Good Book: The Third Life of Per Smevik, by Ole Rolvaag

Ole Rolvaag, later famous for Giants in the Earth, wrote his first novel under a pseudonym because it was ‘too personal’ to put out under his own name. Amerika-breve, which translates as Letters from America, appeared in Norway in 1912, under the name Paal Morck. (Both Rolvaag and Morck feature the vowel that looks like an o, but has a right-leaning slash through it. I’ll fix this entry if I can figure out how to do that in this program.)

Ella Valborg Tweet, Rolvaag’s daughter, and granddaughter, Solvieg Tweet Zempel, translated it, and it came out as The Third Life of Per Smevik in 1971 in hardback from Dillon Press, and in 1987 as a Perennial Library trade paperback from Harper & Row. Tweet also wrote the introduction, which is, in essence, a short biography of Rolvaag.

The ‘third life’ of the title is explained in the first letter the young Norwegian immigrant to Clarkfield, South Dakota, writes home. He explains that it feels like he has led two lives on Earth already, the first being the nearly 21 years he lived in Helgeland, and the second one consisting of his trip from there to South Dakota. He tells his father that the second life, although just over three weeks long, seemed longer than the first life. His third life, he says, is starting in America.

The narrator of the novel has to adjust to a new country at the same time he is growing from a boy to a man. As the back cover copy of the Perennial Library edition says:

…Per Smevik is an astute observer and sensitive reporter of life in America at the turn of the century, of the immigrant’s experience, and, in the memorable story of his third life, of the tragicomical aspects of every man’s life…

This title is on my “Books I Wish Someone Would Put Back in Print” list. As of this posting there were 36 copies at abebooks.com, 32 copies at Alibris, 31 at bn.com, 21 at Amazon, and 9 at biblio.com.

Hmmm. Amazon lists the author’s last name as R2lvaag. I guess I might leave my o’s just the way they are, even if they should have a slash through them.