Peasant characters simply trying to live life in the Norwegian backcountry learn to face tragedy and evil, without experiencing absolute disaster, in Knut Hamsun s Growth of the Soil. Thanks in part to a simplistic writing style and calm, almost detached third-person point-of-view, Hamsum blends misery and misfortune with tenderness, wisdom, and even humor. Readers come to learn from and identify with the fortitude, principals, and inner strength of these souls throughout their epic tale of early settler life.
About the Author
Knut Hamsun (1859 1952) was a Norwegian author. He was praised by King Haakon VII of Norway as Norway's soul. In 1920, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for the epic, Growth of the Soil. He insisted that the main object of modern literature should be the intricacies of the human mind, that writers should describe the "whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow". Hamsun's literary debut was the 1890 psychological novel, Hunger, which some critics consider to have been an inspiration for Franz Kafka's classic short story, A Hunger Artist. Hamsun's reputation was severely tarnished by his vehement advocacy of Nazi Germany both before World War II and after Germany occupied Norway in April, 1940. He lionized leading Nazis and in 1943, in the middle of the war, he mailed his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels. Later, he visited Hitler and in a eulogy for the German leader published on May 7, 1945 one day before surrender of the German occupation forces in Norway Hamsun proclaimed, He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations. After the war, due to a finding that Hamsun was in mental decline, efforts to prosecute him for treason were dropped. Nearly 60 years after his death, a recent biographer told a reporter, We can t help loving him, though we have hated him all these years. That s our Hamsun trauma. He s a ghost that won t stay in the grave. In 2009, the Queen of Norway presided over the gala launching of a year-long program of commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the author's birth. On August 4, 2009 a Knut Hamsun Center (Hamsunsenteret) was opened in Presteid, Hamaroy island.
Knut Hamsun believed that modern literature should express the complexity of the human mind, nowhere is that philosophy more evident than in this stunning modern masterpiece, "Hunger". It tells the story of an unnamed vagrant who stumbles around the streets of Norway's capital looking for food. Hamsun creates a stunning portrait of poverty and a biting social commentary on modern urban life. We follow the vagrant in the story around the town and discover the true depths of his hunger. Hamsun is at his best in this classic of modern literature.
Mysteries (1892) is the story of Johan Nilsen Nagel, a mysterious stranger who suddenly turns up in a small Norwegian town one summer-and just as suddenly disappears. Nagel is a complete outsider, a sort of modern Christ treated in a spirit of near parody. He condemns the politics and thought of the age, brings comfort to the insulted and injured and gains the love of two women suggestive of the biblical Mary and Martha. But there is a sinister side of him: in his vest he carries a vial of Prussic acid. The novel creates a powerful sense of Nagel's stream of thought, as he increasingly withdraws into the torture chamber of his own subconscious psyche.
First published in 1894, Knut Hamsun's Pan is former lieutenant Thomas Glahn's retrospective narrative of his life and adventures in the Norwegian woods. A man of fascinating complexity, Glahn is in some respects a modern successor to a long line of "superfluous" men in western literature, an heir to Goethe's Werther and the protagonists of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky.
But this portrait of a man rejecting the claims of bourgeois society for a Rousseauian embrace of Nature and Eros, explores the veiled mysteries of the unconscious by means of thoroughly modern techniques. Pan's quasi-musical modulations of pace and rhythm, its haunting use of leitmotifs which contract and distend time, its startling versions of myth and legend, and its ecstatic evocations of nature in its various phases and moods, all attest to the novel's Modernist innovations.
Pan provides a lyrical, yet disturbing analysis of love and the recesses of the psyche. This superb new translation restores the power and virtuosity of Hamsun's original and includes an informative introduction.
Smooth as glass the water was yesterday, and smooth as glass it is again today. Indian summer on the island, mild and warm—ah! But there is no sun.
It is many years now since I knew such peace. Twenty or thirty years, maybe; or maybe it was in another life. But I have felt it some time, surely, since I go about now humming a little tune; go about rejoicing, loving every straw and every stone, and feeling as if they cared for me in return.
When I go by the overgrown path, in through the woods, my heart quivers with an unearthly joy. I call to mind a spot on the eastern shores of the Caspian, where I once stood. All just as it is here, with the water still and heavy and iron-grey as now. I walked through the woods, touched to the heart, and verging on tears for sheer happiness' sake, and saying to myself all the time: God in heaven. To be here again....
As if I had been there before.
Ah well, I may have been there once before, perhaps, coming from another time and another land, where the woods and the woodland paths were the same. Perhaps I was a flower then, in the woods, or perhaps a beetle, with its home in some acacia tree.
And now I have come to this place. Perhaps I was a bird and flew all that long way. Or the kernel in some fruit sent by a Persian trader.
When it first appeared in 1898, this fourth novel by celebrated Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun captured instant acclaim for its poetic, psychologically intense portrayal of love's predicament in a class-bound society. Set in a coastal village of late nineteenth- century Norway, Victoria follows two doomed lovers through their thwarted lifelong romance. Johannes, the son of a miller, finds inspiration for his writing in his passionate devotion to Victoria, an impoverished aristocrat constrained by family loyalty. Separated by class barriers and social pressure, the fated pair parts ways, only to realize--too late--the grave misfortune of their lost opportunity. Elegantly rendered in this brand-new translation by Sverre Lyngstad, Victoria's haunting lyricism and emotional depth remain as timeless as ever.
