Word: undset
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...after the first sentence, “When the earthly goods of Ivar Gjesling the Younger of Sundbu were divided up in the year 1306, his property at Sil was given to his daughter Ragnfrid and her husband Lavrans Bjorgulfson.” Perhaps I was unfair to Ms. Undset, but I do not regret my escape for a moment...
Apart from these personal matters, the merger joins two impressive publishing lists. Knopf (1959 sales: more than $4,000,000) has an outstanding array of dead authors-Thomas Mann, Gide, Willa Gather, Camus, Kafka, Sigrid Undset, H. L. Mencken-but is a little spottier on contemporaries, e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre, Elizabeth Bowen. John Hersey. John Updike. Random House (1959 sales: more than $12 million) has the late Eugene O'Neill and Sinclair Lewis, as well as Faulkner. John O'Hara, Robert Penn Warren, Truman Capote, Isak Dinesen, Irwin Shaw, James Michener...
...late, famed Nobel prizewinner Undset (she died in 1949) writes of desperate Norwegian spinsters who are roughly used by all who know them, of babies who bring brief happiness to love-starved households and then sicken and die, of people who hesitate to rescue others for fear of being responsible for the lives they save. The conclusion of each sweetly-sad story is usually damp with tears: Thjodolf ends with its heroine reeling to her bed, where "the weeping came, bitter and burning"; Simonsen ends with its hero on a train speeding away from his loved ones forever: "He wiped...
FOUR STORIES (245 pp.)-Sigrid Undset -Knopf...
British Author Smith, who died early this year, deals with the Little Karoo, an isolated South African plateau peopled by pious, hardfisted Boer farmers who are as trapped by their environment and culture as any of Author Undset's bedeviled Norwegians. For them, too, "man is distant, but God is near." In The Miller, a baffled man expresses his outrage at the approach of death by browbeating his timid wife, who runs "to serve him with quick, fluttering movements like those of a frightened hen"; in The Sinner, a lifetime of hard work and small returns explodes in passion...