Mapped
Hunger
Knut Hamsun
The book calls the city Kristiania (Christiania in its own spelling); that is the old name for Oslo, which the capital carried until 1925. The unnamed narrator paces it in a fever of starvation, up and down Carl Johann Street, out to the fortress by the sea, and down to the wharves. Hamsun keeps to real streets a hungry man can still walk, and it brings Norway into the atlas.
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Kristin Lavransdatter
Sigrid Undset
In fourteenth-century Norway, Kristin, daughter of the landowner Lavrans in the Gudbrandsdal valley, defies her betrothal for a passionate, ruinous love, and lives out a long life of desire, guilt, motherhood and faith that ends amid the Black Death. Undset's Nobel-winning trilogy maps a real medieval Norway: the valley farm of Kristin's childhood, the cathedral city of Nidaros where she seeks absolution, the convent at Oslo, and her husband's estate in Trøndelag.
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