SIESTA

"You travel around a bit, you wander from place to place and you have the fate of bumping into people you have seen before, meeting them suddenly, in unexpected places, so that out of surprise you quite forget to take off your hat and greet them. This happens to me often, yes very often. There is nothing you can do about it. ("The Queen of Sheba")"

1897

Siesta (1897) is a collection of twelve short prose texts. The texts are of varying length, but the majority are told by a first-person narrator who himself takes part in the action.

The opening text "The Queen of Sheba" tells of the narrator's inexplicable fascination with a beautiful woman, a fascination that lasts for several years and eventually takes him across national borders. "Reiersen av Sydstjernen" depicts the aging skipper Reiersen's last trip to the northern Norwegian klippfiskbergen, and his encounter with one of the lovebirds of his youth. The story is said to have inspired the novel Svermere (1904).

Most of the texts in Siesta had been published previously, and Hamsun described the book as "a collection of little things".