Books: Small Things

THE WOMEN AT THE PUMP — Knut Hamsun—Translated from the Norwegian by Arthur G. Chater—Knopf ($3).

Daily the women gather at the pump to fetch water—and to discuss the myriad affairs of the small town, for in a town where only Blacksmith Carlsen and the Postmaster are religious, there is plenty to discuss. The parson may be busy enough christening and confirming, but like as not the christened child has no right to the name, the confirmed is no longer the virgin she should be. There was always a new suspicious twist in the affairs of the carpenter, the fishermen, the doctor, the pompous Consul. And Oliver, swashbuckling sailor returned legless from a storm at sea, would no doubt lose his sweetheart to the steady carpenter. But Petra married Oliver in spite of the gossip, and bore five children. Of course the brown-eyed boys might belong to Consul Johnsen, wealthy shipper, and the youngest was no doubt fathered by the lynx-eyed Lawyer—but the Doctor, who fostered this gossip by certifying Oliver's sterility, bore a time-honored grudge against both shipper and lawyer. So Oliver continued squabbling, capitalizing his crippled state, trespassing on distant islands for illicit loot—birds' eggs and eiderdown which he smuggled on stormy nights to transient English sailors. "Small things and great occur, a tooth falls out of the jaw, a man out of the ranks, a sparrow to the ground."

To Knut Hamsun, life rings true not so much in cataclysmic passions—love, hate, pride—as in lesser foibles, jealousies, spite, prevarication, occasional kindness. His meticulous record of pettiness is intense in its authenticity, disheartening in its cumulative drabness.