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In a review of the first of this Danish novelist's work to be translated into English, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (Jl. N. M. D., Vol.
87, No. 2, p. 252), attention was called to his rare psychological understanding and insight into unconscious processes. The same qualities are evident in this the second of his novels afforded English readers through an excellent translation by Eugene Gay-Tifft.
Dealing with the lives of six men on a freight schooner sailing from Norway to Iceland and thence to Newfoundland, it offers a steady unflinching picture of the separate nature of the men, their reactions to each other during the voyage, and the psychical impinging of the past on the individual concerned and on the collective reactions of the group.
It is difficult to indicate in a review the psychological mastery Sandemose wrests from the simple lines of the story. His grasp of the mental and instinctual conflicts motivating the characters is such that there results not only a fine series of interrelated psychological portraits but a whole impression of the nature of psychoinstinctual reaction once the checks and “safeguards” of ordinary collective living have been removed. What is thrown overboard, what retained, and how much of the latter as seen through the behavior of the specific types presented serves to magnify the mechanisms of more average experience, is no less the weight of the story than the eventual fate of the ship. It is this capacity of cutting through the façade of civilized scotomata to lay bare more of what lies at the core of human reactions that ranks Sandemose with those who through literature have given man a deeper view of himself.
In the novel the level of psychological reality is one with that of external events. This has been emphasized by the prefacing of each section with symbolic episodes and passages in which a series of dominant psychological motifs are expressed, the main lines of which seem at times to abstract the elements of conflict and