A novel by Norwegian-born nobel prize winning author
Knut Hamsun.
Written in 1898,
Victoria is a literal love story, a story of love and
the nature of love. I cannot tell if it loses something in its translation, but even in english its highly
poetic language comes through nicely in many parts.
Our narrator tells us the life story of Johannes, a miller's son who has been in love with one woman his entire life, the book's
namesake, Victoria. Their lives are lived apart after their
childhood together, and apart they live strangely incomplete lives, though every
happiness is afforded them. The plot is interwoven with Hamsun's own ideas of love, it's joys, obstacles and
pitfalls, which are expressed through Johannes' writing later in life. An excerpt:
What, then, is love? A wind whispering among the roses - no, a yellow phosphorescence in the blood. A danse macabre in which even the oldest and frailest hearts are obliged to join. It is like the marguerite which opens wide as night draws on, and like the anemone which closes at breath and dies at a touch.
Such is love.
It can ruin a man, raise him up again, then brand him anew. Such its fickleness it can favour me today, tomorrow you, tomorrow night a stranger. But such also is its constancy it can hold fast like an inviolable seal, can blaze unquenched until the hour of death.
What, then, is the nature of love?
This is typical of
Hamsun's fleeting but nonetheless coherent
prose, as he
moralises about life, love and death.
Victoria is one of four of Hamsun's works that I have read. The other three were
Hunger,
Mysteries and
Growth of The Soil, the latter of which I believe is available online through the
Project Gutenberg website.