Dreamers (New Directions Classics)

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Summary: A Hamsun gem of a romantic tale in new translation.
Review: Dreamers is another wonderful non-romantic romance involving ordinary people in a small Norweigen village from the master of the genre, Knut Hamsun. However, this new translation is a great dissapointment to me after reading the 1920's Alfred A Knopf edition. Much of the colour & humor are lost in this edition. I would strongly suggest using Amazon's used book search & auctions to find the out of print Alfred A Knopf version as it is a far superior translation to this edition that will bring many more smiles and laughs to the reader.

Rating:
Summary: A delightful, humorous well-crafted novel
Review: Hamsun is an author everyone should read - his clear and precise language, his ability to pick details that build fully human characters, and his wicked sense of humor all make for reading at its best.

In this novel, a young but ambitious telegraph operator who is a womanizing drunk as well as a clever inventor seeks capital to make his dreams of better, cheaper fish-glue with dye as a byproduct. Along the way one meets the fiancee he can't get rid of, a curate with a hell-fire-brimstone manner and a wife who is spoiled and childish, lay-helpers with hidden hatreds ... a whole village of believable characters acting in very human ways.

This is not a deep, philosophical novel but through the characters' actions there is a sense of hopefulness that overpowers the foibles.

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Summary: SMALL VILLAGE CASANOVA TRIUMPHS
Review: Ove Rolandson is what a modern audience would call a "playa". He goes around flirting with the factory girls, is the sire of a couple of illegitimate children, proposed to Elise Mack, the daughter of the local fish glue magnate, and become engaged to Olga, the sexton's daughter. And he also has an eye on the new curate's wife. As you can see, he has a lot on his plate. He's not quite the smooth operator that he wishes to be though. While working at the telegraph station and getting drunk and picking up chicks seems to be his only pasttimes, he harbors a secret desire to be an inventor and an entrepreneur. He is secretly experimenting on different methods of extracting fish glue from parts that others see as useless, that, if he can get them patented, could make him a competitor of Trader Mack, the boss of the town.

Dreamers is lighter novel than Hamsun usually writes. It's basically a comic work. We have almost-murders, almost-affairs, almost-dirty dealings, but nothing ever brings the book down into the realm of "heavy" literature. It almost feels like a Shakespearean comedy such as Much Ado About Nothing. Nobody gets hurt in the end. At bottom, most of the characters here have a core of goodness that never lets the plot degenerate into tragedy.

This was a good light read. For an example of more intense works by Hamsun, I would check out "Hunger" and "Pan", the latter novel showing how the same elements we find in "Dreamers" can be melded into something more primal and powerful. I would also recommend Shakespeare's comedies such as "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Love's Labor's Lost". Also, check out "Harvest" by Jean Giono for a similar take on a pastoral subject with more intensity.

Rating:
Summary: Optimistic
Review: What a delight this little book is! And to think that I expected Hamsun to be either experimental, or to have a heavy writing style so common among classic writers... Snip: (...).