The Women at the Pump

In their gossiping at the pumps the women express the poetry, the tawdriness and, above all, the sheer vitality of life in Hamsun s small costal town. A birth (where did those brown eyes come from?); a marriage (shotgun?); a death in strang 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 spinster s preganancy; the inking of the steamship that is the town s pride and joy.