Alberta and Freedom

Description

Alberta Selmer escapes from her cold, suffocating provincial life in Norway to seek out the summer riches of Paris: a city where the bohemians will never die, where there is absinthe, endless talk of cubism and the petrol engine is replacing the horse on the Champs Elysees. However, Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century is a huge sea on which Alberta and her freedoms are cast. With no connections, few work prospects and little money, Alberta is forced to become an artists model. She poses for an English artist until her limbs ache to keep herself from starvation, all the time fearing that news of her occupation might spread to fellow exiles in Montparnasse, or worse still, back to home. Although she begins to write small pieces for newspapers and periodicals, Albertas self-esteem is low and her youth and loneliness cause her to become vulnerable to the casual approaches of predatory men. Relationships, when they happen, are neither easy nor happy. She has not yet found her talent and her freedoms may stagnate.

CORA SANDEL was born Sara Fabricus in Oslo in 1880. After a difficult childhood in the northern Norwegian town of Tromso, she wrote the semi-autobiographical Alberta trilogy. These novels earned her an immediate place in the Scandinavian canon but it was not until the 1960s that Sandel, now living as a recluse, was discovered by the English-speaking world. her books were acclaimed in the mainstream press, and feminist critics reinvented her as a champion of womens emancipation.

Ahead of her time ... Like Virginia Woolf, though much tougher. Beneath the surface is a surprisingly melodramatic plot about artists quarters, sordid interiors and even abortions fictional bait for the ordinary reader. What does matter is the way Sandel sees things. A classic. - Times Literary Supplement; A sure poise and distance that has deserted the novelist today ... it is all there, the pressures of economic, psychological and social forces that have combined to place Alberta where she is. - Guardian; Told with vivid imagery ... Sandels prose has a poetic ring that has lost nothing in translation. It is a story of great pathos. - Punch