The Women at the Pump

The women at the pump in Hamsun's small Norwegian coastal town are seldom short of talking points: a birth (and where did those brown eyes come from?), a marriage (shotgun?), a death in strange circumstances (the victim flattened by a falling barrel of whale oil); the up-and-down career of the town's leading citizen and philanderer; the pointed questions asked in the Norwegian Parliament by its seedy representative; the mail robbery that permanently unhinges the postmaster and leads to the discovery of obscene tattooing all over the blacksmith's son; the news that an elderly spinster is pregnant (while the doctor's wife is not); the disastrous sinking of the steamship that is the town's chief pride and joy. Above all, there are the latest doings of Oliver Andersen and the large family that he and his wife contrive to raise despite growing suspicions that his mysterious accident at sea has deprived him of more than a leg.

In Oliver, Hamsun has created one of the great comic characters of literature: a sly, boastful, flaccid rogue who trades shamelessly and indomitably on his misfortune. In his moral squalor he is the symbol of a corrupt and self-seeking society. Unattractive though he is, he never entirely loses the reader's sympathy, and his relations with his delightful ‘son’ Abel are most movingly depicted. THE WOMEN AT THE PUMP brims with a prodigality of invention, sardonic humor, and an originality of style and technique representing Hamsun's later work at its best. First published in Norway in 1920 - the year Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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