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3.59 AVERAGE
3.59 AVERAGE
"Blood and Blossoms"
Beautiful commentary on love, hierarchy and social position. However, compared to Hunger this one was not as striking. Perhaps because i was comparing the two books in my head while reading that i couldn't enjoy it as much as i wanted. A thought-provoking read nonetheless.
Beautiful commentary on love, hierarchy and social position. However, compared to Hunger this one was not as striking. Perhaps because i was comparing the two books in my head while reading that i couldn't enjoy it as much as i wanted. A thought-provoking read nonetheless.
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Johannes is the miller's son, Victoria is a lady of society. Johannes has a childhood crush on Victoria. As he grows older, his infatuation with her increases, largely due to his imaginings. Their paths cross intermittently, and there is engaging back-and-forth between Johannes and Victoria. I found myself alternately rooting for one character, then another, then back again. I think the messages/lessons about love are relevant even today.
The most romantic story I've ever read with a real and deep tragedy. Beautiful and extrmely touching.
slow-paced
The odds were that I wouldn't like this book. It had many of the features I found fault with in the contemporary bestseller "One Day" by David Nicholls: a frustrating main character who falls deeply and irrevocably in love with someone clearly unsuitable who doesn't initially return his regard; many occasions when the pair might have come together but were prevented by misunderstandings and other frustrating circumstances; in short, too much melodrama right up to the very end. So why did I like it so much? The simplicity of the style, the poetic quality of the writing and the intensity of the hero's emotional life. I will definitely read more of Hamsun's work.
A small share in my positive response must go to the fine presentation of this Condor Book, the full colour reproduction of 'Moonlight' by Edvard Munch on the cover, the high quality paper, the bold font and the broad margins which reduce the words per page and make the reading experience very pleasant indeed.
A small share in my positive response must go to the fine presentation of this Condor Book, the full colour reproduction of 'Moonlight' by Edvard Munch on the cover, the high quality paper, the bold font and the broad margins which reduce the words per page and make the reading experience very pleasant indeed.
emotional
fast-paced
‘Love became the world’s beginning and the world’s ruler; but all its ways are full of flowers and blood, flowers and blood.’
The passions and desires of young love, and the frustration of love torn apart by society, is a source of considerable energy that has been harnessed by writers through all of history. Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun’s 1898 novella, Victoria, draws on this energy to fuel his inextinguishable prose and return to the theme of doomed love, a theme characteristic of his impressive oeuvre. Although this theme was the heart of [b:Pan|32590|Pan|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386923711l/32590._SY75_.jpg|132237], Victoria takes a different approach stylistically, poetically, and most of all, in the behavior of the protagonist. Within this tragic tale of two star-crossed lovers, Hamsun explores the complexities, hopes and inevitable destruction of love in a world ordered through social class as he weaves a multi-layered metafictive prose that marks the dawn of a bright new era for his novels.
Published only 4 years after [b:Pan|32590|Pan|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386923711l/32590._SY75_.jpg|132237], a tragic tale of failed love set in the northern wilderness, Victoria evinced a period of major artistic growth and maturity in Hamsun’s already potent literary pen. According to the excellent introduction provided by translator Sverre Lyngstad, Hamsun wrote in a letter during this period between novels that he had ‘tired of the novel, [and] always despised the drama,’ so he had taken up writing verse, which he considered ‘the only literature that is not both pretentious and insignificant, but only insignificant’. The time spent harnessing the power of poetry is immediately apparent from the first page. Having become tighter and slimmed down to near-poetic verse, the prose simply blossoms upon the page. The striking variance in style between his early, gritty, psychologically intense works including [b:Hunger|3104354|Hunger|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382142937l/3104354._SY75_.jpg|3135610] and [b:Mysteries|32586|Mysteries|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1391925208l/32586._SY75_.jpg|32747], and later novels such as [b:Growth of the Soil|1428604|Growth of the Soil|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348297385l/1428604._SY75_.jpg|2435698] (a crucial work that, as well as being heralded as his ‘masterpiece’, was cited by the Nobel committee as a primary impetus for awarding him their prestigious prize) seems to meet up and pivot upon this novella. Victoria retained his early themes of doomed love, obsession and focal character with manic dispositions - which still continued throughout his body of work, becoming used more for the traits of supporting characters and secondary plotlines – while striking out into different narrative styles and the more streamlined storytelling that shone best in Growth. Hamsun began to keep dialogue to the bare minimum, a strong departure from the loquacious ravings of Nagel in Mysteries, choosing to supply the gist of conversations and leaving the particulars to be filled in through the creative impulses of the reader. Hamsun was a master of revealing only what was absolutely necessary, which helped to drive his novels forward and give him total narrative control. Even a good deal of the action is revealed after the fact, recounted by the characters in a way that gives rise to suspicions of absolute validity.
‘Asked what love is, some will say it is nothing but a wind whispering among the roses and then dying down. But often it is like an unbreakable seal that holds for a lifetime, until death. God created it in so many different kinds and has seen it endure or perish’. Doomed love was a favorite theme of Hamsun’s and appears in some for in almost every one of his books and short stories (the short stories in particular show Hamsun sharpening his skills and insight into this topic). In Victoria, the reader watches the doomed dance of two lovers as they waltz through a series of ups and downs. The novella bounces gracefully between intense amorous excitement and disheartened grief and sorrow, as both the imagery and Johannes’ mood is victim to the whims of his beloved. When love is on his side, love is compared to ‘a summer night with stars in the sky and fragrance on earth’ and Johannes harnesses his joy into frantic writing and singing to the heavens, the latter much to the chagrin of his neighbors, creating an opportunity for Hamsun to allow Johannes to tell of his off-stage escapades in artistically expressive language prone towards exaggeration. In these manic, feverish states, he can live, eat and drink off the feasts of love, ‘coatless, he looks out on the world like a half-clothed madman who has gotten drunk on happiness during the night’. However, when love is withheld, the world around him is bleak and love is only as pleasant as ‘ugly toadstools’. When Victoria implies that social class and social expectations make any union of their hearts impossible, revoking any possibilities of a future between them after days before having pledged her love to him, Hamsun sets Johannes off down a dingy street lined with impoverishment to highlight these social conditions.
Unlike the protagonists in Hamsun’s previous novels, Johannes has a steadier grip of his faculties and does not lash out irrationally despite dipping, or elevating, himself into feverish moods. In fact, the central scene of the novel displays Johannes in a calm, sociable demeanor during a party, a scene in other novels where disaster and outlandish behavior was certain to erupt. Johannes takes compliments and aggression with class and dignity, being the one who comes out smelling of roses. Perhaps this reflects upon the character of Hamsun. There is a strong autobiographical aspect to many of his novels, and his early works which document the rise and fall of irrational moods and behavior may have been a method through which Hamsun was able to step back and observe himself from an outsider’s vantage point in an attempt to gain some insight into his own character. Having aged in experience and wisdom, such irregular nuances may have dulled leading to a more composed and collected protagonist.
Little hope for a sustainable happiness is to be found from the story of Johannes and Victoria as Hamsun further emphasizes his jaded desire to watch love burn in flames than shine with the stars. ‘That’s the way things are,’ lectures an old poet, ‘naturally, you don’t get the women you should have’. Yet, somewhere in this bitter fate, there is a bittersweet sense of beauty. In the burden of never obtaining the one we really love, we can forever desire them and remain in the emotionally intense and radiant infatuation stage forever. However, true love is only reached through accepting and wholly embracing the good and bad of a person, making the ‘love’ more obsession than actual love. Either way, this book is a great example of how many of our problems are of our own doing. So many times does the object of desire lay itself at a characters doorstep, only to be turned away to satisfy some inner angst and pride that will be regretted later. When two individuals become a pair, one inevitably seeks the affections of another, newer infatuation. Hamsun displays quite a bit of pessimism towards young love. The author was quite the wanderer in the younger half of his life, much like most of his protagonists, and was very popular with women. As this was how he understood life, his protagonists are always graced with the same attractive force, even when they are as famished and foul as Hunger’s narrator. The brief and many affairs he may have encountered or observed in his travels must have given him this outlook, and the apparent heart-breaker status of his that can be read between the lines of his books may be the driving force of creating so many characters just to watch their hearts crumble. The passion and the devastation of his tragic romances are sure to ring true in the hearts of an empathetic reader.
Through the use of what [a:James Wood|26341|James Wood|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1336718983p2/26341.jpg] describes as ‘free indirect narration’ in [b:How Fiction Works|1355465|How Fiction Works|James Wood|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312030908l/1355465._SY75_.jpg|1345179], Hamsun skillfully threads the non-participatory narration with Johannes participatory observations and opinions, dipping in an out of his head with a clever word choice, exclamatory phrase within the larger sentence or brief interjection of perspective. Take, for example:
Johannes and the narrative voice are threaded so tightly you can pass over the seams without even noticing Hamsun has gone back and forth between third and first person perspectives. It is especially difficult to readily deduce as Johannes is a poet and author, and what the reader may first attribute to Hamsun as a poetic turn of phrase or choice of word really belongs to Johannes. This affords the novella its vast prose and poetical form and allows lenience and forgiveness for turning to such exaggerated flowery language. The metafictive duality of the novel is served through the technique as well. We have Hamsun, a writer creating a novel with traces of autobiography about a writer with similar traits who takes the loves and losses from his own life and molds it into his own poetry and novels. Through the small but exquisite samples of Johannes own work, we see Hamsun writing poetry in full-fledged Norwegian romantic-style that retells the recent events of Johannes life, contained within a novel that serves as a poetical literary concoction of events from Hamsun’s life. The meta-language of Victoria comes in many, many layers.
Sverre Lyngstad seems to be one of the better, if not the best, English translators of Hamsun's work. After sampling a few other translations through reading several other Hamsun novels, Lyngstad seems to enact the best balance of flow, prose, and accessible syntax. As an added bonus, his introductions are always stuffed with excellent biographical knowledge and viewpoints on the novel. However, the reader should be warned that the 'introduction' would better serve as an 'afterword' as they are rampant with spoilers and other various plot points that could really ruin the book.
While this book did not strike me quite as powerfully as his others, notably Pan, with which is it best compared to, Victoria shows the Norwegian novelist at a crucial turning point in his career and is a short, sharp and intense work that highlights and amplifies many of the themes from its predecessors. While Pan offered more of the emotionally charged and ambiguous behavior that bound Hamsun’s novels forever to my heart, mind and soul, Victoria provides an impressive poetic depiction of the emptiness felt when love, which had previously swelled and burst free from the heart, is denied, covered up, or gift-wrapped and given to someone detestable. This book invokes true, uncomfortable feelings, yet delivers them so exquisitely that we can only be comforted and left desiring more.
3.75/5
I would recommend starting with [b:Hunger|3104354|Hunger|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382142937l/3104354._SY75_.jpg|3135610] or [b:Pan|32590|Pan|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386923711l/32590._SY75_.jpg|132237]
The passions and desires of young love, and the frustration of love torn apart by society, is a source of considerable energy that has been harnessed by writers through all of history. Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun’s 1898 novella, Victoria, draws on this energy to fuel his inextinguishable prose and return to the theme of doomed love, a theme characteristic of his impressive oeuvre. Although this theme was the heart of [b:Pan|32590|Pan|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386923711l/32590._SY75_.jpg|132237], Victoria takes a different approach stylistically, poetically, and most of all, in the behavior of the protagonist. Within this tragic tale of two star-crossed lovers, Hamsun explores the complexities, hopes and inevitable destruction of love in a world ordered through social class as he weaves a multi-layered metafictive prose that marks the dawn of a bright new era for his novels.
Published only 4 years after [b:Pan|32590|Pan|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386923711l/32590._SY75_.jpg|132237], a tragic tale of failed love set in the northern wilderness, Victoria evinced a period of major artistic growth and maturity in Hamsun’s already potent literary pen. According to the excellent introduction provided by translator Sverre Lyngstad, Hamsun wrote in a letter during this period between novels that he had ‘tired of the novel, [and] always despised the drama,’ so he had taken up writing verse, which he considered ‘the only literature that is not both pretentious and insignificant, but only insignificant’. The time spent harnessing the power of poetry is immediately apparent from the first page. Having become tighter and slimmed down to near-poetic verse, the prose simply blossoms upon the page. The striking variance in style between his early, gritty, psychologically intense works including [b:Hunger|3104354|Hunger|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382142937l/3104354._SY75_.jpg|3135610] and [b:Mysteries|32586|Mysteries|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1391925208l/32586._SY75_.jpg|32747], and later novels such as [b:Growth of the Soil|1428604|Growth of the Soil|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348297385l/1428604._SY75_.jpg|2435698] (a crucial work that, as well as being heralded as his ‘masterpiece’, was cited by the Nobel committee as a primary impetus for awarding him their prestigious prize) seems to meet up and pivot upon this novella. Victoria retained his early themes of doomed love, obsession and focal character with manic dispositions - which still continued throughout his body of work, becoming used more for the traits of supporting characters and secondary plotlines – while striking out into different narrative styles and the more streamlined storytelling that shone best in Growth. Hamsun began to keep dialogue to the bare minimum, a strong departure from the loquacious ravings of Nagel in Mysteries, choosing to supply the gist of conversations and leaving the particulars to be filled in through the creative impulses of the reader. Hamsun was a master of revealing only what was absolutely necessary, which helped to drive his novels forward and give him total narrative control. Even a good deal of the action is revealed after the fact, recounted by the characters in a way that gives rise to suspicions of absolute validity.
‘Asked what love is, some will say it is nothing but a wind whispering among the roses and then dying down. But often it is like an unbreakable seal that holds for a lifetime, until death. God created it in so many different kinds and has seen it endure or perish’. Doomed love was a favorite theme of Hamsun’s and appears in some for in almost every one of his books and short stories (the short stories in particular show Hamsun sharpening his skills and insight into this topic). In Victoria, the reader watches the doomed dance of two lovers as they waltz through a series of ups and downs. The novella bounces gracefully between intense amorous excitement and disheartened grief and sorrow, as both the imagery and Johannes’ mood is victim to the whims of his beloved. When love is on his side, love is compared to ‘a summer night with stars in the sky and fragrance on earth’ and Johannes harnesses his joy into frantic writing and singing to the heavens, the latter much to the chagrin of his neighbors, creating an opportunity for Hamsun to allow Johannes to tell of his off-stage escapades in artistically expressive language prone towards exaggeration. In these manic, feverish states, he can live, eat and drink off the feasts of love, ‘coatless, he looks out on the world like a half-clothed madman who has gotten drunk on happiness during the night’. However, when love is withheld, the world around him is bleak and love is only as pleasant as ‘ugly toadstools’. When Victoria implies that social class and social expectations make any union of their hearts impossible, revoking any possibilities of a future between them after days before having pledged her love to him, Hamsun sets Johannes off down a dingy street lined with impoverishment to highlight these social conditions.
Unlike the protagonists in Hamsun’s previous novels, Johannes has a steadier grip of his faculties and does not lash out irrationally despite dipping, or elevating, himself into feverish moods. In fact, the central scene of the novel displays Johannes in a calm, sociable demeanor during a party, a scene in other novels where disaster and outlandish behavior was certain to erupt. Johannes takes compliments and aggression with class and dignity, being the one who comes out smelling of roses. Perhaps this reflects upon the character of Hamsun. There is a strong autobiographical aspect to many of his novels, and his early works which document the rise and fall of irrational moods and behavior may have been a method through which Hamsun was able to step back and observe himself from an outsider’s vantage point in an attempt to gain some insight into his own character. Having aged in experience and wisdom, such irregular nuances may have dulled leading to a more composed and collected protagonist.
Little hope for a sustainable happiness is to be found from the story of Johannes and Victoria as Hamsun further emphasizes his jaded desire to watch love burn in flames than shine with the stars. ‘That’s the way things are,’ lectures an old poet, ‘naturally, you don’t get the women you should have’. Yet, somewhere in this bitter fate, there is a bittersweet sense of beauty. In the burden of never obtaining the one we really love, we can forever desire them and remain in the emotionally intense and radiant infatuation stage forever. However, true love is only reached through accepting and wholly embracing the good and bad of a person, making the ‘love’ more obsession than actual love. Either way, this book is a great example of how many of our problems are of our own doing. So many times does the object of desire lay itself at a characters doorstep, only to be turned away to satisfy some inner angst and pride that will be regretted later. When two individuals become a pair, one inevitably seeks the affections of another, newer infatuation. Hamsun displays quite a bit of pessimism towards young love. The author was quite the wanderer in the younger half of his life, much like most of his protagonists, and was very popular with women. As this was how he understood life, his protagonists are always graced with the same attractive force, even when they are as famished and foul as Hunger’s narrator. The brief and many affairs he may have encountered or observed in his travels must have given him this outlook, and the apparent heart-breaker status of his that can be read between the lines of his books may be the driving force of creating so many characters just to watch their hearts crumble. The passion and the devastation of his tragic romances are sure to ring true in the hearts of an empathetic reader.
Through the use of what [a:James Wood|26341|James Wood|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1336718983p2/26341.jpg] describes as ‘free indirect narration’ in [b:How Fiction Works|1355465|How Fiction Works|James Wood|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312030908l/1355465._SY75_.jpg|1345179], Hamsun skillfully threads the non-participatory narration with Johannes participatory observations and opinions, dipping in an out of his head with a clever word choice, exclamatory phrase within the larger sentence or brief interjection of perspective. Take, for example:
‘The starlings were chattering from the branches above their head. Well and good. God grant them a long life… He had made a speech for her at dinner and torn his heart out; it had cost him dearly to correct and cover up her impertinent interruption, and she hadn’t even thanked him. She had picked up picked up her glass and taken a draft. Skoal! Look at me, see how prettily I drink…[sic]’
Johannes and the narrative voice are threaded so tightly you can pass over the seams without even noticing Hamsun has gone back and forth between third and first person perspectives. It is especially difficult to readily deduce as Johannes is a poet and author, and what the reader may first attribute to Hamsun as a poetic turn of phrase or choice of word really belongs to Johannes. This affords the novella its vast prose and poetical form and allows lenience and forgiveness for turning to such exaggerated flowery language. The metafictive duality of the novel is served through the technique as well. We have Hamsun, a writer creating a novel with traces of autobiography about a writer with similar traits who takes the loves and losses from his own life and molds it into his own poetry and novels. Through the small but exquisite samples of Johannes own work, we see Hamsun writing poetry in full-fledged Norwegian romantic-style that retells the recent events of Johannes life, contained within a novel that serves as a poetical literary concoction of events from Hamsun’s life. The meta-language of Victoria comes in many, many layers.
Sverre Lyngstad seems to be one of the better, if not the best, English translators of Hamsun's work. After sampling a few other translations through reading several other Hamsun novels, Lyngstad seems to enact the best balance of flow, prose, and accessible syntax. As an added bonus, his introductions are always stuffed with excellent biographical knowledge and viewpoints on the novel. However, the reader should be warned that the 'introduction' would better serve as an 'afterword' as they are rampant with spoilers and other various plot points that could really ruin the book.
While this book did not strike me quite as powerfully as his others, notably Pan, with which is it best compared to, Victoria shows the Norwegian novelist at a crucial turning point in his career and is a short, sharp and intense work that highlights and amplifies many of the themes from its predecessors. While Pan offered more of the emotionally charged and ambiguous behavior that bound Hamsun’s novels forever to my heart, mind and soul, Victoria provides an impressive poetic depiction of the emptiness felt when love, which had previously swelled and burst free from the heart, is denied, covered up, or gift-wrapped and given to someone detestable. This book invokes true, uncomfortable feelings, yet delivers them so exquisitely that we can only be comforted and left desiring more.
3.75/5
I would recommend starting with [b:Hunger|3104354|Hunger|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382142937l/3104354._SY75_.jpg|3135610] or [b:Pan|32590|Pan|Knut Hamsun|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386923711l/32590._SY75_.jpg|132237]
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No