Customer Reviews

Peer Gynt

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Often funny. Often bizarre. Always deep. Peer Gynt first appears to me as this self-centered youth who cares only for himself and the satisfaction of his impulses and whims at any cost. He is the quick non-thinker, who leaves a life of relative conventionality to roam as a dissolute wanderer. He is indeed all of these things, but all the while his "self" is not "centered". At the end of his adventures as a libertine, the grey-bearded Peer Gynt is at a cross-roads, and he asks the character of the Button Moulder this question: "What, after all, is this being one's self?" The Button Moulder replies that being one's self means slaying one's Self, and furthermore "observing the Master's intentions in all things." Peer Gynt contemplates this... restraint and delayed gratification have never been manageable themes with him. In my opinion, this whole idea of the search for the "self" is what Peer Gynt is all about. At the very final crossroads he is redeemed by the undeserved forgiveness and love of Solvieg, the woman he has once abandoned... this scene being a beautiful picture of the grace and love of God that is available to the Peer Gynt in every reader.

Ibsen originally wrote Peer Gynt as a poem, and therefore we lose the Norwegian rhyme and metre in any English translation. To compensate if at all possible, I suggest reading the play while listening to the incidental music of Edvard Grieg, specifically composed to accompany the live performance of Peer Gynt. (Note: My review is based on the translation by Peter Watts).

This version of Peer Gynt should be avoided at all costs. It is a copy that was made with robotic page turners and character recognition software that was marginal. The book is full of misspellings and punctuation errors. If you've never read Ibsen's Peer Gynt, this text is very difficult to follow,

The play is fine.

This printing of it, however, is absolutely terrible. Do not waste your money on it. I don't care how much cheaper it is than any of the others. This is completely unreadable. It appears to have been scanned from an 1908 edition of Peer Gynt. They OCR'ed it (Quite poorly I might add), then they print it on demand.

There are no stage directions. There is almost no punctuation in sentences (no commas, etc). There are numerous misspellings. It is nearly impossible to tell who is speaking as the names are misspelled, sometimes in all caps, sometimes not, sometimes indented. The Act and Scene divisions are almost nonexistent.

I read about 5 pages of it before I gave up and got a photocopied version from my teacher. Complete waste of money.

Peer Gynt is a piece of literature that, like Goethe's Faust Part II plays best on the stage of the imagination. It is too lengthy and costly to be performed on stage. Sometimes the first three acts are performed together, sometimes the last two acts are brought together to become a whole for a theatre production.

In terms of reading, this is a great fable piece. Peer is the Trickster with the mirror to his conscience. As a youth, he is Troll-like in his lusts, in his carousing. In his middle-age, he is Troll-like in his financial enterprises. At the end of his life, he is a folorn man, having given up possible true love to run around in search of his self. He is a fraud but we feel sympathy for him. He pursues life in search of distractions and power but ends up empty at the end, soon to be the vicim of the Button Moulder, soon to be nothing more than a button.

This work has many levels and open to numerous interpretations. Ideally, this is the book you read for a book club. There is nothing conventional about it. The conversations will be endless and the philosophy inspired, well, might be inspiring.

I ordered this play to read for a class in school.
Not only was this "robot generated" edition extremely difficult to read due to typos and random formatting inconsistencies, but portions of it were completely missing - for example 2 entire scenes in act 4.
I actually need to know what happens, and reading this version, I don't.
You get some kind of membership with it that means you can view this play, and other books, online, but if I'd wanted to read the play online, I would have done so with one of the free sites that offers complete verions of texts that are in the public domain.
Apparently, the "robot" technology saves on costs, and if it had cost me 2 or 3 dollars, I may have been more forgiving, but it was not, in my opinion, priced low enough to justify the extremely shabby quality.
If you need to read this play, or want to own it (it is a classic, and the story itself is worthwhile), FIND ANOTHER VERSION!

Peer Gynt is a sort of folk tale character who we see go from being a young man to an old man and who gets in several different adventures. The play doesn't have much of a plot exactly. It starts of in a Norwegian village where Peer is a buffoonish character. He leaves the village, meets up with Trolls, gets in a shipwreck, wanders around the desert, and runs into the button moulder. All of this just happens, disconnectedly. He spends time in America also, but we aren't shown that.

There is a lot of talk about being your self, being authentic, etc. If the play has a theme, I am guessing that's it.

It's completely different from Ibsen's realistic works like An Enemy of the People or The Wild Duck. I'm more a fan of those works. Peer Gynt didn't really speak to me.

On a side note, in the movie Educating Rita, with Michael Caine, Rita takes a test where one of the questions was 'What are some of the difficulties in staging Peer Gynt?' A: It's long. It's not in prose. It has trolls and other fantastical creatures. It has a huge cast many of whom are only on stage very briefly. The main character goes from being a youth to a very old man. The settings vary from a Norwegian village to Egypt and the Sphinx. This is why it's rarely done on stage.

Based on traditional Nordic legend Ibsen's version would make a better narrative than verse literary effort. Obviously all rhyme is lost in a prose translation, plus the story itself defies the Greek Unities of Time and Place. Scenes are set in Norway, the tropics and the desert--lest audiences be bored with mere snowy locales. Peer's story covers his wild, reckless youth through his cynical middle age, right up to his regretful old age. He interacts with humans, trolls and other-worldly characters as he vainly romps through life. Driven to clear his reputation and earn the respect of his skeptical, critical neighbors, he embarks on a lifelong journey to discover his true identity.

Possibly a cautionary tale PEER GYNT touches a human chord: the desire to improve oneself, to repay maternal care and to earn the love of a sweet, faithful maiden. Typical Nordic references include trafficking with trolls and the danger of getting a shard of glass or ice in one's eye, which distorts true vision and humanity. Despite the temptation Peer ultimately rejects trolldom in favor of maintaining his priceless human attributes.

This edition, photocopied by robot, proves difficult to read because of:
--lack of apostrophes in most contractions
--odd punctuation which disrupts the flow of reading
--inclusion of literary notes directly into the script, instead of placed as footnotes

In short: a confusing and disappointing version of an honored tale, which inspired composer Edvard Greig's PEER GYNT SUITE.

I like this version a lot - it's full of energy, and very exciting to see in person, which I was lucky enough to do. But it's NOT the Peer Gynt you might be familiar with, or the one you want to pick up if you're looking for a more standard translation. While this one is true to the story and the characters, there's a lot of updating and a lot of language that might offend people who don't like the kinds of words you can't say on radio and TV. It's more of an interpretation than a translation.

If you want a more standard version, I like this one.

This is the first version of the play. Beautiful writing, incredible fluidity of speech. A must have between Peter Pan and Samuel Beckett.

Few works of literature have inspired classical music that has broke into the popular press. One of these is Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Written in the late 19th century, Edvard Grieg wrote two Suites of music for the stageplay version of this Scandinavian classic a decade later. This poem / stageplay is actually a short novel, and tells the story of Peer Gynt, the ultimate ingrate of a son. Growing up raised by a single mother, he is the terror of his village, bullying younger ones and annoying older ones. Eventually he leaves his village and encounters a series of creatures and adventures bound to rattle anyone's cage. One memorable moment is when he finds himself in the Hall of the Mountain King, who happens to be a troll. This is the scene whose song of the same name by Grieg is a classic TV commercial tune. Life soon turns the young Peer into an older Peer. Near the end he reflects on his life with some characters he encounters. At this he realizes the waste his life has been. The moral of the story: don't waste your youth or any other moment of your life causing trouble for yourself or anyone else, for in the end you only isolate yourself and make life miserable for both you and those around you.