Rating: 
Summary: Puts and Calls
Review: Thirty years have passed since I first read this. A favorite then, and I find that time has not diminished my appreciation for this great novel. This is a story of 'puts' and 'calls' and it has nothing to do with Wall Street. In a way this is the genesis of other stories. ...There is uninhabited land in a northern clime and a man is put amidst it. Isak clears land, tills the soil, constructs buildings. He has a call for a woman and Inger is put there. So too is a cow, then a bull, a goat, and a pig. There is a call for additional buildings and more clearing and tillage. A call for a saw mill. A call for irrigation and an engineer is put there. Children are put in the woman and two of these are sons. Eleseus is of different temperament from Sivert and his father and is called to town, to an office. Copper has been put in the land and Geissler and others call upon the landowner Isak to buy so that it might be extracted. Poles are needed for the telegraph. Neighbors arrive and with it a capitalistic thinking, but in the end it is those who work the soil who are truly lauded; and that all the artifacts that come about with development of towns are merely what they are called and worth only what a man will pay for them, unlike the soil. Isak is well described as 'a barge of a man' because of his size and scope of labor, yes, but also because all that follows in the rest of us might be argued as contained in his life of doings and in those of his wife as well. Before there were thrillers, courtroom dramas, potboilers, and romances, there was literature like this. Thank god, it still lives.
Rating:
Summary: a 20th-century masterpiece
Review: This book is in my top-twenty list of 20th-century novels. I can't fathom how anyone with any literary sense could call the prose "stilted." Simple, yes, prosaic, perhaps; but spare and lean does not mean devoid of grace. Hemingway strove all his life to write this way. And let's not forget, Henry Miller held Hamsun and Celine (another politically incorrect master-novelist) in the highest possible regard and wrote that they both influenced him greatly. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough to anyone who loves literature. As far as the political context is concerned, let's remember that Zubin Mehta performed Wagner in Israel after a long ban and received an enthusiastic reception. I'm a little weary of those politically sensitive souls that want to remove Twain from school reading lists and find Shakespeare too chauvenistic, etc. etc. I certainly can find no evidence of Hamsun's political views expressed in any of his novels. Give this one a chance and decide for yourself. Don't be put off by the thought-police.
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