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306 Western American Literature thirty years ago T heodore Jorgenson and Nora Solum published a useful biog­ raphy o f Rolvaag, but the volum e under review is the first full-length, published study o f his writing. Reigstad, who is Professor o f English at Pacific Lutheran University and who is well acquainted with the general trends o f Norwegian literature, first undertook this study as a doctoral dissertation at the University o f New Mexico in 1958. But his notes and bibliography indicate that he has exam ined research on Rolvaag appearing between the com pletion o f his dissertation and the publica­ tion o f this book. T he author has also made extensive use o f the Rolvaag manus­ cript collection at St. O laf College, Northfield, Minnesota. Finally, interviews and correspondence with Rolvaag’s late wife add to the value o f the m onograph. T he author’s approach is a familiar one. After pointing out the formative influences o f Rolvaag’s early years in Norway and America, Reigstad undertakes a work by work exam ination o f the novelist’s career. H e stresses the impact o f the stark and bleak physical settings o f Norway and the stern and pietistic religious influences o f Rolvaag’s hom e. Also emphasized are Rolvaag’s interests in Norwegian folklore, cultural conflicts between Norway and America, and immigrants’ attempts at acculturation. Rolvaag’s first works are autobiographical and deal with his struggles to becom e educated and to write fiction. His apprentice novels utilize stereotyped characters, and they are too superficial and preachy. But Rolvaag rapidly improved. Pure Gold, first written in 1920, is a forceful presentation o f a man and woman so caught up in the pursuit o f materialism that they bargain away their cultural underpinnings and sell their souls to Mammon. Reigstad’s most useful chapter is that discussing Giants in the Earth. He utilizes large chunks o f Rolvaag’s diaries and letters to show how the novel came into being. H e stresses Rolvaag’s depiction o f the psychological impact o f the frontier experience on his characters and shows that figures like Beret, despite the terrible ordeals they undergo, more than endure; they are victorious pioneers. Finally, the author’s treatment o f the use o f Norwegian and Old World folklore in the novel is the best I have seen. In short, Reigstad’s study achieves its m odest goal — to discuss Rolvaag “the novelist, rather than . . . Rolvaag the historian or prophet o f acculturation” (p. ix). His approach am algam ates plot sum m ary with adequate analysis o f individual works, and he thus provides a useful reading o f Rolvaag’s novels. RICHARD W. E TU LAIN, Idaho State University Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta. By Pablo Neruda, (Translated by Ben Belitt). (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972. 184 pages, $7.95.) Robert Heilm an and other Western literature critics have com m ented on the dearth o f tragedy in the genre. Rarer have been tragedies based upon the Spanish­ Reviews 307 speaking people who populated much o f the West and Southwest during the nineteenth century. Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda’s Splendor and Death ofJoaquin Murieta is just such a tragic drama in verse set in the gold country o f California. Murieta was a Chilean who joined other Latins in a quest for el oro. He left Valparaiso to slave for gringo dollars in 1849 and arrived in San Francisco with his new bride Theresa. Neruda depicts the young married as innocents. Their tragedy will echo a them e from Shakespeare’s King Lear in that “N othing will come o f nothing.” Murieta’s search for the precious ore is thus described in Scene Four, “T he B loodhounds and the Death o f Theresa.” N othing — not drought or the sting o f the serpent in hiding — dismayed him. H e drank down the glass o f his fever and the frost o f the night, yielding nothing, esteem ing his w ounds and his passion as nothing. After several bitter encounters...

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