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.

Translated by: Marie Wells