Rating: 
Summary: The Eye of the Beholder
Review: Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth will forever remain as of the truly epic works of American literature. A descendant of the Trottlander tribe of southern Norway myself, I grew up on a farm in midwest Minnesota and experienced the identical landscapes so vividly described in Rolvaag's masterpiece. Needless to say, I have always felt a profound connection to this work through how its rich pathetic fallacy largely mirrored my childhood fantasies and dreams.
Giants in the Earth is a novel about dichotomous relationships. And in a novel that depicts how relationships ultimately define their participants, the central figure in this important work is the land itself. It is interesting to note the order of effects the pastoral loneliness produces in its inhabitants. Beret, like many other non-natives living on the Great Plains, views the land as a lethal threat too pervasively gargantuan to overcome. Per on the other hand, views the land like so many of my father's generation: a fertile blessing that contains some of the most arable land on the entire planet. The attitudes of the novel's central characters towards their situation comes to reveal their strengths and weaknesses in a poignant, bittersweet saga as morose and sublime as the land itself. Compelling, tragic, humorous and underspoken, Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth reflects the feelings and goals of an entire generation of immigrants striven to succeed at all costs. Thankfully for us all, they did.
Rating: 
Summary: As historically accurate as The Flintstones.
Review: The title of this book is misleading. I thought that this book would be about giants living underground. The synopsis is also misleading. I thought the book would be about people dealing with hardships in the prairie. Yes, the book does feature Norwegians in the prairie, but hardships are not present. Whenever it seems like something bad may happen, the situation rights itself. Wife looks like she's going to die but lives, it snows right after the guy plants his seeds but they grow anyway, or a crazy woman steals their kid and runs away but only up a hill and nothing bad ensues.
It's a very historically inaccurate book. People didn't just go out into the prairie and conquer it in a month. There were hardships such as disease, famine, and unpleasant weather. Furthermore, these people are Norwegian immigrants that recently came to America. Where did they get the money to buy all of that stuff? They know no English and have no knowledge of farming, and yet are able to acquire all of the supplies at a reasonable price and still have a lot of money left over. What is this tomfoolery?
The style employed in this book is simplistic, which is neither an asset nor a hindrance. There is no plot to be found here or character development. The characters just fall ass backward into success at every attempt at farming. The book is redundant. It's the main character, Per Hansa, farming. Nothing else matters except his farming. Every other character is more like a tool rather than a person. His wife makes food, his kids help around the house, his neighbors entertain him, and all of the passersby are just magic birds that drop off whatever he needs. Pies, beer, farm animals. And everything that he needs can either be conveniently traded for with potatoes or found in a forty-mile radius.
This book makes it look like I can just travel backward through time right now in the nude and start a fantastic farm. I can plow with my feet, water with my saliva, and, well I don't need a house, I'll just sleep in the fetal position and all of the sheep and trees will keep me company.
Rating:
Summary: The American story
Review: This is a story of Norwegian immigrants to America and how they struggle against the harshness of nature to make new homes in a new land. This work was once required reading in schools in New York State and I remember as a schoolchild reading it with a certain degree of puzzlement and bewilderment. Now I understand to be a work through which many Norwegian Americans feel their own Americanization story is most accurately told. But the farming world of Per Hansa, the many complications of his family's and neighbors' life struck me as in some way alien. Yet the persistence, the courage of Per Hansa and the whole immigrant society did teach a lesson i.e. that the making of a new life in America would only be made through enduring and overcoming extraordinary hardships.
The characters in this book are well- drawn, and there is a narrative that moves along if at times with difficulty.
But to know a very special kind of American world and character this book is highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: THEY CAME...THEY SAW...THEY CONQUERED...
Review: This is the first in a trilogy of books about the Norwegian settlement of the Dakota Territory. The second book is titled, " Peder Victorious", and the third and last book is titled, "Their Fathers' God." The author, a Norwegian who emigrated to the United States in 1896 and eventually became a professor at St. Olaf's College, wrote it in Norwegian, but it is every bit as American as apple pie.This is a beautifully written, lyrical book about the experiences of the early Norwegians who settled in the vast prairie of the Dakota Territory during the latter half of the nineteenth century. It speaks of their isolation and desolation, as well as of the hardships inherent in pioneering so far West with so little resources at hand with which to do so. Dependent solely upon their inner resources, hard work, ingenuity, and whatever goods they had managed to haul with them, these peasant, would-be-farmers from Norway would be the stuff of which this country was made. Their resilience in the face of relentless hardship, adversity, and deprivation is stunning, as is their belief in a better life. The story focuses on a small group of Norwegians who traveled together from the same small fishing hamlet in Norway and formed a settlement. Pioneers, they paved the way for those who were yet to come. The author details their trials and tribulations, with the focal figure of this group being an individual by the name of Per Hansa, who arrived in the vast prairie of the Dakota territory with his wife, Beret, and their three children. Yet, despite these central characters, all that happens revolves around the land and the elements that sustain it and drain it from season to season. It is Per Hansa, however, who, perhaps, best epitomizes the enterprising spirit of the first settlers to the Dakota Territory, while his wife, Beret, represents those whose coping mechanisms were less able to make a smooth transition to their new environs. Per Hansa, bursting with energy and enthusiasm, is a man who thinks out of the box and refuses to let the elements get the best of him. He is a natural leader upon whom the others rely, a symbol of the pioneering spirit that revolutionized this country and made it great. Beret, on the other hand, symbolizes those who see a relentless uphill fight to try to make something out of seemingly nothing. She fails to see the beauty around her, seeing only the stillness, the isolation, and what she perceives as the interminable loneliness. Therein lies the heart of the dichotomy in their relationship, as Per Hansa sees his cup as half full, while Beret sees hers as half empty. Yet, despite Per Hansa's joy in the land, there is an underlying bittersweet moroseness that permeates the book that serves to underscore the great sacrifice that these early pioneers had to make in order for their settlement of the Great Plains of the Dakota Territory to work. It is grounded in an understanding by the author of the Norwegian immigrant culture and experience. It is a book that is brimming with feeling and written by an author who had the soul of a poet. Those who have read and enjoyed the quartet of books written by Swedish author, Vilhelm Moberg, about the early Swedish settlers of Minnesota, will likewise enjoy this book, as will all those who love lyrically written historical fiction. I very much look forward to reading the remaining two books in this trilogy.
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