Novel
Alberta and Jacob
Alberte og Jakob
Cora Sandel · 1926
Synopsis
In a small town in the north of Norway, Alberte Selmer lives a stifled adolescence between a father known as the Magistrate and a mother in open war with him, in an impoverished bourgeois family that exhausts itself keeping up appearances. Her brother Jakob, who is given the education that is denied to her, cares little about it. Shy, kept apart from young people her own age, Alberte cannot yet put a name to her desire for another life.
Context
The novel appeared from Gyldendal in 1926, and the publisher recalls that it was an immediate success. It opens a trilogy, continued in 1931 and in 1939, which according to Gyldendal draws on the author's life and follows Alberte's slow maturing into a woman and an artist; an English critic recognises Tromsø in the unnamed town. Elizabeth Rokkan translated it into English in 1962, Charles Aubry into French in 1991 for Éditions des femmes; the following volume appeared in French only in 2020.
Who it is for
Translated into French and English: a coming-of-age novel in which almost everything plays out in the silence of a house.
Prizes and reception
A success from its release, and the opening of a trilogy in which the publisher sees one of the strongest portraits of a woman in literature.
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