Women at the Pump

In their gossiping at the pump the women express the poetry, the tawdriness and, above all, the sheer vitality of life in Hamsun''s small coastal town. A birth (where did those brown eyes come from?); a marriage (shotgun?); a death in strange 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 ...