Young love and class

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34047, 10 January 1976, Page 8

Young love and class

Victoria. By Knut Hamsun. Souvenir Press. 170 pp. N.Z. price $3.45. First published in 1878, this short love story by a Norwegian Nobel Prize winner has’ been republished as a paperback in a new translation by Oliver Stallybrass. Charming though it is, the story has the stiff formality of a piece of Hardanger embroidery, the measured simplicity of an old folktale. “Victoria” tells of gentle Johannes the miller’s son and his love for the daughter of a local landowner. Although he is to travel and become a famous writer with liberal views, in his youth the strictures of class are very real, and he hardly considers the possibility of Victoria returning his love. Of course Victoria loves him dearly, but she cannot break through his shyness, and his certainty of the social gulf between them. In the true tradition of such tragic tales, as soon as one difficulty is removed another takes its place, and the lovers are doomed to remain apart.