Alberta & Freedom

by Cora Sandel

Book Overview

Cora Sandel was one of the most important Scandinavian writers of the 20th century and this is the second volume in her richly acclaimed Alberta trilogy. Alberta Selmer escapes from her cold suffocating provincial life in Norway to seek out the summer riches in Paris: a city where the bohemians will never die, where there is absinthe and endless talk of Cubism. But Paris is not all she imagined: although she begins to write small pieces for newspapers and periodicals, Alberta's self-esteem is low, and her inexperience makes her prey to the casual approaches of predatory men. Relationships, when they happen, are neither easy nor happy. Feeling her talent beginning to suffer and her freedom stagnating, Alberta faces a struggle to survive. After its publication in 1931, "Alberta and Freedom" established itself as an immediate classic and Alberta Selmer as one of the century's great anti-heroines.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0821407589
• ISBN13: 9780821407585
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Length: 254 Pages
• Weight: 0.13 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The struggle to write

This, the second book in the Alberta trilogy, breaks with the past in more ways than one. While the first book concerned itself with the struggles of an adolescent girl growing up in a cold and alienating small town in Northern Norway, the first book examines Alberta's life seven years later. She is now a woman living on the fringe of the expatriate artist community in Paris, and she struggles to maintain her autonomy, develop her voice as a writer, and stave off crushing loneliness and poverty. Sandel is a master of Norwegian prose fiction, and although Alberta's situation is often desperate, the writing is always exquisite.