The Women At The Pump

In their gossiping at the pumps the women express the poetry, the tawdriness and, above all, the sheer vitality of life in Hamsun’s small costal town. A birth (where did those brown eyes come from?); a marriage (shotgun?); a death in strang circumstances (the victim flattened by a barrel of whale oil); the up – and – down career of the town’s leading citizen and philanderer; the elderly spinster’s preganancy; the inking of the steamship that is the town’s pride and joy.