From Publishers Weekly
In these lesser-known stories by the Norwegian Nobel laureate, Hamsun explores familiar themes of spiritual hunger, youthful searching, madness, illness and death in turn-of-the-century Norway through protagonists whose experiences (and complaints) mirror his own. In the story "On Tour," the main character is "a traveling aesthete" named Hamsun who quips, "I'm a young genius with a name so unknown that as yet no advertising editor has spelled it correctly." Though he often dwells on his own character, Hamsun skillfully uses mannerisms to portray character generally. In another tale, for example, a crazy seafarer is made to seem more like a rodent than a man, "scurrying everywhere and sniffing with his sharp white nose while his gleaming little brown eyes . . . flew restlessly on ahead." Hamsun's forte, however, is blending romanticism andsince another 'with' later in sentence hard realism to evoke the mood of Norway's cold, "colorless" towns, with their varied classes of people--bourgeois ladies who "set the tone in all matters regarding class and taste," young swells in top hats who wander drunkenly through the streets at night, and the desperate poor who must pawn even their coats in winter.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This volume features nine rediscovered--and mostly slight--stories with notes by the Norwegian Nobel laureate, randomly published between 1884 and 1906. The typically rambling title story is an impressionistic piece on an audience's roaming the streets after a late-night show. There are autobiographical musings on compassion for the poor, Hamsun's life as a writer and lecturer, and travel. "Small Town Life" has a much-touted but tedious barbershop sequence. "Sin," though, is an effective rumination on evil as "simply to do wrong and fail to do good"; and "A Fragment of Life" is a powerful study of serious illness. But on the whole (to quote from the note to "Around Christmas"), Hamsun himself would "most certainly have vetoed the reprinting of such 'old nonsense.' " For specialized collections only.
- Kenneth Mintz, Hoboken P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Kenneth Mintz, Hoboken P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
