Dreamers

by Knut Hamsun and W W Webster

Book Overview

The midnight sun illumines more than fishing and fjords in this remote northern Norwegian village. In fact, half-baked schemes and hilarity abound. Big Ove Rolandsen, telegraph operator, mad scientist, and local Casanova, trades wits, fists, and kisses with a host of quirky neighbors. He serenades the curate's wife and fights a drunken giant, but taking on Trader Mack, the town's fish-glue magnate, is a more difficult matter. Knut Hamsun, author of the acclaimed Hunger and winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, renders the dreams and dramas of these townsfolk with a delightfully light touch. Robert Bly has written that Hamsun "has a magnifying glass on his eye, like a jeweler's," and Dreamers gleams like a perfect, semi-precious stone.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811213218
• ISBN13: 9780811213219
• Release Date: May 1996
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 132 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

A delightful, humorous well-crafted novel

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.

Optimistic

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: (...).

Great Introduction to Hamsun

Light as gossamer, beautiful, and surprisingly insightful. Hamsun is a master of the human experience. His simple, visual style disguises a deep understanding of life. Dreamers is short and sweet - a great way to discover a Nobel prize winning author