Sigurd Hoel was one of Norway's major novelists of the twentieth century. Fictionally--with dry humor and a sense of tragedy--he recorded the psychological problems of the intelligentsia, his contemporaries in the capital of Oslo. His major theme was that of betrayal, one that also haunted him in his few ventures into historical fiction. His novels were published from the 1920s to the 1960s. Several of them remain popular: they are often reprinted and are subjected to much scholarly scrutiny.

The work that initially made a name for Hoel, Syndere i sommersol (1927; translated as Sinners in Summertime, 1930), has much in common with J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951). When each was published, friends told friends that this novel had to be read; young people found that the two short works portrayed them--and exposed their foibles--with humor and charm. Like Salinger's novel, Syndere i sommersol offers an often...