Category — Lyrical

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.

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.