Word: undset
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Americans think of Norway as a cold slice of northern forest and fjord, of Norwegian writers as weighty (like Sigrid Undset) or gloomy (like Knut Hamsun). But a Norwegian novel published this week is as different from this preconception as its author's startling name. It could have been written in any country of Europe...
...first thought was "O pu sing sin" (Chinese for "I don't believe it"). Her first words were, "That's ridiculous; it's incredible." Outclassed by earlier prize-winners like William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, by women novelists like Selma Lagerlof or Sigrid Undset who have won it before her, Pearl Buck would be placed by most critics below such U. S. possibilities as Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Van Wyck Brooks...
...their solid, youthful worth, their irony, their humor, their peasant lustiness." ALLI'S SON-Magnhild Haalke-Knopf ($2.50). Sombre Norwegian story of a young sailor's wife whose son becomes a psychopathic case; a first novel recommended to U. S. readers by Nobel Prize-winner Sigrid Undset...
...company with a good many contemporary European novelists, Sigrid Undset has a faculty for making the life of the past appear rich and meaningful in comparison with the involved perplexities of the present. Her three-volume historical romance, Kristin Lavransdatter, pictured a medieval Norway that was brutal and hard, but one in which people fitted into the few simple grooves that society provided and fulfilled their destinies with dramatic symmetry. A prime example of historical fiction, its elaborate documentation artfully grained into the narrative, that book became a best seller (204,000 copies) in the U. S. when...
Gimnar's Daughter, one of her first novels, was published in 1909, when Sigrid Undset was 27. A brief, direct story, melodramatic as the folk tales on which it is modeled, it lacks both the involved psychological analyses that weight down her modern fiction, the realistic details that distinguish her historical romances. Since it is laid in the reign of King Olav, when Norway was undergoing the transition from paganism to Christianity, it also reveals Sigrid Undset's profound religious feeling, is an early expression of the devotion that was eventually to lead her to write thesis novels...