Family business in a Norwegian coastal town
Alexander Kielland is regarded as one of “The Four Greats” of 19th-century Norwegian literature. His first novel, Garman and Worse, was published in 1880. (This book should not be confused with another Kielland novel entitled Skipper Worse, published in 1882, which is a prequel to this novel.) Garman and Worse takes place in a small town on the coast of Norway. The title refers to the name of a shipping business founded by two families, the Garmans and the Worses. Of the two, the Garmans have the larger stake in the business and are the prominent wealthy family in the town. The novel is largely the saga of the Garman family, though the cast includes a variety of townspeople as supporting players. Richard Garman, the somewhat flighty black sheep of the family, has chosen to man the lighthouse at Bratvold while his brother Christian Frederick Garman, referred to as the young Consul, occupies the nearby family estate of Sandsgaard and acts as president of the family business. When Richard’s daughter Madeleine, who has grown up in rustic isolation at the lighthouse, reaches the age of womanhood, he sends her to Sandsgaard to live at her uncle’s house, where she can acquire the cultured manners necessary to enter society and field potential suitors.
The young Consul has three grown children of his own, and Kielland continues to add new characters in each chapter until the ensemble cast becomes vast and ungainly. I actually had to draw up family trees just to keep track of everyone. With so many intertwining plotlines, the reader wonders when one protagonist is going to rise above the others and become the protagonist of the novel. That never really happens, however, as Kielland constantly shifts perspective from one character to another and distributes the narrative equally among them. Kielland was a realist, and he depicts his fictional microcosm of society with an admirable complexity and authenticity. At times his writing is reminiscent of Emile Zola’s naturalistic novels in his attention to detail and psychological insight, but Kielland’s is a kinder, gentler, realism—less pessimistic, less cynical, and less preachy in its social criticism.
The affections of no less than four young women are at stake in the novel, which leads to much jockeying of position among various admirers: a schoolteacher, a businessman, a lawyer, a clergyman, a laborer, a fisherman, and others. Garman and Worse could therefore probably best be classified as a novel of manners, but Kielland’s concerns are broader than that. Early on, the book shows signs of becoming a novel of class conflict, but that thread disappears for many chapters, only to be recovered towards the end of the book. Though the plot contains few of what might be called exciting events, the reader gradually becomes intimately invested in the lives of these characters as each grows over time and learns his or her own moral lesson. As a study of human nature, Garman and Worse is quietly compelling.
I had previously read a collection of short stories by Kielland, entitled Tales of Two Countries, which is similar in style and quality to this novel. Compared to other Norwegian writers, Kielland’s writing is more realistic and less romantic than that of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, another of The Four Greats. Most readers of today would probably prefer a more modernist writer like Knut Hamsun, but those who enjoy classic realist literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries will find Kielland much to their liking.
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Norwegian lit with a French twist
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| Alexander Kielland |
In his native Norway, Alexander Kielland is considered one of the “Four Greats” of Norwegian literature, along with Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Henrik Ibsen, and Jonas Lie. I first encountered Kielland’s work in the Scandinavian volume of the Stories by Foreign Authors series, which includes his story “Two Friends.” After reading that great selection, I was hungry for more work from this intriguing author. Tales of Two Countries, a collection of ten stories by Kielland, was published in English translation in 1891. These works are among Kielland’s earliest writings and were originally published in Norwegian around 1880. The book’s introduction by H. H. Boyeson provides a brief career overview of Kielland’s writing, but I stopped reading it when it started spoiling the plots to all his novels.
The two countries referred to in the title are Norway—Kielland’s homeland and residence for most of his life—and France—where he lived briefly at the start of his writing career. One can definitely see the influence of French literature on Kielland’s work. Many of the pieces included here express a socially conscious concern with class disparity and the living conditions of the poor. The Francophile reader will spot the romantic influence of Victor Hugo in the revolutionary rhetoric of “Pharaoh,” the gritty naturalistic bluntness of Emile Zola in the squalid scenes of “At the Fair,” and the biting sarcasm of Honoré de Balzac as Kielland lampoons upper-class hypocrisy in “A Good Conscience.” Apart from the social commentary, the other half of the book consists of love stories, often told with a comic sensibility. Their brevity and lightheartedness, coupled with a keen, matter-of-fact insight into human relationships, calls to mind some of the short-short stories of François Coppée’s collection Ten Tales.
Brevity can also be a drawback, however, as these tales often end abruptly and leave the reader wanting more. In general the longest stories are also the strongest. The aforementioned “Two Friends,” set in Paris, is the best entry in the book. Charles is an introverted, unattractive man with a good head for business. His friend and business partner Alphonse is a good-looking, likable bloke who skates through life. When Charles becomes envious and resentful of his happy-go-lucky comrade, the two have a falling out and part ways. In “Romance and Reality,” a young couple ponders marriage, but the groom wants to wait until he’s more financially secure. After all their friends reassure them that love conquers all, these fools rush in, only to wake up too late to the realities of a hasty matrimony. For its time, this is a remarkably modern and frankly unromanticized look at marriage. Kielland even subtly builds a case for family planning. “The Parsonage” is an engaging and bittersweet tale about a minister’s daughter who has lived a sheltered life on her father’s rural Norwegian estate. When a party of young people stops at their home, she experiences her first taste of love. Another good selection, though further afield, is “The Peat Moor,” a story told from the point of view of a raven.
I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t find anything here of quite the same caliber as “Two Friends,” but overall this is still a strong showing by Kielland, and this collection certainly deserves to be read. The promise of these brief, early pieces makes me eager to see what Kielland can do with a full-length novel.
Stories in this collection
Pharaoh
The Parsonage
The Peat Moor
“Hope’s Clad in April Green”
At the Fair
Two Friends
A Good Conscience
Romance and Reality
Withered Leaves
The Battle of Waterloo
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Get some northern exposure
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| Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson |
This collection of Scandinavian short fiction was originally published in 1899 by Charles Scribner’s Sons as one of ten books in their Stories by Foreign Authors series, each volume of which focuses on a different nation or region of Europe. Most of the books in the series have been scanned and are now available for free online through sites like Project Gutenberg, Hathi Trust, and Amazon. Of the authors featured in this volume, the only name that’s likely to be recognizable to today’s English-language readers is that of Norwegian writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, simply because he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1903. After having previously read a mediocre novel by Bjørnson, I was pleasantly surprised by his two exceptional pieces in this collection. In fact, five of the six stories included in this volume are very good; only the final entry disappoints.
The book kicks off with a very brief piece by Bjørnson entitled “The Father.” It concisely encapsulates one father’s relationship with his son in an unconventional and touching way. “When Father Brought Home the Lamp” by Finnish author Juhani Aho is the best story in the book. When a rural family buys a brand new oil lamp, freeing them from the necessity of burning wood chips, it immediately elevates their social status within their rural village. At times it has the same tongue-in-cheek, warmly nostalgic flavor of the movie A Christmas Story. In “The Flying Mail” by Danish author M. Goldschmidt, a bachelor lawyer writes a love letter to his ideal dream girl and casts it to the wind, letting fate decide his romantic future. The rather whimsical premise stretches the boundaries of credibility, but still it’s an engaging piece. Bjørnson’s second offering, “The Railroad and the Churchyard,” is another very strong work. When two lifelong friends disagree over a matter of local politics, it brings years worth of envy and resentment boiling to the surface. “Two Friends” by Alexander Kielland deals with a similar falling out between two old friends and business partners. Though the author is Norwegian, the story takes place entirely in Paris.
The final piece in the book, entitled “Hopes,” is by Swedish author Frederika Bremer. It’s a stream-of-consciousness narrative from the point of view of a poor man with neither enough food to eat nor wood for a fire. He doesn’t mind his lifestyle all that much, until he begins to feel an uncontrollable longing to be loved. Bremer tries hard to be clever, but mostly it’s just a rambling string of unintelligible drivel. The stories in this book represent a period at which Scandinavian literature was making its transition into modernism. The first five stories all have a naturalistic style that’s reminiscent of the literature of French writer Emile Zola. The Bremer story, on the other hand, feels more modern than the rest, and suffers from the pointlessness of experimentation for experimentation’s sake. For a more successful attempt at the same style and subject matter, read Norwegian author Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger.
These days Scandinavian literature is undergoing a bit of a renaissance, thanks in large part to the murder mystery genre, but beyond Henrik Ibsen the classic authors of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland are still largely unfamiliar to English-language readers. This volume provides a good introduction to some worthy authors who deserve greater notoriety. Had they been born in France or Russia, perhaps they’d be household names. Based on the stories included here, Bjørnson, Aho, and Kielland definitely deserve further investigation.
Stories in this collection
The Father by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
When Father Brought Home the Lamp by Juhani Aho
The Flying Mail by M. Goldschmidt
The Railroad and the Churchyard by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
Two Friends by Alexander Kielland
Hopes by Frederika Bremer
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