Fishermen who play with death for the wealth of the sea and depend for their livelihood on the caprices of nature do not easily harden into traditional moulds. At 4, the family moved to Nordland, home of a people as alien from the heavier inland peasant as if they lived on different continents. "The moralist and preacher who wrote Growth of the Soil is a true scion of the best old peasant stock. But through The Women at the Pump, in 1920, she covers them all.
Though Hamsun was in his 60s at the time she published this study, he still had quite a few books left in him, so the late Hamsun work doesn't appear here. Working from a semi-precious original edition that I could only read in the library, I found myself copying many passages into my notebook because of how apt or arresting they seemed to me to be. She divides Hamsun and his work into three useful and accurate phases, The Wanderer, The Poet, and The Citizen. She met Hamsun on a visit to her native family when she was a young woman, as she recalls in this book written when she was in her 40s. Larsen was American of Norwegian descent, knew the language, and had family back in the old country.
In this case, the only one I've read, the results are excellent. Hanna Astrup Larsen edited Scandinavian-American magazines, compiled anthologies of Scandinavian literature, and ventured into some biography-cum-literary-criticism. The original of this unusual book was published by Knopf in 1922, shortly after Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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