The Family at Gilje: A Domestic Story of the Forties

The Family at Gilje: A Domestic Story of the Forties

The story of Jonas Lie's life, even though told in brief, will readily yield the key to the various phases of his strange authorship. No one of his long list of books is an adequate index of his powers. The special character of each is the outgrowth of peculiar traits of natural endowment in conjunction with definite facts and experiences of his life. Some of the features of his genius seem strangely incongruousas different as day and night. These features are clearly reflected in his writings. By critics he has been variously proclaimed "the poet of Nordland," "the novelist of the sea," or "the novelist of Norwegian homes," and is commonly classed as a realist. His reputation and great popularity rest mainly upon his realistic novels. In this field he ranks as one of the leading portrayers of character and social conditions in modern Norse literature; and of his realism The Family at Gilje is possibly the best illustration. Yet there was much more than an ingenuous realist in Lie.1 He was also a fascinating mystic; a teller of fantastic stories, profoundly symbolic in character; a great myth-making raconteur of grotesque tales that have a distinct folkloristic flavor,viii particularly as found in his two volumes entitled Trold. This part of his authorship, though it does not bulk large, and, naturally enough, has not been fathomed by the general reader, is nevertheless a very important part, and is surely the most original and poetic. It appears in a definite though restrained form as mystic romanticism in his first prose work, Second Sight, and then scarcely a trace of it is seen until it bursts forth, twenty years later, with the vigor of long-repressed passion. It would therefore be unfair to judge Jonas Lie by the single novel in handas unfair as it would be to judge Ibsen by a single one of his social dramasThe Pillars of Society, for instance. In Ibsen the imaginative power displayed in Brand and Peer Gynt did not in the social dramas reassert itself in anything but an adumbration of the abandon and exuberance of the dramatic poems. In Lie, however, the mystic and myth-maker reappeared with strength redoubled. Erik Lie, in a book on his father's life (Oplevelser), says with reference to this: "If it had been given to Jonas Lie to continue his authorship in his last years, his Nordland nature would surelysuch is my beliefmore and more have asserted itself, and he would have dived down into the misty world of the subconscious, where his near-sighted eyes saw so clearly, and whence hisix first works sprang up like fantastic plants on the bottom of the sea." There is not a trace or an inkling of this clairvoyant power in The Family at Gilje. Its excellences are of a distinctly different nature. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 55646
Author: Lie, Jonas
Release Date: Sep 29, 2017
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Eastman, Samuel Coffin, 1837-1917