Wayfarers by Knut Hamsun

Workingman’s blues, Norwegian style

Wayfarers, a novel by Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, was published in 1927 (Norwegian title: Landstrykere). Be careful not to confuse this with another Hamsun book, Wanderers, or his novel A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings, part of his Wanderer trilogy. (Only the English titles are confusing, not the Norwegian titles). Wayfarers, on the other hand, is the first book in Hamsun’s August trilogy, the second and third books being August and The Road Leads On.

Edevart Andresen lives with his parents and siblings in Polden, the small Norwegian coastal village where he grew up. Like most men in his village, he makes his living primarily from fishing. Every winter the Polden men go on a fishing expedition to the Lofoten Islands and then return to dry their fish on the rocks of their hometown shore. One day, Edevart meets another young man, August, who has been away from Polden, traveling the world as a sailor, and has now returned. August, with his gold teeth and boastful talk, is frequently the object of ridicule from his neighbors. Edevart and August strike up a fast friendship. August is a big-idea man who’s always looking for a scheme to make a fast buck. He convinces Edevart to enter into various business enterprises with him. The two travel up and down the Norwegian coast like vagabonds, engaging in assorted occupations. Sometimes flush with cash and sometimes hard-up for a meal, the two traveling companions form a share-and-share-alike, what’s-mine-is-yours bond. The dynamic between the two is often comical, sometimes calling to mind the two tramps from Waiting for Godot. Though not much different in age, Edevart is still an inexperienced, naive young man while August is more a shrewd man-of-the-world. Edevart is still very much a “good boy,” but he begins to fall under the corrupting influence of August’s looser morals. Their relationship is not without conflict, and sometimes they separate for months, only to reunite for another adventure..

The story takes place in the late 1860s. Judging by the fickle fortunes of the characters in this book, Hamsun depicts a time of economic hardship in Norway. While much of Europe has transitioned into an industrial economy, the denizens of these small villages on the Norwegian coast still live a subsistence lifestyle not much changed from many generations past. No source of income, not even the fish, can be relied upon, so Edevart and August must turn to other avenues of income, including itinerant peddling, storekeeping, farming, and thievery, among others.

This novel meanders just as much as its two protagonists. The story often proceeds at a lackadaisical but pleasant pace. As you become involved with these characters, you are content to take life as it comes, just as they do. If there is a message to this story, it isn’t hammered home. This book is about the journey, not the destination. Hamsun considers the question of whether it is better to accept one’s lot in life and be whom one was born to be, or to venture afar, forge one’s own path, and try to determine one’s own destiny. This novel shows both the positive and negative aspects of wanderlust and vagrancy. Another issue that’s discussed is emigration to America. No doubt Hamsun saw many of his countrymen leave Norway for the United States during hard times. Here he questions the milk-and-honey, rags-to-riches image of America and asserts that crossing the Atlantic is no happily-ever-after panacea.

After completing this book, I was pleased to find out that it’s part of a trilogy. I enjoyed following the lives of these two men, and I look forward to catching up with Edevart and August in the second and third novels of the August series. Because these books were published late in Hamsun’s career, however, there are no English translations in the public domain, and paper copies of August are not cheap.   

The Lottery Ticket by Jules Verne

Foregone conclusions in Norway

The Lottery Ticket is a novel by Jules Verne published in 1886. It was also published in English translation under the alternate title of Ticket No. 9672. Like most of Verne’s fiction, this novel is one of his Voyages Extraordinaires, a series that consists of about 60 books. Although Verne is largely remembered today as a science fiction writer, the one element that really ties all of his work together is a love of travel, geography, and exploration. The Lottery Ticket is not science fiction but rather one of Verne’s geographical adventures. To be honest, however, there really isn’t even much adventure in this one.

The Lottery Ticket is set in the Telemark region of Southern Norway. The Hansen family, consisting of the widow Dame Hansen and her young-adult children Joel and Hulda, run an inn in the village of Dal near the Rjukan Falls, a popular tourist destination. Hulda is engaged to a fisherman named Ole Kamp, who is off on a commercial fishing voyage to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. The two young lovers’ wedding is set to take place when he returns. His ship, the Viking, however, misses its expected return date by over a month. The Hansens fear the vessel is lost at sea and Hulda may never see her betrothed again.

Like many a Verne novel, this one takes forever to get going. The story doesn’t really start until chapter 11 or 12 (out of 20). Everything prior to that is just getting acquainted with the characters and the setting. Through the daily lives of the Hansen family, Verne delivers a primer on Norwegian geography, culture, and scenery. Verne traveled to Norway in 1861, and I would assume many of the towns and sites mentioned here probably comprised his itinerary during that trip. He definitely visited the Rjukan Falls. The lottery ticket mentioned in the book’s title is really a ridiculous plot element that can only lead to a predictable conclusion. The novel would have been better without it. The one real opportunity for adventure in this novel is the search for Ole’s lost ship, but all of that happens “offstage.” The main characters are not involved in that manhunt, and the details are only relayed secondhand and after the fact.

Despite being utterly predictable, The Lottery Ticket is a pleasant enough read. The characters are likable, and the setting is inviting. There is a satisfaction that comes from watching the events unfold in their obvious manner. Verne provides enough of a travelogue of Norway to maintain one’s interest. Verne was very good at writing about the scientific and geographical aspects of his fiction. He was able to get readers excited about those subjects. When he describes an exotic locale, he typically gives you enough of an education to make you want to go and visit those places. When it came to putting plots together, however, Verne’s efforts were often clumsy and formulaic, by today’s standards anyway. There are exceptions, of course, such as the excellent Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Even given his faults, I still think Verne was a better storyteller than H. G. Wells. The Lottery Ticket is certainly not one of the more extraordinary voyages in Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, but like almost all of his books, it’s a satisfactorily fun ride nonetheless.

Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature by Thor Heyerdahl

Polynesian Walden

Norwegian explorer and author Thor Heyerdahl achieved fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s with his book and documentary film Kon-Tiki, about his voyage from South America to Polynesia on a primitive wooden raft. The Kon-Tiki expedition was not his first adventurous journey, however. As early as his teenage years, Heyerdahl had dreamed of escaping civilization to live a self-sufficient life in an unspoiled wilderness. He decided on Fatu-Hiva, an island in the Marquesas, as the ideal destination in which to live this dream of getting “back to nature.” Heyerdahl deliberately searched for a wife to share this vision, and he found one in Liv Coucheron-Torp. The day after their marriage in 1936, the couple sailed for the Marquesas, where they would be dropped on the shore with little more than the clothes on their backs. In 1938, Heyerdahl published in Norway an account of this unconventional honeymoon entitled Hunt for Paradise. After achieving worldwide fame from his later expeditions, he revised the account and published it in English in 1974 as Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature.

At the time, Fatu-Hiva was home to a few small coastal Indigenous communities and a handful of white men. The Heyerdahls ventured into the interior of the island to live a semi-isolated existence in the jungle. They relocated a few times to different locations around the island, where they built their own homes and mostly foraged for fruit and shellfish. Heyerdahl doesn’t just describe what they saw and did but also, much like Henry David Thoreau in Walden or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, philosophizes quite a bit about nature and man’s place in it. This includes much eloquent lamenting on environmental degradation. In this travelog, Heyerdahl’s account goes beyond the romantic stereotype of a South Pacific paradise and presents the realistic pros and cons of living on a tropical island.

It was here in the Marquesas that Heyerdahl first got the idea that Polynesians are descended from seafaring Peruvians, an theory he tested with his Kon-Tiki expedition. On Fatu-Hiva, the Heyerdahls encountered many Polynesian ruins and anthropological artifacts. Heyerdahl points out the stylistic similarities between the art of the Polynesians and Indigenous South Americans. He also discusses in much detail the migration or transplantation of plant and animal species between the Americas and Polynesia. He hypothesizes on which species were brought to Fatu-Hiva by white explorers and which preceded them (thus brought by ancient South American mariners). This theory of the American ancestry of Polynesians was controversial for its time, since most scientists believed that Polynesians were descended from mainland Asians who migrated Eastward. Today, Heyerdahl’s theory is considered racially problematic pseudoscience, and DNA evidence doesn’t support it. Nevertheless, when it comes to expedition narratives, Heyerdahl knows how to write a good book. For those who like exotic adventure, Kon-Tiki is an excellent read; Fatu-Hiva is merely good. For a better account of roughing it in the Marquesas, read Herman Melville’s Typee.

Given Heyerdahl’s background in zoology, I was disappointed that he didn’t write more about the wildlife of Fatu-Hiva. He focuses more attention on the human inhabitants of the island. Despite being far off the beaten path, Fatu-Hiva was not entirely uncivilized nor untouched by European influence. In fact, the greatest danger faced by the Heyerdahls is unexpected: Catholic islanders who persecute the couple for being Protestants. Heyerdahl readily admits that his experiment in getting “back to nature” was only partially successful because the negative aspects of human nature and modern civilization were to some degree inescapable. Nevertheless, his attempt at a tropical idyll is admirable and makes for an interesting read.

The Nordic Translation Series

Modern lit from Northern Europe
From 1965 to 1970, the University of Wisconsin Press published its Nordic Translation Series. This collection of books presented works of literature from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden in English translation, thereby introducing English-language readers to the modern authors of those nations. The books in this series include novels, short stories, drama, and memoir. Each book typically has an introduction by a university professor that provides a brief biography of the author and some explanation of the historical context behind the work. 

I believe 16 books were published in the series. Eleven of those books are now available for free download. The University of Wisconsin Press has released these translations as open access books. They can be found at the UW Libraries website. Old Books by Dead Guys has previously reviewed all eleven of those books, and presents an overview of the series below. Though not every book in the series is a masterpiece, each volume presents a welcome glimpse into a corner of the world often neglected by English-language readers. Scandinavian literature (a subset of Nordic) has enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years, mostly due to mystery novels and thrillers. The books listed below, however, represent some of the highbrow literary luminaries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who are revered in their native lands. Click on the titles below to read the full reviews.

Denmark 🇩🇰

We Murderers: A Play in Three Acts (1920) by Guðmundur Kamban (1.5 stars)
Kamban was born in Iceland. He moved to Denmark for college and remained in Copenhagen for most of his life, although he lived briefly in New York, London, and Berlin. His play We Murderers is set in New York. As a result, it doesn’t in any way come across as particularly Nordic or Scandinavian, which begs the question, why would anyone translate it for this series? Isn’t the purpose of this series to educate Americans about Nordic culture? Instead, this is a pedestrian marital melodrama involving a jealous husband and a wife with a straying eye. There is a touch of Eugene O’Neill in this, but it would be early-career O’Neill, as seen in such forgettable plays as Welded, Diff’rent, and The First Man. A century after it was first staged, this drama reads as rather pretentious and overly melodramatic.

Finland 🇫🇮

People in the Summer Night (1934) by Frans Eemil Sillanpää (4 stars)
Sillanpää won the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature, the only Finnish author so far to have done so. This novel paints a vivid portrait of a rural community in Finland. Comprised of 48 short chapters, the structure of the novel is more of a montage than a linear narrative. The story takes place almost entirely over the course of one summer night, when Finland is lit by the strange midnight twilight of Northern latitudes. A large ensemble cast of characters act out the intimate dramas that contribute to the collective history of this fictional rural community. Sillanpää’s style strikes a delicate and satisfying balance between pastoral romanticism and naturalist realism.

The Woodcarver and Death (1940) by Hagar Olsson (2.5 stars)
Olsson was a member of a minority Swedish population in Finland that produced its own body of literature in the Swedish language, of which this novel is an example. A quiet young woodcarver decides to leave his widowed mother’s home and make a pilgrimage to his birthplace. Obsessed with thoughts of death, the pointlessness of life, and the futility of religion, he hopes the journey might help him to discover some meaning to life. This book calls to mind some of the soul-searching wanderer novels of German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse, such as Siddhartha or Narcissus and Goldmund, but drearier and less interesting. This novel is a bit too contemplative and navel-gazing for my taste.

My Childhood by Toivo Pekkanen (4.5 stars)
Unlike most of the works in this series, which have a decidedly modernist style, this partial autobiography by Pekkanen is a straight-up work of old-school naturalism. For most of this narrative, Finland was under the rule of the Russian Empire, and Pekkanen was born in a coastal town near the Russian border. After his father dies of a stroke, Pekkanen and his mother struggle with poverty and hunger that only worsen with the coming of World War I and the Russian Revolution. This powerful and poignant memoir explores timeless and universal themes of coming-of-age through a story that is specific to its time an place. One learns quite a bit about Finnish history and Finnish life in the process. While there are harsh and brutal aspects to this story, it is also suffused with familial love and a resilient hope for the future.

Iceland 🇮🇸

Fire and Ice: Three Icelandic Plays (1915–1955) by Jóhann Sigurjónsson, Davið Stefánsson, and Agnar Þórðarson (3.5 stars)
This trio of Icelandic dramas highlights three important figures in the history of Icelandic theatre, and their works included here depict three distinct periods in Iceland’s history and literature. Sigurjónsson’s The Wish is a Faustian tale of a driven young man who dabbles in black magic. Stefánsson’s Golden Gate is a humorous Christian folktale about an old woman striving to get her recently deceased husband’s soul through the pearly gates of Heaven. Þórðarson’s Atoms and Madams is a modern political satire involving imperialism and resource extraction. Because of its tripartite structure and the editor’s informative introductions, Fire and Ice is one of the more successful books in the Nordic Translation Series at educating the reader about the history and literature of the nation in question.

Norway 🇳🇴

The Fourth Night Watch (1923) by Johan Falkberget (4 stars)
Falkberget, a very prolific author of historical novels, is highly respected in his home country. As a representative of the regionalist movement in Norwegian literature, his writing exhibits similar characteristics to authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope or Emile Zola. This novel is set in the mining region where Falkberget was born, and the story takes place around 1807, about the time Norway won its independence from Denmark and entered a war against Sweden. The plot involves a realistic depiction of forbidden love, as well as contrasting characters of different social classes. Although this is not a religious novel, it portrays the significant role that Christianity played in Norwegian society during this time period. The reader learns much about Norwegian history from reading this book.

The Great Cycle (1934) by Tarjei Vesaas (5 stars)
While literary critics often classify Vesaas as one of Norway’s groundbreaking modernists, The Great Cycle is pretty traditional stylistically and reads like a naturalistic depiction of Norwegian rural life in a bygone era. This is a coming-of-age story about a boy born and raised on an isolated farm in the rural countryside. As he grows into adolescence, he chafes at the idea of being forced to take over the family farm. While the Norwegian setting is made intimately real for the reader, the life events and the feelings they engender are universally human. Though understated and modest on the surface, this excellent novel delivers a deep and powerful reading experience. It reads like a kinder, gentler variation on Knut Hamsun’s masterpiece Growth of the Soil. I consider this the best book in the Nordic Translation Series.

Werewolf (1958) by Aksel Sandemose (3 stars)
Sandemose was born in Denmark and moved to Norway as an adult. The “werewolf” of the title is only a metaphor, similar to the wolf of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. The story involves a successful but alcoholic writer who periodically comes into contact with a love from his younger days, whom he seduced when she was half his age. There are also some references to the Nazi occupation during World War II, but most of the novel is really about the characters’ love lives and sex lives. This is a work of modernist literature that goes overboard with its modernism, obscuring the narrative with self-indulgent and ostentatious artiness. Sandemose doesn’t present the story in chronological order, and the lives of these characters are a puzzle that the reader has to piece together. This might have been a more compelling story if it weren’t so deliberately difficult and pretentious.

Sweden 🇸🇪

Kallocain (1940) by Karin Boye (4.5 stars)
Though best known as a poet, Boye also wrote five novels, including this science fiction story set in a dystopian future. The narrator, a scientist, describes a highly militaristic society subject to a draconian bureaucracy called the Worldstate. The citizens of this land live underground under heavy surveillance. Written during the rise of the Nazis and Stalin’s reign over the Soviet Union, this novel is a warning cry against totalitarian dictatorships and the military-industrial complex. Boye, however, emphasizes the personal over the political by investigating issues of human nature: the need for love, the fear of intimacy, the allure of conformity, the poison of jealousy, the paranoia of betrayal, and the reluctance to acknowledge or reveal one’s true self.

Bread of Love (1945) by Peder Sjögren (3 stars)
This novel takes place during the Finnish Continuation War of 1941 to 1944, a conflict that formed part of the Eastern Front of World War II. It is based on some of Sjögren’s own wartime experiences. The narrator is one of a troop of 20 soldiers holed up in underground burrows beneath the ice and snow, surrounded by mine fields. This novel would have been better had it been a relentlessly realistic novel of war, but instead Sjögren softens the blow with overly poetical prose, a fairy-tale romance, and suggestions of supernatural forces toying with the destinies of man, all of which diverts the narrative from reality into the realm of fable.

Rose of Jericho and Other Stories (1946–1949) by Tage Aurell (2.5 stars)
Aurell grew up in Värmland, a rather rustic area of Sweden. Much like America’s William Faulkner, however, he writes about rural and small-town life in an experimental, modernist style that would appeal more to
big-city and university intellectuals than to the simple country folk he depicts in his stories. In general, Aurell’s writing is too abstract for my taste. These stories are often frustrating in their deliberate obscurity, but about a third of the nine stories assembled here deliver a moving story with characters that the reader really grows to care about. Overall, however, the book didn’t teach me much about Swedish country life.

Additional Books in the Series
The following books were also published in the Nordic Translation Series, but they are not currently available in open access editions (probably due to copyright and permissions issues). Old Books by Dead Guys has not reviewed them.

Two Minutes of Silence by H. C. Branner (Denmark)
This collection of short stories appears to be out of print. Only used copies available.

World Light by Halldór Laxness (Iceland)
An English translation of this novel is currently available from the publisher Vintage.

The Black Cliffs by Gunnar Gunnarsson (Iceland)
Out of print (in English, at least). Look for used copies.

Havoc by Tom Kristensen (Denmark)
An English translation of this novel is currently available from New York Review of Books Classics.

Jørgen Stein by Jacob Paludan (Denmark)
Out of print (in English, at least). Look for used copies.

My Struggle, Volume 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Real life so real it’s boring

My Struggle is a six-volume autobiographical work by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. Volume 1 of the series was published in 2009. Although Knausgaard himself is the protagonist of My Struggle, and his real-life family figures largely in these books, it is unclear how much of the text is fact and how much fiction, which may explain why the books in this series are generally considered novels. When Volume 1 was released, it made a major splash in the literary world. As the edition I read states, “My Struggle has won countless international literary awards.” After reading Volume 1, however, it is difficult to see what the big deal is. Knausgaard is very skilled at documenting life with detailed verisimilitude. Such talent, however, doesn’t preclude his highly descriptive prose from meandering pointlessness.

Knausgaard and I are the same age, and his tales of adolescence read very similarly to my own. He drinks and smokes with his friends, avoids his parents, tries unsuccessfully to find sex and love, wastes his time romancing a girl who really isn’t interested, dreams of being a rock musician, and builds his identity around selected bands that he likes. A third of the book is this long, convoluted story about an underaged Knausgaard expending a great deal of effort to sneak beer to a New Year’s Eve party, a party which ends up being lame anyway. If Knausgaard’s intention is to elevate regular, mundane life to the realm of literature, then at least he got the mundane part right. It turns out that growing up in Norway in the 1980s wasn’t that much different from growing up in Wisconsin. I don’t need to read about this life; I lived it.

More interesting are Knausgaard’s philosophical thoughts on matters like marriage, fatherhood, and death. He and I share some common ground in our views on such subjects. Sometimes when you find an author who sees things the way you do, it can be a revelation. “There are other people in this world like me!” In this case, however, the familiarity is just boring. For instance, roughly half the book is devoted to the death of Knausgaard’s father, dealing with his grief, getting through the funeral, and so on. That is something that most middle-aged readers can identify with, having lived through such events with their own parents. Leading up to the funeral, however, did I really need to read Knausgaard’s quotidian impressions of an airport, what he ate for breakfast at his brother’s house, or a review of the bands they listened to on the car stereo? I guess all this accumulation of prosaic observations is supposed to create an atmosphere of real life, as if to emphasize the common humanity shared by “normal people” who put their pants on one leg at a time like everybody else, but it all just feels like a colossal waste of time. Not until half way through the book does anything happen that’s beyond ordinary, and even after that, I spent about three hours of my life reading about Knausgaard cleaning a house.

This is the second book I’ve read by Knausgaard, the first being his 2020 novel The Morning Star. On the basis of these two books, I surmise that Knausgaard’s strategy is to lull readers into a sleepy security by inundating them in the bland minutiae of everyday life, thereby magnifying the intensity of a few startling occurrences with which he intends to shock them toward the end of the book. The Morning Star ended in a vague, inconclusive termination. Likewise, at the very end of My Struggle, Volume 1, Knausgaard hints at some unusual aspects of his father’s death but then never delivers the secrets, thus pressuring the reader to purchase the next volume. Whether a marketing ploy or simply artsy pretention, such deliberately half-assed endings just feel like a cheat. I have already purchased Volume 2 of My Struggle, because it was on sale for a low price, but now I’m not so sure I want to spend my time on it.

The Fourth Night Watch by Johan Falkberget

Norwegian regional realism in a northern mining town

Norwegian author Johan Falkberget’s novel The Fourth Night Watch was originally published in 1923. The University of Wisconsin Press published an English translation in 1968 as part of its Nordic Translation Series. This admirable series introduced English-language audiences to many lesser-known Scandinavian authors. Several of the books in this series, including The Fourth Night Watch, are now available for free download at the University of Wisconsin Libraries website. Falkberget (1879-1967) was a very prolific author of historical novels and highly respected in his home country, but as far as I can tell, this may be the only one of his works that’s ever been translated into English.

This is one of the better books in the Nordic Translation Series. Many of the authors featured in that series are early modernist authors whose prose is somewhat experimental in nature. Falkberget, on the other hand, comes across as a pre-modern realist whose writing exhibits similar characteristics to authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope or Emile Zola. The introduction to The Fourth Night Watch states that Falkberget was part of a regionalist movement in Norwegian literature, in which writers outside of the urban capital wrote realist novels of their home districts (similar to the regional realist movement in America during the early 20th century). The Fourth Night Watch is set in the mining region of Røros, where Falkberget was born. The story begins in 1807, about the time Norway won its independence from Denmark and entered a war against Sweden.

Benjamin Sigismund has been appointed pastor in the town of Bergstaden, in the Røros mining district. He relocates his family from Christiania (later renamed Oslo), and they take up lodging in rather shabby rented rooms. At first, Sigismund and his wife are appalled by the drab rustic atmosphere of the town and its uncouth, working class inhabitants. Sigismund takes his calling as a man of the cloth seriously, however, and diligently sets out to save the souls of these northerners by reforming their godless ways. At first, the pastor plies his trade with a fair amount of vanity, pride, and self-righteousness, but the more time he spends in Røros the more he begins to see the country laborers as equals rather than inferiors. His position and his marriage are threatened, however, when he falls in love with Gunhild, a beautiful young married woman.

The forbidden love between Sigismund and Gunhild may sound like a familiar melodramatic trope, but here Falkberget handles the relationship realistically. The reader can identify with the feelings of unsatisfied longing, guilt, and loss that this romance engenders. Another important thread running throughout the book is Sigismund’s developing friendship with his sacristan, a blacksmith named Ole Korneliusen, or Ol-Kanalesa in the local dialect. These two characters, of differing upbringings and social classes, start out with an adversarial relationship but gradually begin to find common ground and develop a mutual admiration. Although this is not a religious novel, due to Sigismund’s profession, religion plays a major part in the story, similar to some of Balzac, Trollope, and Zola’s novels with clergyman protagonists. One of the reasons this novel is one of the more interesting entries in the Nordic Translation Series is that you really do learn a lot about Norwegian life, at least during this time period, unlike some of the more modern works in the series that are less specific in time and place. Those with an interest in Scandinavian literature and history will find The Fourth Night Watch a compelling read. Thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press for making such works available to English-language readers.  

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Victoria by Knut Hamsun

Love stinks in semi-feudal Norway

Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. He was a pioneering modernist whose style has been extremely influential in world literature. Norway basically disowned him when he became a Nazi sympathizer during World War II, but after a few decades it again became acceptable to appreciate his work. Hamsun’s novel Victoria was published in 1898. Though not one of his better-known works, Victoria has been adapted into film a half dozen times, more than any other of his novels.

Johannes is the son of a miller in a rural town on the coast of Norway. Nearby stands the Castle, where dwell the Master and his family. The Miller and his family are essentially servants to the Master. They not only mill the grain produced on the Master’s lands but also perform odd jobs when asked, such as rowing boating parties on an afternoon outing. As a youth, Johannes becomes playmates with the Master’s daughter Victoria, who is a few years his junior. Playing outdoors amid the idyllic landscape, Johannes and Victoria develop an innocent love for one another. When they grow into young adulthood, the two admit their love for one another. Victoria makes it clear, however, that she and Johannes are not of the same social class, and her father would never approve of a union between them.

As the years go by, the two go on with their lives while their love steadfastly simmers below the surface. This is not, however, simply a melodramatic tale of two saintly lovers pining away for one another. Victoria entertains other suitors and encourages Johannes to woo another woman. The unsatisfied longing between the two sometimes poisons their interactions, resulting in outbursts of resentment and hurtful exchanges. Victoria repeatedly makes it clear to Johannes that he is beneath her station, yet she unfairly resists letting him go completely and sometimes plays a cruel coquette. Though the novel begins as a very idyllic romance, it soon turns into an unconventional love story with a rather pessimistic view of love and fate.

Hamsun was a neo-Romanticist who rebelled against the trends of realism and naturalism that prevailed in world literature in the late-nineteenth century. He felt that modernism should aspire to more than just the relation of reality. Literature should delve into the psyche and soul as Romanticists had done before, but through the lens of modern philosophy and psychology. Here Hamsun accomplishes that through the use of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, literary techniques of which he was one of the world’s pioneers.

With its Castle and the Miller and so on, this novel has a very fairy-tale atmosphere to it, but I suspect it depicts the reality of Norway at a time when some vestiges of feudalism still existed in land ownership and social strata, particularly in rural areas. The psychological drama between the characters is anything but a fairy tale. Their behavior bears the authenticity of real relationships, which is what makes this story timelessly compelling more than a century later. Hamsun may have shunned realism, but I think there is still a naturalistic aspect to this novel in the way that the characters are shaped and restricted by their social environment and the class system of their time. All lit-crit terminology aside, I liked Hamsun’s delicate balance between romance and realism here, and more importantly he made me truly care about these characters and feel what they felt.  

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Werewolf by Aksel Sandemose

The private lives of postwar Norwegians

Aksel Sandemose was born in Denmark, where he began his writing career. At about the age of 30, he moved to Norway and continued his literary career there. He published books in both languages. His novel Werewolf (Varulven), published in 1958, is a distinctly Norwegian narrative. The English translation of this book was published in 1966 by the University of Wisconsin Press as part of their Nordic Translation Series. These books are available for free download at the website of the University of Wisconsin Libraries.

Erling Vik is a Norwegian writer and an alcoholic. The love of his life is Felicia, whom he first met in 1934. He took her virginity when she was 17, and he 34. This created a lifelong bond between them, though they often went their separate ways in life. He married another woman, was involved with many others, and had an illegitimate daughter with a prostitute. Felicia, likewise, had relationships with other men before marrying Jan and settling down at his farm named Venhaug. Now Felicia is in her early forties, and Erling in his late fifties. He is a frequent visitor to Venhaug, where he and Felicia carry on their sporadic love affair, with the approval of Jan. In addition, Felicia has essentially adopted Erling’s daughter Julie, who also resides at Venhaug. When the Nazis invaded Norway, Erling, Felicia, and Jan all had roles in the resistance movement. They all took a part in the “liquidation” (assassination) of Nazi collaborators and spent time in exile in Sweden. Now, years after the war, Felicia (with Jan’s blessing) encourages Erling to move to Venhaug. Erling, however, doesn’t know if he’s ready to settle down to such a permanent arrangement and give up his personal freedom.

It takes an awfully long time to figure all of that out. Sandemose doesn’t present the narrative in chronological order. Thus, the lives of these characters are a puzzle that the reader has to piece together. I see no good reason for this strategy, other than it’s the kind of thing that literary critics like and expect from modernist writers. It certainly doesn’t do the reader any favors, and seems a pretentious gimmick that actually hampers one’s understanding of the characters.

As one can tell from the synopsis above, this book is not about a werewolf. The werewolf here is metaphorical, much like the wolf of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. The way Sandemose haphazardly throws around the word “werewolf” in this novel results in a very ambiguous metaphor indeed. He seems to use the word as a euphemism for the personal demons that people face (particularly males), such as alcohol, insanity, a death wish, or a violent streak. At one point he seems to be using the word to describe the Nazis or those who sympathize with them.

At first I was drawn into the lives of these characters, but I really found myself losing interest at about the halfway point. Unlike the other books in the Nordic Translation Series, which are rather short, this novel is a long haul. One wishes there were more about the Nazi occupation and the characters’ resistance activities. Most of the book is concerned with the characters’ sex lives, but not in a graphic way, which might have been more interesting. Sandemose goes off into unnecessary digressions involving minor characters and treads water with dream sequences, strange pointless anecdotes, and quotations of poetry that don’t contribute much to the plot. The last ten percent of the book is actually very good, but one wishes the reader didn’t have to wade through so much needless excess to get there. Despite being published in 1958, Werewolf reads as if it might have been written within the past few years. One the one hand, it feels very contemporary in its open-minded liberalism, but on the other hand, it displays a propensity for self-indulgence common to many of today’s literary figures.

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The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard

A long, slow tease that ends with a bore

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of the most critically acclaimed authors in world literature in recent years. He became quite famous for his six-volume series of autobiographical novels entitled My Struggle (Min Kamp). His novel The Morning Star (Morgenstjernen), also received a heap of accolades upon its publication in 2020. This is my first experience with Knausgaard, so I can’t comment on My Struggle, but The Morning Star definitely left me feeling like maybe it doesn’t deserve all the awards it’s won.

The novel follows the lives of several Norwegian characters, each of whom narrates their own chapters in the first person. The story takes place in Western and Southern Norway over the course of two days. An abnormally large star unexpectedly appears in the sky. Scientists conjecture that it may be a new supernova or similar astronomical phenomena, but Knausgaard leads the reader to suspect there may be a more supernatural reason for the star’s sudden appearance. The star seems to have sparked strange behavior and abnormal activity among Norway’s wild animal populations, and some of the characters are troubled by unsettling hallucinations.

The bulk of the book is comprised of the characters describing their daily lives. Knausgaard does a great job of crafting compelling characters and painting authentic pictures of real life. I don’t believe there’s a single character in the book that I couldn’t identify with in some way. None of them are boring, and each individual’s psychology is believably rendered. They often express profound and provocative thoughts. In a typical chapter, you read about one character’s activities for a half hour to an hour. A minister performs a funeral service. A teenager throws a party in the hope of making friends. A jerk cheats on his wife. A caregiver performs her shift at a mental hospital. Then, on the last page, there’s a hint of something that belongs in a Stephen King novel. Then you move on to the next character. All the little bread crumbs of horror that Knausgaard drops at the end of each chapter don’t add up to much of a story. Thus, the book is mostly a series of disconnected scenes, admirably well-drawn, that never coalesce into anything resembling a plot. Many of the book’s chapters end in cliffhangers that are never followed up. That makes for the kind of ambiguity that literary critics praise as deep, but most readers will just find annoying.

Knausgaard makes a halfhearted attempt to tie things together in the last two chapters. The penultimate chapter is an overdone piece of supernatural fantasy that feels familiar and clichéd. The final chapter is written in the form of an essay, and spends a lot of its length lecturing the reader on ancient Greece. I enjoyed the character of Egil in his earlier chapter, where he really showed a unique way of looking at life and had some interesting things to say. In that last chapter, however, he bored the devil out of me.

The fragmentary, half-baked, and arbitrary style of the narrative was surely intentional on Knausgaard’s part, and may even be a savvy marketing ploy. The Morning Star feels incomplete, like it’s just begging for a sequel. Sure enough, Knausgaard published a sequel, The Wolves of Eternity, in 2021. A third novel in the series has since been published in Norway, and a fourth is on the way. Perhaps when all is said and done, the complete saga will be a masterpiece. This book does indeed deliver some beautiful passages of writing. On its own, however, The Morning Star leaves one feeling like they’ve been cheated out of a complete novel and left wanting more.

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The Mountains Wait by Theodor Broch

Life under the Nazis in a northern Norwegian town

This book came to my attention because it features pictures by Rockwell Kent, one of America’s great book illustrators. Finding the subject matter interesting, I decided to read it, and I’m glad I did. The Mountains Wait was written by Theodor Broch, a Norwegian lawyer and politician. In this memoir, published in 1942, Broch recounts Norway’s involuntary entry into World War II when the Nordic nation was invaded by the Nazis.

The book opens with Broch fleeing through the mountains trying to escape into neutral Sweden. He then flashes back ten years to when he first moved to the small, far northern city of Narvik a decade earlier. Narvik is a seaport town from which the iron ore of Swedish mines is shipped out to the world. Broch, raised and educated in Oslo, moved to Narvik following graduation from law school because his father, a military man, was stationed there. In the first few chapters of the book, Broch relates how he began practicing law, became a city councilman, and was then elected mayor of Narvik. As he gets to know the inhabitants of the remote community, the reader gets a glimpse into the peaceful and picturesque life of this small Norwegian town.

That all changes on April 9, 1940, when the Nazis invade Norway. Narvik is taken and occupied for its crucial seaport. The British launch a savage naval battle in the adjacent fjord, but it fails to win the town’s freedom. Soldiers from Norway, Britain, Poland, and even the French Foreign Legion are all engaged in combat in and around Narvik. As mayor of the town, Broch is required to meet with the Nazi commanding officers and cater to their demands. He provides a realistic glimpse at life under Nazi occupation. At times relations are reluctantly cordial between the Norwegians and their captors, but the residents of Narvik still covertly resist the Nazis at the risk of punishment by death. Because the Nazis claim the Nordics as their racial brethren, the overt atrocities of ethnic cleansing are not an issue, but the Nazis certainly do not behave themselves as gentleman combatants when they engage in all kinds of dirty tricks from donning Norwegian uniforms, hiding behind the red cross symbol, or using civilians as human shields. As time goes on and their hold on the town becomes less secure, the Nazis become more violent and abusive towards the Norwegians. Many citizens of Narvik are killed by bombing raids, and some by friendly fire, as their town is destroyed around them.

The title of the book refers to the fact that while Broch and many of his countrymen have fled to live in exile, he hopes that one day the Nazis will be driven from Norway, and his native land will once again welcome its children back to its beautiful snow-covered landscapes. A word that is used often in the text is “quisling,” denoting a traitor who collaborates with the enemy. This common noun was derived from the proper name of Vidkun Quisling, head of the Norwegian government under Nazi occupation, who briefly makes an appearance early in the book.

Kent’s illustrations for the book are excellent. He provides headpieces and tailpieces for each chapter. These are mostly lovely scenic views of the Narvik region. Only a few of the illustrations specifically depict views of war. Regardless of the art, however, readers with any connection to Norway or an interest in the second world war in Europe will find Broch’s historical memoir a compelling read.
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Illustrations by Rockwell Kent, from the book

The Great Cycle by Tarjei Vesaas

Coming of age in rural Norway

In the 1960s, the University of Wisconsin Press published its Nordic Translation Series, which introduced lesser-known works of Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, and Icelandic literature to English-language audiences. Eleven of the books from that series are now available to read online for free at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries website. One of these volumes is The Great Cycle by Tarjei Vesaas, originally published in Norway in 1934. Vesaas is widely considered one of Norway’s most important authors of the twentieth century. While critics often classify Vesaas as one of his nation’s groundbreaking modernists, The Great Cycle is pretty traditional stylistically and reads like a naturalistic depiction of Norwegian rural life in a bygone era.

Per Bufast, the protagonist, is six years old when the novel begins. He lives on an isolated farm in the Norwegian countryside with his mother, father, aunt, and little brother Botolv. As the eldest son in the family, Per is expected to take over the family farm when his father retires. At a very young age, Per overhears his father say that Per will live the rest of his days at Bufast. Once heard, this statement hangs over Per’s head like a death sentence. He rebels against this restriction of his personal freedom, though in a rather mild way. He decides that if he excels at his studies, his parents will have no choice but to send him to the seminary to train him for the priesthood, which he sees as his ticket off the farm.

The title of The Great Cycle can be interpreted in two ways. The first is the natural cycle of the seasons, as viewed through the age-old operations of a farm. The second is the cycle of human life consisting of, to put it bluntly, birth, school, work, and death, with each generation successively following upon the footsteps of the last. This same cycle (minus the school) also applies to the livestock on the Bufast farm as Per watches them live out the usefulness of their lives. The novel only covers Per’s life from ages six to twenty-six, but over the course of the book he learns much about death through family and friends. He also comes to an awareness of love and sex, though acquiring such knowledge is difficult when the sheer remoteness of his existence limits his prospective mates to the handful of farm girls his own age with whom he comes into contact. Per’s relationship with his only male friend is strained by the fact that both are attracted to the same girl. Apparently, the outward expression of emotion does not come naturally to the Nordic soul, creating distances between Per and those he loves that prove difficult to bridge. While the Norwegian setting is made intimately real for the reader, the life events and feelings they engender are universally human.

Though Per experiences his share of tragedy and anxiety, this is a quiet and introspective novel, without much overt turmoil. It reads like a kinder, gentler variation on Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil. Both books romanticize a turning away from civilized society to the primitivism of nature, but Vesaas’s nature is not as harsh and brutal as Hamsun’s. In fact, the Bufast farm is often so comforting it becomes an enticing trap that deceptively stifles lives. Appropriately, the language with which Vesaas tells the story often feels as confined and reticent as the setting and characters. His prose consists of stark imagery and curt phrasing that nonetheless evoke great natural beauty and psychological depth, each and every word carefully chosen with the skill of a master poet. Though understated and modest on the surface, this excellent novel delivers a deep and powerful reading experience. The Great Cycle has a sequel, published in 1835, entitled Women Call Home (Kvinnor ropar heim), though I don’t think it’s ever been translated into English. If not, it’s a shame, because reading The Great Cycle will leave you wanting to follow Per into the next stage of his life.
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Jenny by Sigrid Undset

Norwegian meet-the-parents nightmare
Winner of the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature, Norwegian author Sigrid Undset is best known for her trilogy about medieval Norway, Kristin Lavransdatter, which I have not yet read. I have an interest in the works of some of Undset’s contemporaries in Scandinavian literature and wanted to give one of her books a try. I settled on her 1911 novel Jenny simply because it was the easiest to get my hands on in English.

I must admit when I first started reading Jenny I absolutely hated it. The novel opens on a group of five Norwegian friends, all artists, who are living, studying, and working in Rome. These five annoying bohemian hipsters engage in extensive inane conversations on topics like buying jewelry, but mostly they verbosely psychoanalyze themselves and each other. Like a throwback to so many Victorian-era novels of all nations, the very mention of an ancient Roman bridge or fountain is supposed to lend depth to these tedious proceedings. Despite the fact that this is a novel about artists, very little of it is actually about art. Helge Gram, who has just arrived in Rome, is the naive, just-fell-off-the-turnip-truck newcomer to this social circle. He falls in love with another member of the group, Jenny Winge, and somehow convinces her to fall in love with him.

The novel improves considerably once the characters return to Norway. After their engagement, Jenny goes to meet Helge’s family at their home. She soon learns that Helge has a very domineering mother, of whom the rest of the family lives in fear, although if anyone should point that out Helge immediately rises to his mother’s defense. Helge’s father is a more sympathetic sort, and he also at one time harbored artistic inclinations, so on the basis of that common ground Jenny begins to spend time with him. Mr. Gram requests that Jenny not tell Mrs. Gram about their meetings, which really puts Jenny in an odd position of having to keep secrets from her future mother-in-law. The disturbing dynamic between Mr. Gram, Mrs. Gram, and Helge inspires second thoughts about her engagement as Jenny is repeatedly asked to construct a web of lies to tiptoe around each family member’s delicate feelings. This is just the beginning, however, as this uncomfortable meet-the-parents scenario escalates to unforeseen repercussions that challenge credibility.

As the story progresses, the reader becomes more intimately familiar with Jenny and more engaged in the life of this well-drawn character. Unfortunately, she is the only likeable character in a book where almost everyone is at least annoying and some are downright creepy. The story eventually morphs into a feminist narrative, examining gender roles and a woman’s right to live independently and determine her own fate, whether financial, romantic, or sexual. One wants to like the book for this reason, but it just gets so bogged down with overly lengthy philosophical discussions about love. The feminist subject matter deserves a more realistic telling, but the characters are too busy behaving like tragic heroes in an opera. Undset should be commended for handling touchy subject matter that was no doubt controversial for 1911, but the way it is handled will likely fail to satisfy the readers of a century later.

Given that much of Jenny is concerned with issues of womanhood, it is probable that a female reader might get more out of this novel than this male reader did. Ultimately the book delivers some quite memorable scenes, but the memories it leaves aren’t exactly fond ones.
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Look Back on Happiness by Knut Hamsun

This wanderer should have wandered further
Look Back on Happiness, a novel by Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, was originally published in 1912 under the Norwegian title Den sidste Glæde, and is also known in English as The Last Joy. Some critics place this novel as the third book in a “Wanderer Trilogy,” following Under the Autumn Star (1906) and A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings (1909), but I don’t know if Hamsun ever designated it as such. Though the three books are similar in style and subject matter, there’s no concrete evidence in the text that the narrator in this book is the same character who featured in those two earlier novels, and Hamsun wrote a lot of books with wandering protagonists.

Here the unnamed narrator, a writer in his early seventies, is successful enough and wealthy enough to live his life as he pleases. Though a man of means, he chooses to leave city life behind and live a nomadic existence in the country. When the novel opens, he is spending the winter in a primitive hut and living off the land like Henry David Thoreau in a Norwegian Walden. The solitude gives him time for philosophical reflection and gives Hamsun the opportunity to indulge in some truly beautiful nature writing. Like Thoreau, however, the narrator is not a total recluse, and he does occasionally entertain visitors in his humble abode. The novel thus becomes less about his life in nature and more about the people he encounters in his travels.

When Spring arrives, the wanderer walks to a farm that operates a country inn for tourists who come to enjoy the mountain scenery. Here he gets to know the staff and the guests and becomes intimately involved in their affairs. From this point, very early on, the narrative veers away from the narrator’s personal journey to focus on these other characters’ lives. This is very much in keeping with Under the Autumn Star and A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings, in that the narrator is almost more of a passive observer than a participant in the narrative. Even after he leaves this tourist retreat, he continues to coincidentally and unrealistically run into the inn’s guests wherever he roams. One woman in particular, a Miss Torsen, strikes his interest, and although he is too old for romantic involvement, he concerns himself in her affairs almost to the point of stalking her.

The picture Hamsun paints of this female character is not very flattering. At first she is depicted as a coquette who toys with men to boost her own self-esteem, though she does grow and become a more sympathetic character as the book goes on. As a schoolteacher, she is an educated woman, but the narrator denigrates her education, and Hamsun indicates that she can only find fulfillment through marriage and childbirth. Sexism should hardly be surprising in a century-old book, however, and Hamsun may just be espousing the joys of simpler family values, as his male narrator likewise represents an ignorance-is-bliss and back-to-nature attitude towards life. There is no doubt a fair amount of social and political commentary in the book that a Norwegian in 1912 might have found very insightful, but much of it was likely lost on this 21st-century reader. For example, one character goes off on an anti-Switzerland tirade that falls somewhere between good-natured ribbing and an international incident.

Look Back on Happiness is one of Hamsun’s less successful works. The fact that he so soon abandons the natural and nomadic aspects of the story in favor of a sort of modern novel of manners is a disappointment. He keeps the reader interested enough to want to move from one chapter to the next, but in the end one wonders what the point is and whether it was all just a waste of time.
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