Return to (Norwegian) Family Values

Reading Trygve Gulbranssen's Bjorndal Trilogy (consisting of three novels published in English under the title The Wind from the Mountains) is a strangely comforting experience. Here is a story of rural life in the turn-of-the-century Norway, when, well, men were men, women were women and everybody knew their place in the world. The trilogy follows a prosperous family of rural farmers turned merchants who evolve beyond financial success to find compassion, probity and courage. The book somehow feels both historical and contemporary, almost a reflection of our need to shed the stresses of the modern age for a more simple and somehow a more heroic existence.