommended.

The Wild Orchid and The Burning Bush were later published in one volume and called The Winding Road.

[Teaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best fictional conversion stories I've ever read.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beginning a few years after the end of The Wild Orchid, this novel follows Paul Selmer and his wife as they struggle first through the last year of World War One, and finally with difficulties in their relationship that had been, in minute forms, present from the beginning. Having become a Catholic at the beginning of The Burning Bush, Paul finds that his new faith does not make life happier or easier (though it does make it more satisfying and meaningful), but rather more difficult as he gradually discovers his true self and the forces behind some of his choices, both in the past and in his married life. His only consolation, besides his faith, is his two children: a bright and sweet daughter and a quiet yet thoughtful son. Toward the end of the novel, the story quickens as a central figure from Paul's youth suddenly reappears, and the explanation behind the surprising climax of The Wild Orchid is finally revealed. This reappearance culminates in a desperate act of violence almost at the very end of the novel.

It's not really possible to say much more than this without giving away major developments in both this book and the preceding one. Suffice it to say that Undset's writing, clear and piercing as always, carries the reader off into the middle of the twentieth century in Norway, into a man's struggle to save his family from the vicissitudes of human nature, and to unite his soul with truth and charity. Despite the dust jacket's description, Paul's newfound Catholicism actually plays a larger role in the novel than in the previous book, and nearly every chapter is filled with its strange, brilliant quality: the hidden beauty that is found in the shabby, the dreary, and the subtly complex.

These are some of Undset's greatest strengths: in depicting characters and their emotions and motivations, often hidden even from the characters themselves, in an honest, and thorough way, not afraid to delve into the hidden cracks in human thought, desire and action. Though not as beautiful, as compelling or as memorable as her medieval masterpieces (Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken), this "Winding Road" series is just as human, just as keen and piercing, and just as much a work of literary art.

[Asunción · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read both books, one after the other, The Wild Orchid and then this one, as in fact they are a single book.
I have liked both, although I found the second part of the first volume too long.
I found quite interesting the path towards Paul's conversion, and also learning about Norway at the beginning of the 20th century, their ways, and how they hated Catholicism, because they didn't understand it, and how the characters changed their mind when they saw the way Paul acted.

[Mariangel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the continuation of "The wild orchid", and I liked it much better than the first, although the two books cannot be separated. The story of Paul, his wife and his children kept me very so engaged that I finished it in 4 days. Some events of the first book are explained in this one. We see the story through Paul's thoughts; I was a bit impatient with how Paul looks down on his wife, as it gets repetitive, but he eventually realizes it too. His thoughts on God, present throughout the book, I found particularly well expressed. Sunny's character and development I liked very much.

[Brideshead · Rating 4 out of 5]

La novela te va enganchando conforme avanzas. Sobre todo por el personaje principal, Paul Selmer, en su búsqueda de la verdad que le conduce al catolicismo. Es un hombre recto, honrado, consecuente que sabe hacer frente al dolor, a la decepción, a la traición con una gran altura de miras que se alimenta de su fe recién adquirida.
Libro profundo, emotivo, que te plantea grandes cuestiones.

[Drew Norwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Winding Road, of which this book forms the second and final part, is one of the most edifying novels I’ve read. And I mean ‘edifying’ in the highest, the Pauline, sense of the term (with 'edify' meaning to build up or “to promote growth in Christian wisdom, affection, grace, virtue, holiness, blessedness”).

The story doesn’t have the scope or grandeur of Kristin Lavrandatter but it is even better than Kristin in some ways. There are many marvelous passages that I hope to remember:

On God's humility and incarnation: "God could have forced men to walk in His ways as obediently as the stars. But He enters the world of men, clad in the old habiliments of Adam, and lays aside His omnipotence at the door. The thought took his breath away. It was as though he could see it: the contrast between a universe moving in constant rhythms according to eternal laws and the everlasting lawless tumult of human wills; it was a kind of vision--a glimpse of omnipotence ruling the cosmos and going about begging in the throng of human souls, a beggar who asked to be allowed to give and to deal out some of the mysterious wealth of his own being."

On the eternity of the soul: "Even her little pink and white doll's face was only a mask that concealed the image of God in her. Buried under a whole mountain of ideas which she had received as presents from her mother and her relations and friends lay a soul which was to live its life when all the stars are burnt out. Like a costly pearl at the bottom of a trunk of old clothes--though perhaps she herself could not see that the pearl was any more than a smart button on her old cast-off confirmation frock."

On God's pursuit of rebellious man: "But the thing was that the other [the priest] sat there believing that he, Paul Selmer, had an immortal soul which [his] lord and master had created. And as his soul had done the same as all other souls, run away from its home and lost itself in trackless wastes, its creator had followed it down upon earth in order to save it, had redeemed it from captivity at a price which human thought it utterly unable to grasp."

On our eternal rebellion from God: "He thought he could never have seen till now what was implied in the eternal rebellion against God. It was not men's everlasting protest, renewed a thousand times daily, against man proposing and God disposing. He now looked down into the very foundation which lay below this--we wish to be rid of God, we refuse to hear anything of one who has created us. We claim to know nothing and to be able to exercise our imagination freely concerning the unknown island in space on which we are stranded; we have come to a no man's land form no one knows where, and no one knows that we are here. We wish to ask, but not to receive an answer, to invent and to believe that as we invent, so shall it be. It will be hell; hell is where God is not. So hell must exists, God's mercy must acquiesce in the provision of an asylum for such as desire to remain for all eternity outside all order and without God above them, sufficient to themselves forever and ever. It would certainly be a place that would beat all the hell-fire preachers could picture--a place where every man will become what he must when he is allowed to follow his own line to the very end."

On a society forgetting God: "And all the time the real reality has been at our side, glorious and terrible. All men have known and believed this in all times, clearly or vaguely--excepting us post-Christian heathens. Is it because our incredulity is something we have chosen deliberately--rejecting the reality, the Word which commanded that all the things we see should have being, when the Word was made flesh to dwell among men? To scare away reality, to bury ourselves well down in our dreams, to kill him who tries to wake us, no doubt we are all tempted to do this. Is this what is meant by all that is said in the gospel about our being children of darkness, abhorring the light?"

On the treason of autonomy: "Till now he had nothing but his own conscience to go by. Though in a way he had always felt it was something like treason to claim autonomy for it--only he could not tell against whom it might be treason. It was true he had seen that the people who declared that the judgment of a perosn's own conscience was all that mattered were as a rule decent folk who kept to current moral ideas--expect that they might find it rather hard to keep strictly to them when a threat of bankruptcy or a new love affair tempted them to turn into a side track for once."

On deliverance from happiness: "O God--to think that one must not only pray God to preserve one's children from misfortune, from all the terrible things one does not know, but just as much that they may be saved from the happiness one does know."

On discovering our impotence and neediness: "He thought of his own children. To be sure, he would wish them to find out their own impotence by measuring themselves against God's perfection and not by discovery what it meant to yield to temptation. . . But if the worst came to the worst it was better that they should be taught their own shortcomings . . . than that they should become so easily satisfied that they were content to be simply themselves."

On God's dying even for the unreflective person: "That she had a soul that was worth God's dying to save it--he was indeed compelled to admit to himself that he found that remarkable. That God might be willing to suffer and die in order to save thorough-going, notorious sinners--well, one can understand that in a way, since with the very notion of sin one associates such ideas with suffering, spiritual crippling, some kind of fracture of the spiritual skull. . . But people of that kind, who are so cheerful and contented precisely with their own limitations, who curl up snugly in their own ego like a cat in a basket--well, well, if God created people like that, then he knows all about them that passes the wit of man, and then they must be just as precious in his sight as any other souls. It is de fide to believe that."

On living in accord with natural laws: "Men cannot be contented when they are not allowed to live according to the laws of nature, even if they know nothing about the law they are breaking. And it is a law of nature that men must be formed in close relationship with those to whom they owe the very type of their being, and when they are grown up, their conditions must be such that they can be left alone as much as they need--"

On utilitarian morality: "Naturally it is dry moral to be industrious. And morality is an indispensable aid to the development of virtues in a metaphysical sense--power to desire absorption into God's universal scheme, courage to exalt oneself towards one's origin. If morality is reduced to being an end in itself--a system of convenience for this life merely--it very soon falls into corruption. Utilitarian morality always has a corpse-like smell."

On forgetting heroes: "The same rule must apply to the Kingdom of Heaven as to other kingdoms--when a people forgets its heroes or tries to depreciate them, instead of showing them honor and gratitude, it condemns itself to insignificance and cowardice and loses the instinct to defend itself against all that is inimical and alien to its nature."

On navel-gazing: "nor shall we find the divine by burrowing down into ourselves and feeling religious."

On the fearful love of God: "Probably all men know in their hearts that they are only created in order to let themselves be flooded by the love of God and to give back the little drop of it which they can take into themselves. But men are afraid of a love that passes all understanding and afraid of a lover who gives all--but the little He asks in return is all we can give. We try to flee from so unequal a conflict of love as that between the Creator and His creature, and still to preserve an illusion that we have realized the end for which we were created . . . Only to find out how small is the range of our power of loving and how slight the strain it can bear, when severed from its connection with God."

On Jesus' meekness: "'Jesus, gentle and meek of heart, fashion my heart after Thy hearty.' He prayed thus every day, of course, and meant it too. But evidently that was still a long way off. Especially as a man has first to learn what those two words, gentle and meek, really mean. For at any rate they do not mean anything passive, anything sanctimonious, but something electric, a dynamic force--otherwise they could not be said of the heart of Jesus--"

On revolution and order of society: "Either one had to hold with the existing state of society, sickening as it was in many ways, full of injustice and at the mercy of a development which determined its own mysterious way--or one must take part in pulling it down and building a new one on entirely different principles. Only there was noting in the new principles which made an offer to solve the fundamental difficulty, that human beings are human."

On the masses and leadership: "If the masses in a society are allowed to share in the governing and making decisions, the leaders must use all their cunning and blandishments to make the people think they are governing when they are really being led-and then there are no limits to the follies that are committed and the values that are wasted, And if the little minority of talented men has its way, four out of five of them will sacrifice the masses to their own aims--whether these be materialistic or idealistic."

On culture and mechanization: "[H]e no longer believed that culture must succumb to mechanization; mechanization can be subjected to culture in proportion as men become aware of the real hierarchy of things. Whether men look for their salvation to something of their own invention or subject themselves to it, is all the same; it is fetishism."

On human enterprise: "Every human enterprise ends worse than it began, but the world is always full of good beginnings."

On autonomy as the foundation of sin: "The very foundation of sin: I will be my own master. I will not hear of any indebtedness."

[Maurisa Mayerle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second book in Unset’s The Winding Road this was one of the best fictitious conversion stories I’ve ever read. It is a slow moving novel but so beautiful and poignant as Paul progresses in his attraction to Catholicism, to his conversion to the Faith, and then on to the complete submission of his egoism and will to God.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It was precisely that which was so terrible—that we never know: we choose to believe in another person, but we know all the time that it is hazardous to do so. Or we choose not to believe; but then we know that perhaps we are wronging a fellow-creature. Greater certainty than this can never be ours." (p.402 of 473 in this edition) Reading The Wild Orchid and this was like that some.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

This conclusion to the story begun in THE WILD ORCHID does a better job of pacing than the previous book but with the somewhat unsympathetic protagonist it's hard to get invested in the story. That said, the setting in modern Norway of the WWI era is neat, especially seeing how the Catholic Church existed in that country at that time. It's not quite BRIDESHEAD REVISITED but it has many similarities, so ymmv if you like that sort of thing.

[Evelyn Hernandez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly still processing this one. It dealt with a lot of pretty depressing themes but, in classic Undset style, felt very much like real life. Husband loved it though and Paul’s conversion story offered lots of hope. Plus Sunlife is the cutest, sweetest character. Recommend, but maybe not to everyone.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fictional story, and second installment of a Norwegian man’s convert journey to Catholicism. I couldn’t help but think and assume of what Paul thoughts and experienced was similar to what Sigrid Undset were in her conversion.

There were reflections on past life with mistress, his current marriage, his daily thoughts and irritation in little things. I felt I understood his character and personality.

At times the translation seems a little awkward, but the story is impressive one. Would I recommend it? To certain people, yes and especially to Catholic or Christian converts, because I think they would get the most out of it.

[Leif Harboe]

Spennende å være inne i hodet på konvertitt en Paul Selmer. Må si at jeg har oppdaget eller gjenoppdaget Sigrid Undset. Boka er en skikkelig pageturner, spesielt hvis man har sans for religiøse grublerier.
Sterke scener, f.eks. datterens sykeleie. Da måtte papirlommetørklet fram.😭

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are so many beautiful passages I want to copy into my commonplace book from this volume and The Wild Orchid, but right now, having just finished the book, all I can think is that Lucy is the Ann Veal of this series: