The Making of Daniel Braut
Published on 28. February 2008
Book
Paperback/Softback
256 pages
978-1-870041-81-2 (ISBN)
Description
Daniel Braut, the protagonist of Arne Garborg's ground-breaking 1883 novel, is an impressionable boy whose one ambition is to rise above the poverty of his farming background in western Norway. Regarded by others as gifted, he sees education as the path to becoming part of the establishment. However, his long struggle is not only hampered by his desperate poverty, his unrealistic dreams and his provincialism, but takes a terrible toll on his personality. He is a mirror of his age, of a Norway slowly emerging from a predominantly peasant society into a modern urban culture, and of the religious, political and social upheavals of the late nineteenth century. Marked by a puritanical childhood in Jaren, a district and a mindset from which he early distanced himself, Arne Garborg (1851-1924) was a writer who was left rootless and in conflict with himself, always searching. His writing reflects his personal crises, but also the linguistic and intellectual development of a country struggling to free itself of foreign influence and religious bigotry, and assert its independence.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Norwich
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 196 mm
Width: 128 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-870041-81-2 (9781870041812)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Described as the most naturally intellectual writer of his generation Arne Garborg (1851-1924) was the first major writer to emerge from the peasant-farming community of Norway in the second half of the nineteenth century. Breaking with his puritanical, and conservative peasant culture, he moved to the capital, Christiania, to become a writer. Rejecting 'peasant romanticism' he described from the inside the problems facing a whole culture in an age of rapid change, and he was deeply aware of the problems associated with this change: the intellectual, moral and sexual confusion and the possibility of losing one's way and going under. All these are issues he explores in his novels of the 1880s (The Making of Daniel Braut, Mannfolk (1886, Men) and Hjaa ho mor (1890, Living with Mummy) and in Tratte Mand (1891, Weary Men), the novel in which he grapples with decadence. In the 1890s Garborg returned to his roots, and after writing the deeply personal and compassionate work Fred (1892, Peace) about a farmer who, like Garborg's father, becomes swept up in fanatical pietism and ends up committing suicide, he began to draw on the folk-culture, landscape and traditions of Jaren in western Norway to produce Haugtussa (1895, The Hillside Maiden) a cycle of seventy poems and several works in which he tries to find his way to a more humane Christianity. A complex mix of sharp intelligence, analytic ability and a deep emotional need for roots and faith, Garborg wrote with irony but also deep compassion, and in the latter part of his life, lyricism. He was also the first writer to show that New Norwegian could function perfectly as the language of literature.