Category — Fiction Books

The Emigrants (Utvandrarna) is an epic work of historical fiction. This beautifully written book of historical fiction was first published in the early nineteen fifties and met with rave reviews at the time.

The focus in The Emigrants is on the family, relatives, and friends of Karl Oscar Nilsson. Karl Oskar Nilsson grew up in Smaland, Sweden. He was a peasant farmer who unceasingly worked his farm, only to find that, no matter what he did, he could not progress and would continue to live on the cusp of total poverty. Seeing no other way out, he, as so many others from the Scandinavian countries, gathers up his family and friends in order to take the monumental step of making a fresh start by emigrating to the United States of America.

We witness first hand the set backs the Nilsson family encounters in Sweden, and learn to understand how they could be willing to take such a big and consequential decision. We learn, as well, to understand the Swedish social and religious mores of the time, and thus the impact that they have on people.

Karl Oskar finds himself leading a band of likeminded people, all leaving for different reasons and with different expectations. This is the story of their experiences in Sweden, and their dangerous crossing aboard an overcrowded schooner.

The Emigrants is the story of the first leg of their journey: Their lives in Sweden, the motives for the huge decision they each made, and their tough sea voyage across the Atlantic. It is a book about hardship and struggle, and it is a great work of historical fiction. Vilhelm Moberg did considerable research into the subject and the result sheds important light on the exodus from Scandinavia in general and Sweden in particular.

See more reviews of books by Vilhelm Moberg at scandinavianbooks.com

You can  order Vilhelm Moberg’s books from amazon UK (the pictures of the books link to amazon US): The Emigrants (Emigrant Novels), Unto a Good Land (The Emigrants, Book 2), The Settlers (Emigrant Novels) and The Last Letter Home (Emigrant Novels).
Also, amazon UK carries A History of the Swedish People: From Prehistory to the Renaissance v. 1 and A History of the Swedish People: From Renaissance to Revolution v. 2.

Linn Ullmann’s most recent book, A Blessed Child, was reviewed in the New York Times Sunday Book Review today! This is, of course, a great honor. Linn Ullmann is a very talented writer, improving from book to book, and I was very pleased to see her book reviewed.

New York Times writes that

Her mother is the actress Liv Ullmann and her father the writer and director Ingmar Bergman, who fathered nine children by six different women. Ullmann is the youngest of that brood: a fairy-tale position if ever there was one, the great man’s last baby, daughter of his wildly talented, gorgeous and ferociously intelligent muse. One admires Linn Ullmann — a lot — for surviving such a powerful and intoxicating legacy with such a strong artistic drive.

The review is positive and very interesting!

Brand is the drama of absolute intransigence in support of the religious life as opposed to the hedonistic one. The motto of Brand, the main character, is “All or nothing”. He is a strong person, a very stubborn Norwegian, and he does not admit compromises nor expedients, but goes directly to his goal, over-riding affections, memories and traditions. The conventional God is a God too spineless for Brand, a God weak and antiquated, a God who contents himself with fragments of human hearts, and who finds it sufficient that man, fortified by the Christian doctrine of redemption, offers Him homage every seven days.

Upon this petty and what he views as a vulgar concepcion of religion, the young Norwegian pastor declares war to the death. Better, according to Brand, to live in utter impiety, better to live like a libertine than to accommodate oneself to the practice of such a false and lying life. “Either everything or nothing.”

Thus Henrik Ibsen lets Brand struggle with and live out the dilemmas laid out by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in Either/Or (see Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (Penguin Classics)). And to some extent Brand may be viewed as Ibsen’s reply to, and partly also refutation of, Kierkegaard.

If there is a God, one should dedicate oneself to him completely, without dissimulation and without defections. In conformance to this ambitious ideal of his, Brand refuses to leave his parish although the climate threatens the life of his wife and child and later they die; and he also denies the sacrament to his aged dying mother, because she will not consent to give away all her riches. Contrary to Zarathustra, who from the mountain descends into the valley to be among men, Brand painfully climbs to the summit in order to be nearer to his God. But an avanche descends upon him. Dying Brand asks of the Eternal if the littlie grain of human will has any weight in the scale of redemption.

In the midst of the crash of the avalanche the answer comes to him: “God is love!” With such an answer the tragic Norwegian arrives at a more humane and generous conclusion than the philosopher Kierkegaard, whose life has some points of similarity with that of the cleric Brand. This is a wonderful play and a great, thought-provoking reading.

See also our Henrik Ibsen pages at ScandinavianBooks.com!

See also: George Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism (Dover Books on Literature and Drama), James McFarlane’s The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen (Cambridge Companions to Literature), and Toril Moi’s excellent Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy.

The most popular Scandinavian fiction books at amazon.com (May, 2008):

1. Kristin Lavransdatter (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Sigrid Undset (Author), Tiina Nunnally (Editor, Translator), Brad Leithauser (Introduction)

2. Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (Perennial Classics) by Ole Edvart Rolvaag (Author)

3. The Return: An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) by Hakan Nesser (Author)

4. Four Major Plays: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder (Oxford World’s Classics) by Henrik Ibsen (Author), James McFarlane (Introduction, Translator), Jens Arup (Translator)

5. Four Great Plays of Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder (Enriched Classics Series) by Henrik Ibsen (Author)

6. Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg (Author)

7. Hunger: A Novel by Knut Hamsun (Author), Paul Auster (Introduction), Robert Bly (Translator)

8. Unspoken: A Mystery (Inspector Anders Knutas Mysteries) by Mari Jungstedt (Author), Tiina Nunnally (Translator)

9. An Enemy of the People; The Wild Duck; Rosmersholm (Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University Press).) by Henrik Ibsen (Author), James McFarlane (Translator)

10. Growth of the Soil (Penguin Classics) by Knut Hamsun (Author), Brad Leithauser (Introduction), Sverre Lyngstad (Translator)

(Translated by Arthur G. Chater.New : York: Knopf, 1936. New translation by Tiina Nanally.) (Norwegian title: Fortællingen om Viga-Ljot og Vigdis. Christiania (Oslo): Aschehoug, 1909.)

Set in Norway and Iceland at the beginning of the eleventh century, Gunnar’s Daughter is the story of the beautiful, spoiled Vigdis Gunnarsdatter, who is casually raped by the man she had wanted to love.

A woman of courage and intelligence, Vigdis is toughened by adversity. Alone she raises the child conceived in violence, repeatedly defending her autonomy in a world governed by men. Alone she rebuilds her life and restores her family’s honor, until an unrelenting social code propels her to take the action that again destroys her happiness.

More than a historical romance, Gunnar’s Daughter depicts characters driven by passion and vengefulness, themes as familiar in Undset’s own time - and in ours - as they were in the Saga Age. A strong, unsentimental book by Undset.

Knut Hamsun was a great Norwegian novelist, dramatist, poet, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. He is perhaps best known for Growth of the Soil, Hunger, and Mysteries. These are relatively “heavy” and serious books, and they have contributed much to making serious and hard to read part of Hamsun’s image as an author. (You can read more about Knut Hamsun’s books at http://www.leserglede.com/.)

However, Knut Hamsun has many other qualities as a writer as well. He had a great sense of humor and irony, and he was socially engaged as well as a great observer of social change. A number of his writings display these characteristics, thus pointing to a “lighter”, and perhaps more easily accessible side of Knut Hamsun.

Segelfoss Town is one of these books. It is a wonderful, light novel, and my personal favorite among Hamsun’s books.

Segelfoss Town is the continuation of Children of the Age, but can be read indepent of it. Now Tobias Holmengrå, the entrepreneurial capitalist, is the big guy in Segelfoss. The lieutenant is nothing but a distant memory now; money and the struggle of the classes rule the day. Changing times, business cycles, and events large and small create problems for the city and even its richest citizen.

This is, in my humble opinion, an even more interesting book than “Children of the Age”, and full of black humor, fascinating interactions among the wide gallery of characters in the book, and with great observations about the dynamics of the changing circumstances.

While easier to read than most of Hamsun’s other books, this book still reveals the depth of Hamsun’s ability to observe, and is written in a beautiful, extremely well crafted language. Great fun, and a great experience, as well as food for thought.

I enjoy reading Knut Hamsun. He writes elegantly and beautiful, and I like his sense of humor. Pan is about Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, living in a hunting cabin up in the Northern part of Norway, along with his dog, Aesop. He lives not far from the village Sirius, and interacts with people there. Then something happens which turns his life upside down.

Pan is a wonderful Hamsun book. Otto Weineger claimed it was the most beautiful book ever written. In Pan, Hamsun is concerned with the beauty of nature and our relationship to it. His descriptions are beautiful. His mastery of language, and his very conscious use of it, is intruiging. He uses language to underscore what is happening. For instance, when Glahn is alone, his sentences are long, drawn out, but when he talks to women, his sentences are short, distinct, intense. In addition, the story in Pan is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.

Pan, in my humbe opinion, is one of the most interesting books written by Hamsun, a true masterpiece. At the center of the book is the eternal battle of the sexes. The book is full of pure poetry and “lyric outbursts”. Pan is also, deservedly, one of the most widely known works by Knut Hamsun.