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Customer Reviews (51)

Beautiful novel, limited ideology...
Growth of the Soil is a book about Norwegian peasant life. The main story revolves around a character named Isak who sets off into the forests of Norway in search of a suitable site to build a farm. We follow Isak through the various seasons of his life as his original turf hut becomes a real house, he gets married, raises a family, and slowly but surely a small community begins to grow up around him.

The story is told in simple, but beautiful, prose, and though the characters are simple in many ways they are deeply human. Knut Hamsun is excellent in describing the small vanities that assail people, even `simple' country folk. Each character in the novel has their own peculiar source of vanity whether it is Inger's ring, Eleseus's walking stick, or Isak's ability to do a seemingly endless amount of work. But there is no fire and brimstone in Hamsun's descriptions of human vanity, only understanding, and humanity, and humor.

Even Inger's propensity to fall in love with just about every worker who comes to stay on the farm is not portrayed as some monstrous character flaw, but as an understandable human foible with its own season and its own resolution. An ordinary novel might have turned Inger's acts of infidelity into a central plot element, or a central complication around which the entire story would revolve, and finally come to some dramatic (and perhaps tragic) conclusion. But that is not how Hamsun's novel is structured. Hamsun's novel is structured like the seasons themselves, each event comes in its own time, dominates the story for awhile, and then goes in its own time without the necessity for any great human action, or dramatic resolution.

There is also a certain mystical aura which pervades the whole novel. Life in the wilds is not entirely dominated by the will to survive, "life there is not all earthly toil and worldliness; there is piety and the fear of death and rich superstition" (pg. 180). For, as Hamsun writes, "In the wilds, each season has its wonders, but always, unchangingly, there is that immense heavy sound of heaven and earth, the sense of being surrounded on all sides, the darkness of the forest, the kindliness of the trees" (pg. 178).

There are a few episodes in which this mystical sense, which remains as a background through most of the story, becomes explicit and takes center stage. One evening while Inger is standing outside listening for the cowbells she hears some tiny baby fish, who spend their entire life in a small tarn and are of no use to anybody, singing softly, "It was the tiny fishes song" (pg. 179). Another evening Isak is out gathering lumber and he sits down to rest for a moment, all is quiet around him, when he sees a pair of eyes which he believes to be the "Evil One".

Another incident involves Isak's son Sivert, and I think I better let Hamsun describe it in his own words, "Sivert, walking one evening by the river, stops on a sudden; there on the water are a pair of ducks, male and female...Sivert stands looking at the birds, looking past them, far into a dream. A sound had floated through him, a sweetness, and left him standing there with a delicate, thin recollection of something wild and splendid, something he had known before, and forgotten again...twas' not for worldly speech. And it was Sivert from Sellanraa, went out one evening, young and ordinary as he was, and met with this" (pg. 376-377).

Though these episodes never become the central focus of the story they create a kind of mystical atmosphere that pervades the whole novel. Hamsun's world is saturated with spiritual values.

A final word needs to be said about Hamsun's support of the Nazis. It is certainly true that a reader coming to this novel for the first time, who knew nothing of Hamsun or his regrettable political allegiances, would never guess that they were reading the work of a Nazi sympathizer. There is nothing overtly racist in the book or overtly political. So one should not let Hamsun's personal life effect one's enjoyment of this book.

But I am afraid that I cannot completely go along with those reviewers who see absolutely no connection between Hamsun's work and his Nazi sympathies. A major theme of this book is the contrast Hamsun creates between the "materialistic" values of the city, and the more "spiritual" values of the country. Hamsun is not simply describing what it was like to be a farmer at a certain place and at a certain time. There is also a certain sense of nostalgia for a way of life that seems to be being destroyed by unbridled materialism, by money, and by rationalism.

While I have some sympathy with Hamsun's concerns about the problems raised by a life more and more dominated by materialistic and rationalistic values, his proposed solution (at least as presented in this book) seems reactionary and counter-progressive to me. The celebration of peasant life, and peasant values, led many people to support the Nazis (who celebrated similar values) who should have known better (I am thinking of Heidegger). That is why I give the book four stars instead of five.

As a novel Hamsun's book is beautiful and well worth reading. But as ideology, or as a solution to the problems facing modern society, I think it is sorely lacking...

-Brian

Simple yet frustratingly beautiful.
When your are living your life you don't get surprised about every moment; for instance when birds are chirping together at the end of a day or some old lady talking about a husband died a week ago. We don't care these small everday details because this is life bare. But if someone writes a book about simple life of simple people and manages to succeed you may say that is god's work. Hamsun is no god of course and i doubt he believes in it but i must admit that there much more difficulty in picturing the original country people than intellectual, intriguing, complicated fictional characters of modern novel that are cought up in unbelievably odd situations. What makes this book a masterpiece is that you suddenly believe in whole of it. This is the story of small farmer making himself an honest,hard working big landowner from virtually nothing. There are no tricks of deadly landowning ambitions, bloody boundary conflicts, so called sexual awakenings of isolated teens or the dramas of hired hands and that kind of artificial excitements which are in service of most rural novels to compensate lack of writing skills. No, far from it just simple folk living in the face of the soil like the other countless ones lived from the beginning of time. Their names are Isak and Inger but could have been something else for example Ali and Fatma or Bamidele and Ramla, and not a single sentence would change. This in my opinion is a bold attemp to give a description of what it means to feel a single transcendent moment in which we feel in whole with the world; the first time we understand the meaning of the chirping birds in front f our window. A must read for all ages.

Get Your Hands Dirty!
Growth of the Soil won Knut Hamsun the Nobel Prize for literature for good reason. This epic of the Norwegian wilds tells the story of the simple yet hardworking and practical Isak and his family as they build their farm and their lives with their hands, evoking "the elemental bond between humans and the land."

The story arc of Growth of the Soil is completely different from what most modern readers are used to. In most modern novels the author sets up situations and knocks them down like houses of cards, watching the characters deal with the resulting tragedies. When Hamsun sets us up with what would almost certainly go by way of formula in a modern day novel, he turns and goes in unexpected directions again and again. (*SPOILER ALERT*) When it is discovered that Isak does not have full title to his land we are ready for him to lose it, but he doesn't. When copper is discovered in Isak's mountains, we are ready for Isak to get cheated out of fair payment, but he isn't. When Inger goes to prison she could return a broken woman, but instead utilizes the opportunity to better herself.(*END SPOILER ALERT*)

The characters in Growth of the Soil are deceptively simple people who persevere. When faced with challenges they trust each other and work through them, continually building a better and stronger society as a result. The characters have certain faults, but those faults don't necessarily make them bad people - just people, like you and me. When shocking things do happen, we are completely blindsided by them.

Written in 1917 with amazing foresight, Growth of the Soil also addresses many issues in the forefront today, such as women's rights, incarceration and rehabilitation, abortion, and environmentalism, among others. This is a book that will stay with you and make you think long after you have turned the last page. It is very refreshing to read this amazing work by a master novelist with the subtly deft skill to surprise us again and again.

I am in love with this book and no other.
I read.I read all the time, and I almost only read classics, books written by Nobel Prize winners; to me that prize says something that no other says.This book:It is so deep.How does one explain that?It's deep, but it's simple, tauntingly, hauntingly simple; one has to read it all at once, and it's a long book, but it's like falling in love.I know.This is pure.This is a pure and honest and deep book about being human.One feels enriched, full, deeper, while and after reading it.One learns as one can't in any other way, I know of, that human life, no matter whose, no matter the conditions, is ineffably and profoundly important, beautiful, moving, meaningful, and one has read it in the words of one of the greatest writers who ever lived, and those words are pure poetry in their astounding way of saying so much in so few.Give it time.Let it "grow" on you. Live it; be inside it.Love this book.It is its own reward for being.

Feather Trail Press edition terrible
I have just purchased the Feather Trail Press edition of this fantastic novel, but am disgusted with the quality of the layout. The second line of the cumbersome, wordy description on the back has noticeable typos, followed by several more as it goes on. It almost seems like a non English speaker composed the back description, swapping words, changing sentence structure and unaware of run-on's.

The actual layout in the book is unsightly. Slim margins, courier style font make it un-enjoyable and resembling a dry, dreary term paper rather than a soft, humanistic masterpiece.

Googling Feather Trail Press has offered no results, there is no contact information inside the book, no website, address, etc.

Although I have not inspected it, I would recommend the Penguin classic edition based on past experience. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (35)

Unforgettable, Nagel!
This book is Hamsun's masterpiece. A stranger suddenly appears in a small town and performed a number of extraordinary things. His name is Jon Nilsen Nagel. He is hopelessly different from other people and is an eternal-living contradiction. He contradicts everyone and everything under the sun; he does not understand why other people think as he does.
He falls in love with two women. Despite of his fervent efforts, he cannot have them. He seems to be able to read people's mind; he understands human beings' true nature more than anybody else. He is totally stranger to this earth and ultimately an outsider. Even Nagel is not his real name...
This is my favorite book and reread so many times. You cannot forget Nagel when you finish reading this book!

The mysteries of life
Mysteries tells the story Johan Nagel, a young man who mysteriously appears in a small coastal Norwegian town, unsettles it with his bizarre behavior, and then disappears just as abruptly.

Mysteries does not have a proper plot.Instead the narrative simply follows Nagel as he interacts with the townspeople.Hamsun believed fiction should delve into the intricacies of the human mind, and like the human mind, should move and change directions moment to moment.He didn't think a character should have one dominant trait, which was the fictional mode of his time, but should reflect real life by having many, shifting, and often conflicting traits.Thus we spend a lot of time on the roller coaster ride of Nagel's inner thoughts, which could be alternately reasonable and crazy, arrogant and humble, self-righteous and cruel.

As the title implies, there are many mysteries here.Nagel does not reveal a complete history of himself, and when he does reveal something, it's often in an obtuse way.Sometimes we catch Nagel in lies, and we feel as befuddled and intrigued by him as the townspeople who are also trying to figure him out.But Nagel also catches some of them out in their own lies, and this is where the novel gets interesting, as we learn that they are as unique and conflicted as Nagel.

The main storylines here are Nagel's love for the town's engaged beauty, Dagny, who Nagel harasses while her betrothed is away (he is a military man), and his interest in The Midget, who, as the nickname implies, is a much-maligned midget.Nagel's love is not so surprising given the young woman's charm and beauty. (as Nagel arrives in town, another man has just committed suicide over her just announced engagement) What is surprising is Dagny's response to him, which some might find conflicted enough to explain Nagel's madness for her by itself.In the Midget, Nagel seems to find a project.When he first sees the Midget, he's being picked on.Nagel tries to show The Midget respect to counter his treatment at the hands of the rest of the town, but The Midget resists.Why is this?In these two storylines, we see all the complexities of human relationships, the highs that human nature can attain as well as the lows, and the sometimes inhuman indifference we can sometimes feel for others, as well as ourselves.

Hamsun is not popular here in America for his style, which eschews plot for sometimes rambling emotional narrative.(Hamsun is one of those many cases in art where an influence of more popular artists is neglected in comparison to the influenced.Hamsun influenced many of the giants of early twentieth century literature, including Faulkner, Hemingway, Kafka and Joyce.)But, even if this style doesn't appeal to you, I think you'll find many redeeming qualities in his writing.His prose is lyrical, often lyrical enough to pull you through some of the longer voyages of thought.And he reaches for high goals, no less a one than to understand the human mind.This is a noble cause in itself, but what makes him genius is his accuracy in reflecting it.When one finishes reading Mysteries, some mysteries still remain, but we feel like we know more than we did before about human nature, and that's important.If you've never read Hamsun before, he's worth a look.

Mysteries, a Novel
I gave this as a gift to my mother who is very well read and also a critical reader.She said the book was fascinating and a great read. I look forward to reading it myself.

Marred by an unbelievable and pathetic protagonist
Based on my appreciation of other novels by Knut Hamsun and the near unanimity of favorable reviews of MYSTERIES here on the Amazon site, I fully expected to enjoy this novel.Alas, it didn't measure up to expectations.Were I writing this review and awarding Amazon stars a century ago, I might well have been more enthusaistic and perhaps even have awarded the book five stars.The novel certainly presents a memorable young protagonist, thoroughly disaffected with modern life. But unease with society and life itself has become a familiar theme in the 100+ years since MYSTERIES was published, and many more recent novels handle that theme better, less verbosely, and through a much more convincing protagonist.

And it is the protagonist, Johan Nilsen Nagel, that is the biggest problem with MYSTERIES.As in initial matter, he is so eccentric that, to me, he is not a believable character.Putting that aside and accepting him as he is presented, Nagel is extremely self-centered and arrogant, and he is irresponsible and unreliable.He is at odds with the world and as a result he ends up toying with his life (which, although not ennobling, is his prerogative) and with other people (which is not).I recently read another Scandinavian novel from roughly the same time, "The Serious Game" by Hjalmar Soderberg, and it is interesting to contrast the protagonist of that novel, Arvid Starjblom, with Nagel.The two experience some of the same existential dilemmas -- including the mysterious and destructive compulsion of romantic love -- yet Starjblom does not abjectly surrender and he retains some honor and dignity.Maybe it is that Starjblom has a conscience whereas Nagel is utterly self-absorbed and unscrupulous, even nihilistic.Nagel ultimately comes to a bad end, but he is such a pathetic character that I was not particularly bothered by his comeuppance.

Hamsun sprinkles MYSTERIES with a few noteworthy observations on the politics and society of his time, including the pithy critique of Marxism that it is based on "a false premise--namely, that all men are equal."But the quality of the writing is not of the first order. The novel is simply too long, too filled with Nagel's mental histrionics and his natterings.On the plus side, this edition includes an introduction by Sven Birkerts and an afterword by Isaac Bashevis Singer, both of which are worthwhile.

mystery of mysteries
Mysteries. I read it forty years ago. And have many times since. It is inexplicable, there is no summing it. Nothing you can say that isn't just words.

I look at my hand holding this book, and it looks different than the one that turned the first page so long ago. Older. And that's a surprise. This surprise of time and space, life, compressed, love, loss, youth, and the fundamental innocence of perception... self-destruction as life is, by being lived, self destruction ... all of this succumbs to a single singing moment of Nagel's bow on the violin string in Mysteries, and then disappears into the modesty of the final inevitable anonymity. No distinction between chaos and order.

Just the heart as it was.


... Read more

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Customer Reviews (10)

Hunger as a great teacher?As inspiration?
I first read "Hunger" when I was in my twenties and I was stunned.It seemed such a tour de force of...something.I didn't know what it was, but to me it was authentic in a way that all literature should be.Hamsun's nameless hero was certifiably mad--crazy by almost any standard, yet he was sane I thought in his deliberate alienation from bourgeois society, from the relatively unfeeling and "dead" conventional ways of life that most people pursue.Rereading the novel some decades later I see his alienation not so much a deliberate choice but as one forced on him by his nature.He alienates himself from society because he believes he is superior and because he cannot help himself.Despite his abject poverty his greatest drive is to avoid losing face or what he thinks of as his honor.

Thus he would rather starve that steal; he would rather go without food than ask for money from people he knows since in doing so he would lose face.When he gets change from a five kroner note that isn't his he feels so guilty that he tosses the money at a street cake seller to show that he doesn't need to stoop to stealing to survive.He is above that.Yet later he demands that the cake seller give him cakes for his money, saying that he had paid in advance!Near the end after getting an anonymous ten kroner note from a messenger, he cries out that "This humiliation was the worst of all!Accepting ten kroner in beggar's alms without being able to throw them back to the giver...." (p. 223)He is the man who cannot beg regardless of how hungry he gets.

In this way we see the radical swings in his moods and mentality.These swings of apprehension, understand and feeling are at the very heart of the novel.What Hamsun has done is examine very minutely his own heart and soul during such times (he himself experienced years of hunger when in his twenties just before "Hunger" was published in 1890).And what he discovered was the most amazing heights of emotion followed quickly by the most extreme lows and then back again.He saw these swings as natural to the human condition, these fantasies of mind as real or even more real that the cobblestones of the city or the sun overhead.States of mind come from within but are triggered by some outside event; yet one might find joy in the absurdity of life, a quick sense of power and exhilaration from some small, even imagined, triumph over someone met in the street.One might feel oneself a great hero by refusing a meal ticket since no matter how hungry one is above charity.

Even though Hamsun's hero rants and raves like a lunatic and even though he goes around in dirty rags and sleeps in the street, the people of Christiania (now Oslo) treat him rather kindly.No one whiplashes him.The cops don't throw him in jail.No teenage boys beat him up for kicks as happens to some of today's homeless.Instead they laugh at him--not to his face, but off to the side, after he has wandered off.They pity him as does the whore with the veil, who in her pity finds some excitement in wanting to love this pathetic creature who tears his hair out, who will not take a job but insists on proving to himself and the world that he can make a living from his writing.

What makes this work as literature is that, although Hamsun's hero is maintaining his pride through petty acts and rationalizations and lies to himself, the reader can see (thanks to Hamsun's artistry) that the people around him are amused at his foolish and insane pride, the kind of pride that can...well, as Hamsun's hero himself says on page 227, "...a man can die, you know, from too much pride."

Why pride?From an evolutionary standpoint if a man loses honor or has no pride in himself then he is treated accordingly by his tribe.In dominance rank he is among the lowest and gets just the scraps of society; he gets few or no reproductive chances.Certainly no woman would want to marry him and have his children.We see this poignantly when he is asked by an acquaintance about the woman he was walking with who is a prostitute.To puff himself up he declares that he is her fiancé.

Although Hamsun's hero won't steal, he will lie.He allows himself to lie because he feels deep down that he is not lying.Once he gets his act together as a writer, the recognition and honor due him will come and, yes, such a woman and many others will want him to be their intended.It is all a matter of "gleaning his teeming brain" (to recall Keats).

But the hunger of this novel has a symbolic value as well.The artist must suffer; he must feel and experience extremes in order to have the emotional and experiential authority to be a great artist.Kafka, no doubt thinking of this novel, wrote a short story entitled, "A Hunger Artist," the title implying what Hamsun consciously or unconsciously believed: that the artist must hunger greatly before he can succeed.

And indeed that is exactly what Hamsun himself did.With the publication of this novel began a great career that propelled him to recognition as one of the great literary figures of the modern era, whose work became widely imitated.In 1920 not long after the publication of his novel, "Growth of the Soil," he was awarded the Noble Prize in literature.

Powerful and Painful
Knut Hamsun not only managed to touch the mind of the mad but he also delves into their stomach.This story of paranoia, compassion, and starvation is not one to be missed.

We follow the main character on his daily walks as he contemplates and frightens himself with the looks he receives from strangers, trying desperately to hold on to what little he has and yet find some way to make ends meet just enough to fill his stomach.Hunger is a painful novel in that you find yourself hoping for the best and finding that while your protagonist does as well he endlessly tortures himself.Wanting to simultaneously belong but be left alone we are torn through the painful extremes by a character for which there exists no middle ground.

Knut Hamsun invites us in for the short but worthwhile ride of Hunger, leaving the reader hungry for more and questioning everything they knew about the story by the time it has reached culmination.

"I will make my character laugh"
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
Thus Auden ("In memory of WB Yeats").

Hamsun's hero in Hunger is restless,provocative,insolent,egotistical,given to swoops of joyful lyricism and the utmost humiliation and despair as he begs,borrows,starves,lies and cheats his way through his days in Kristiana in the late 19th century. His moods are always changing like the weather,laughing, shouting,talking to himself, crying, angry.His bouts of starvation empty and hollow him out,make him hallucinate,give him delusions of writing the next masterpiece,a refutation of Kant in 3 parts,which he doesn't do,but it gives his feverish mind a goal.The main poles of his existence are the Editor,his Landlord,the Baker and the Pawnshop.Not forgetting the policeman.

His lies become as truthful to him as the truth and he acts them out. God both exists for him to rail at, or doesn't exist. Andreas Tangen(we only learn his name half way through) most definitely does exist! He starves for the next crust of bread, while searching for work,he also starves for inspiration to write. He swings between pride and humility. His pride will not allow him to take money when he needs it, and makes him charitable when he can't afford it.He pawns the clothes off his back to give the money to another wretch.He perverts and distorts the Christian ethic, and, as in Doestoyevsky's Notes from the Underground,has hopes of gaining salvation through degradation and suffering.

His attention is seized by everything,riding on a chain of moods through the back streets of Kristiana,'flies and gnats stuck to the paper...I blew on them to make them go away,then blew harder and harder,but it was no use. The little pests lean back and make themselves heavy,putting up such a struggle that their thin legs bend.' He is given over to bouts of elation while writing. He sucks on stones when he is hungry. He wanders aimlessly in Hamsun's plotless novel,his poverty becomes a lodestone of wealthy perceptions.Every now and then the Editor takes pity and gives him money for an article,which lasts a few days,then the starvation all begins again.

Without the stub of a pencil he is lost.His clothes are thread-bare and shabby. He plays pranks on women to embarrass them.He has fun at other people's expense.He invents new words and new names. He is at one with animate and inanimate nature in her changing cycles.We do not get the sociology of hunger as in Orwell(`Down and Out in Paris and London') but we get the physiology and the effects on the unconscious. Tangen is an aristocrat of the spirit,grandiose and self-elevating. He moves and annoys us.This novel explores the dark nether regions of the human mind in its overture tothe 20th century.This masterpiece,the birth-pangs of a genius.Robert Bly's translation
is energetic and poetic,if not always technically accurate.

Bukowski's Cathedral
I picked up Hunger because I am a fan of Charles Bukowski's writing, and he mentions several times in his works that Knut Hamsun is his favorite author.After finishing Hunger, I understand why - its main character is very real, intensely psychological, living through what he must, learning what he has to learn to heal some broken part of himself. I now realize Bukowski took these themes for his work and made them his own. In the excellent afterword to this edition (must reading), Robert Bly says "...Hunger is a cathedral. It is a cathedral because the whole novel is a resonating chamber for an unknown part of the personality." The central focus of Hunger is precisely what is not there - the part of the main character's personality that makes him do the things he does, the unconscious. Where do the impulses of the unconscious come from, and what do they say about us and about the times in which we live?

Written in 1890, Hunger was a new kind of novel for the 20th century, later influencing Hemingway, Saramago, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Camus, and many others. Hunger is not symbolic. The main character is really hungry as he wanders the streets of Christiana (Oslo) with little in his pockets but a pencil nub and a few sheets of paper on which to write another article he hopefully can sell to the newspaper for a few kroner. He goes for days without eating, writes feverishly, wanders the streets at all times of day and night, contemplates eating his own pockets, tries to pawn the buttons off his own coat, sells some articles, is OK for a while, and then starves again. At times the protagonist seems to lapse into insanity, giving what little he has away and seemingly subverting his own efforts. At other times he appears to be a genius. In the words of Samuel Beckett, this is a type of writing that "admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else."

Hunger's unnamed main character is drawn from Hamsun's own 10 years of being down and out on the streets of Christiana.Hamsun's character was new and shocking because he trusts and obeys the impulses of his unconscious with no judgment, hysteria, or self pity, in direct contradiction to the mainstream literature of the day. Robert Bly states that "there is a sense throughout the entire novel that his starvation was somehow planned by his unconscious - that somehow his unconscious has chosen suffering as a way for some part of him to get well."He goes on to say that "His obedience to the unconscious, even at the cost of physical suffering, is the right thing; it is the road of genius and learning."

In Hunger, we haunt the city streets with Hamsun, live in his mind, and never really leave. Highly recommended.

Excellent character study
I enjoyed reading this insightful and interesting character study of
a writer and his mental and physical struggles. The author takes you inside the flawed characters mind like no other book I have read has ever done. I found
it fasinating. The mind and where it can take you is examined in this wonderful
book. ... Read more

Product Description
A novel by the 1920 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.Written after Hamsun's return from an ill-fated tour of America, Hunger is loosely based on the author's own impoverished life before his breakthrough in 1890. Set in fin-de-siecle Kristiania, the novel recounts the adventures of a starving young man whose sense of reality is giving way to a delusionary existence on the darker side of a modern metropolis. While he vainly tries to maintain an outer shell of respectability, his mental and physical decay are recounted in detail. His ordeal, enhanced by his inability or unwillingness to pursue a professional career, which he deems unfit for someone of his abilities, is pictured in a series of encounters which Hamsun himself described as 'a series of analyses.' In many ways, the protagonist of the novel displays traits reminiscent of Raskolnikov, whose creator, Fyodor Dostoevsky, was one of Hamsun's main influences. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (90)

Hunger by Knut Hamsun
I just purchased a copy of what purports to be Knut Hamsun's classic book, "Hunger".I say "purports" because there is no progeny on the book, no name given for the writing of the introduction to the work.The publication and printing appear to be one off,computer generated, listed as being printed on October 19, 2010 in Lexington Kentucky.The Publisher, Seven Treasures Publications, is not the one listed on the Amazon Sales page

I was led to believe (by Amazon) that this was a translation by Per Lyngvyst, but there is no information whatsoever on the book as to who translated it.

This company also claims the Copyright on this book (2008), which seems fraudulent.If this publisher has purchased the rights, I suppose that is possible, but the likelihood is that the book is in the public domain (written in the 19th century) or renewed by as Estate.

Please explain.

I will be returning the book, but before I spend extensive time criticizing and warning about this company and this method, please send an explanation.

Thanks,

Richard

Maybe a Bit Overrated?
So finally I came across this much praised book by Knut Hamsun. Well in my opinion it is a little bit overrated. I mean it's OK, but it's very repetitive in it's nature. It's the story about this crazy young man running around doing crazy things in Norway's capital, at that time called Christania. There is actually no development in the novel, we just witness these crazy excesses of the principal, things like saying weird things to coincidental people on the streets etc. I think Hamsun envisioned the book as a comedy depicting the craziness and idiosyncrasies of the young artist. People who liked this book should proceed with Sigurd Hoel's "Meeting at the Milestone". That's another good Norwegian book. I think you'll like it!

I wish I had writtten this
The writing may not seem vagrant in regards to other in its genre. I thank Hamsun for that at best. The book seemingly turns the pages itself. It reads like a hurricane, simply lending its hand to our minds eye and lets us into the jaded world of the protagonist and that is what glues the text together, his emotions.

While I don't share the accolades of it being stark reality and frighteningly stark and realistic, in fact I don't believe it to be worded harshly at all, in fact it makes hunger and the struggle for success in absolute poverty all the more appealing, and even more poetic as such.

This was a recommendation from my Harvard Creative writing teacher, who said pay particular attention to who translates it, as it is the key to really understanding Knut's true feelings.

Gripping
Hunger is a psychologically accurate portrait of a hungry man, in this case an artist. Hamsun himself suffered greatly from poverty during several phases of his early life and must have experienced a bit of what our wanderer in the book went through - his genius was able to extrapolate on that to produce this gripping realistic work.

The Scandanavians Were Always Existenalist
I'm reviewing the Dover edition- I've read a couple of these editions, and while they tend to be affordable and readable, the introductions tend to be less interesting then what you see in the Oxford World Classics line.

This is yet another book I read simply because it was in the "1001 Books to Read Before You Die" list- ha!Wasn't dissapointed, it was a quick and fun read.Loved his descriptions of ennui... and hunger! ... Read more

Product Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Beautiful poetic book!
Victoria is the story of Johannes's love toward Victoria. He loves her dearly from his childhood on, but the circumstances prevent them from being together. Victoria loves Johannes dearly, but her family problems cannot allow showing her feelings.
When the time comes for her to be able to express her true feelings toward him, it is too late.
Hamsun wrote deep emotional feelings about love. I believe that he is the greatest writer and Victoria is one of his best writings.
The letter from Victoria to Johannes is deeply emotional and touched readers' heart profoundly. Witout shedding tears, you cannot read this book.

very powerful story in spite of its length
I did not really know how Knut Hamsun was. Just for the sake of defeating the boredom, I looked over the each Nobel laureate in Literature. Surprisingly, there are many authors who are almost completely forgotten now. Where or not they deserved Nobel prize is not my concern and their falling in oblivion perhaps explains their overrated literary merit when they were bestowed the prize. I think one writer whose oblivion and dishonor was not brought by quality of his wrting but his belief is Knut Hamsun.
I first got to know him , when I was reading an auto biography of a certain waffen SS veteran who fought in Artic region. He brought his name several times and mentioned Hamsun was his favorite author. I was more than curious to know this author. Fortunately, Penguinrecently published few of his works. The first one I read was "Pan" , another powerful story that shows Hamsun deserves the epithet of "Scandinavian Dostoevskii"(It is coincidence that both had strongly abohorrent character , namely Nazi sympathy for Hamsun and virlulent anti-semitism for Dostoevskii)
Then, I read "victoria". I was surprising that Hamsun can deliver this sort of love story that is so different from "Pan". If Glahn'suntrammeled passion and Edvarda's unfaithfulness cause the demise of their love in Pan, Johanness and Victoria's love is predestined to doom due to their difference social standing. Hamsun's social critique is simple but powerful; "NO matter how talented and gifted you are, old class system can't be overcome"
Another thing that beckons me waslyrical descrption of town, city and surrounding Hamsun delivers in every single sentence. From begining I strongly notice that Hamsun must have influenced by Storm's "Immensee".
I can't judge whose work is superior .But after reading "Victoria" , I certainly say Hamsun not only deserved the notorious title of being norwegian "Dostoevskii", but also Norwegian "Georg Storm" who influenced so many posterity. It's simply pity that only handful of Hamsun's works have been translated in English. If his obscurity were derived from his political opinion, could we possibly seperate literary merit from politics ?

This novella would make a great movie!
It won't take the reader long to quickly breeze through this touching, tantalizing and tragic tale of two star-crossed lovers - Johannes and Victoria.However once you are through with this novella, odds are you will never forget it.I certainly will carry it's vision with me forever, for it's truly unforgettable.Johannes is the relatively poor son of a miller who secretely pines for the beautiful Victoria, daughter of the lord of the castle (who also holds her admirer, covertly close to her heart).Like many heartbreaking love stories throughout history, the two young lovers are forever separated by their social status, along with quite a lot of bad luck to boot.Hamsun was a man who seemed to find the sublime in sorrow and sadness:"Asked what love is, some reply:It is only a wind whispering among the roses and dying away."This is undoubtedly one of his finest works and by far, his greatest love story.

The real tragedy though, is Hamsun himself.Perhaps the greatest Norweigan writer next to Ibsen that ever lived, most of his great work will forever be tainted by the author's tragic mistake of being a Nazi sympathizer (he wrote an obituary for Hitler in which he referred to him as "a warrior for mankind").However, as deplorable as his misguided beliefs were, there is no denying the profound elegance of his prose.

Hamsun's terse, unpretentious style of writing has influenced countless other greats from Hemingway to Bukowski and it's just a shame that his conservative beliefs and his allegiance to Adolph will forever mar his magnificent works.It's very difficult to believe, that someone who wrote such sensitive, stirring stories such as this one, could have even remotely advocated such atrocities.Again, we have no idea what kind of propaganda he was being fed at the time while living in the German occupied Norway during WWII.Regardless, he is a writer that deserves more attention than he gets here in the U.S.How many Noble Prize winning authors (he was awarded it in 1920) are lesser known than him?Not many.

This is a beautiful love story, but a definite tear-jerker as well. As I referred to in my title, I don't understand why Hollywood hasn't made a movie based on this story yet, especially with all of the recycled garbage it continues to put out.Definitely a worthy read!

The most beautiful European love-story ever?
This is probably Knut Hamsun's' masterpiece when it comes to love stories, and possibly one of Europe's most beautiful love stories. The book is about the son of the old miller, and the daughter of the local "nobleman", the owner of the "Castle". From they are very small and all the way up until the very end he loves her. The parts where they are in the cave and on the island are so beautiful and melancholic. But he being the miller's son, and her being part of the "upper-class", the love is an impossible one. Various circumstances increase the distance between them, and the impossibility of their love, but I won't reveal much. The story is just so beautiful and sad, that it should be required reading for all.

Then comes the fun part, the author; Knut Hamsun, probably Norway's greatest author of all time, was a die-hard "right-wing" anti-modern conservative. This is quite amusing, because all the liberal and anti-European readers just can't wrap their mind around the fact that a person that wrote such beautiful prose was so "abhorrent" in their twisted view. One of his 5 best books and one whose story you'll carry with you forever. Highly recommended!

(I read a different edition)

A classic and simple tale of love
This book has been one of my all time favorites that I read over and over. I'm no scholar, but the love letter Victoria writes at the end is the most inspiring I have ever read. It brings me to tears every time! It is a short easy to read book. It is so beautifully written. I recommend it to anyone who wants to really feel both heartache and true love. It will make you FEEL deeply. I love this book! ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (3)

A fine sampler of stories.
This is a selection of twenty stories, taken from Hamsun's three published volumes of short stories (Siesta, Brushwood, and Striving Life). In the introduction, the editor comments that "the short stories provide a fascinating glimpse of an author shedding one literary skin to reveal another". And, indeed, the diversity of style is one of the most interesting things about the collection. From relatively straightforward ghost stories to the dark humor of "A Lecture Tour", Tales of Love and Loss paint a picture of an author with a wide variety of skills and interest.

Hamsun train spotters will notice character and plot linkages between these stories and several of the novels. In general, even though I really enjoyed the volume I am not sure that it is where I would begin with Hamsun. He was primarily a novelist, and as good as these stories are I have to think that they are to some degree benefiting from the reflected light of his greater works.

Short Stories by a Career Novelist
My understanding from the forward to "Tales of Love and Loss" is that Hamsun was primarily a novelist who "played around with" the short story early in his career.He apparently lost interest in the style because his mid and later career shunned the short story.Too bad because "Tales of Love and Loss" proves that he was adept at it.

The 20 stories in this collection are all sketches of different personalities in different settings.From Norway to the New World and then back to the Old, we encounter a variety of characters.We meet an unsuccessful lecturer, a man with a talent for spending other people's money, a man in the midst of the Paris uprising, a father who sets out to teach his wayward son a lesson about gambling, a woman who knew how to out-fox her scheming husband, a prairie cook who got even in the cruelest of ways, a woman whose life was changed forever by an otherwise forgettable event, and many others.

I got a kick traveling over the Mayan countryside in Yucatan while reading a Norwegian writer tell a tale that took place in my home state of North Dakota.Hamsun shows some of his gift for the bizarre side of the human psyche but most of the stories seem to be people and events he knew or stories he heard first hand.

I have read 8 novels of Hamsun and have looked forward to reading more.However, I had come to near the end of the rope of those available in English.(If I had known about Hamsun when I was in college, I wouldn't have dropped Norwegian after one semester).Two years ago or so I couldn't find any books by Hamsun that I didn't already have.He apparently is undergoing a rebirth of popularity because there seemed to be more books available now than I thought he had written.Many will cite "Hunger" or "Mysteries" as his best but my favorite is still "Growth of the Soil".I'm looking forward to aquiring some of these new releases while they last.If I'm not mistaken, there should be one more collection of short stories out there.After reading "Tales of Love and Loss", my appetite is whet.

Brilliant!
Anyone who is a fan of Hamsun's two most highly-regarded novels ('Hunger' and 'Mysteries') will feel blessed should they stumble upon this not-so-well-known collection of stories.Hamsun is at his best in these timeless tales that carve out a place for Hamsun along with Franz Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Roman Payne, Sam North, Edgar Poe, et al. as a master of the short story. ... Read more

Product Description
The beginning of Robert Ferguson's introduction is arresting. 'If they've heard of him at all, people tend to know two things about Knut Hamsun: that he wrote "Hunger", and that he met Hitler. Those who know a little more know that in "Hunger", "Mysteries" and "Pan", he produced novels that have had a decisive effect on European and American literature of the twentieth century. Ernest Hemingway tried to write like him; so did Henry Miller, who called him 'the Dickens of my generation'; 'never has the Nobel Prize been awarded to one worthier of it'. Thomas Mann wrote in 1929. Hermann Hesse called him 'my favourite author'. Russian writers like Andre Bely and Boris Pasternak read him keenly in their youth, and Andre Gide thought him arguable superior to Dostoevsky. They all read him - Kafka, Brecht, Gorky, Wells, and Musil. Rebecca West described him as the possessor of 'qualities that belong to the very great - the completest omniscience about human nature'. And Isaac Bashevis Singer stated that Hamsun was quite simply 'the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect - his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism'.Singer, in his foreword to "Hunger", goes on to say that 'The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun'. Yet in discussions of the history of modern literature, Hamsun's name is rarely mentioned. His reputation, which probably reached its height around 1929 with the world celebrations of his seventieth birthday, was in ruins by the end of the Second World War. Alone among the major European writers, he had supported Hitler. Brazenly alone, he had hailed he rise and bemoaned the fall of the epitome of spiritual tyranny in recent history'. What a subject, and in this, the first biography, Robert Ferguson brilliantly gets the measure of this awkward, paradoxical writer, or, as he calls him 'a multiple paradox, a living riddle; a human question-mark'. '"Enigma" is scholarly, very readable, warm, intelligent, shrewd, refreshingly unpretentious, invaluable, essential. A magnificent achievement' - Martin Seymour-Smith, "Washington Post". '"Enigma" is simply a pleasure to read.When Ferguson writes of the demonic muse that haunted Hamsun throughout his life, we glimpse something profound about the creative act of writing, and we come very close to the exalted emotion that every writer feels - or hopes to feel. Indeed, the highest praise that can be bestowed on Ferguson's work is to declare that "Enigma" is one of the most moving, inspiring and exciting books on the subject of writing that I have ever encountered' - Jonathan Kirsch, "Los Angeles Times". 'Robert Ferguson's is the first full length English biography of Knut Hamsun and no one could have done a more expert job' - John Carey, "Sunday Times". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Hamsun was a Screwy Guy
I always thought Hamsuns own personal screwiness imposed itself onto the characters of his books. Depending on who you talk to he is either overrated or underrated as a writer. I find him to be a very good but not quite greatwriter. I find it ironic that so many Hitler heads and Euro "new right" types are so into Hamsun because he said he thought Hitler was cool when he was like 90 years old but with the exception of Growth of the Soil he is a very Jewy type writer and was even more so that way in his personal life. Realisticly his pro-Hitler proclamations were probably more than anything due to his life long anti-English sentiments. You have to look long and hard to find anything Hamsun ever said that was even mildly racist. During WW2 there was a famous (at least within Denmark) writer named Nexø that went to Stalin Russia and made radio broadcasts into the west during the war.Even though Stalin killed more people than Hitler nobody really held it against him but Hamsun will pay the price for a long time to come for his quasi support of Hitler.

Like I said Hamsun was a screwy guy. There was a woman who Hamsun claimed was stalking him and sending nasty letters about him to many of his acquaintances. The police watched and followed her for months and found no evidence of any of this. I have to believe that Hamsun orchestrated the whole thing, even sending out the letters himself. He did however live many places and had some interesting observances. On America he says Americans think "the meaning of a work of art is reduced to its cash value" and "instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto stud farm". His observavtions on Muslims while passing through Turkey were "the Koran has created an attitude towards life which cannot be debated or discussed". Overall this was a decent biography of Hamsun.

An Enjoyable and Thought-Provoking Read
I don't take the time to read many biographies, but I have become very intrigued by Knut Hamsun and his writing in the last few years, and so decided to learn a little bit more about his controversial life by checking out Enigma. From the very beginning, I was drawn in by Ferguson's deep research and careful writing, and found that I couldn't put the book down for long without feeling a need to jump right back in. Hamsun led a life that continues to confuse and even anger his modern fans and detractors, and so it is no surprise that his biography is unbelievably interesting.

If you are looking to at last discover the evidence to claim unequivocally that Hamsun was or was not a Nazi, don't bother looking here. On the other hand, if you are looking to gain insight into who the man actually was and what he actually believed (for better or worse), Enigma is well worth a read. Hamsun was a character as fragmented as the ones he wrote about, and Ferguson does an admirable job bringing all the different sides of him to life through narratives, articles, letters, and pictures.

Born to be a writer, Hamsun!
I think that it is a very well written biography book of Knut Hamsun. It dipicts and well studied how Hamsun's own experiences relate to his works. Anyone who loves Hamsun's works must read this book. I am very sure that you will enjoy reading it and will understand Hamsun's attitude towards his works deeply. This book is highly recomended his admires who have read Hamsun's majore books, but not a novice, I guess.

not hungry
I wanted the writing here to be as great as Knut Hamsun's own Hunger--and of course, it simply can't be. I'm not at all sure that it's Ferguson's fault. I wanted to know what Hamsun's mindset was at the time of struggling through his masterpieces like Hunger and Pan and Victoria, I wanted to be able to get inside the great writer's mind...and it just can't be, because the author of this bio wasn't there. If you want psychological insights and great writing you must go to the source: Hamsun's own novels. Yes, you'll getdates and details here in Enigma, but that does not make for interesting and/or engaging reading. I was disappointed. The gifted, self-taught Knut Hamsun remains a favorite, though. One of the giants.

Put 2 And 2 Together People: Read This Book!
i bought this book. i read this book. i lost this book on a bus in one city. i saw someone reading this book in a different city months later. we discussed knut hamsun for 5ive hours. in another city i bought this book again. who among us could read hunger, pan, mysteries, victoria, dreamersand under the autumn star without wanting to know all we can about theauthor? this is as natural as stubbing your toe. if reading the aforementioned books doesnt make you want to know everything about knut hamsun,you are defective. this should be against the law. like not dying of thirstwhen you refuse to drink water.

they call this book ENIGMA people. figureit out. they call it that because knut hamsun was an extremely intrestingperson composed of complex contradictions. and this book also gives asynopsis of every major work hamsun ever produced. something like thatcould very well be termed invaluable, couldnt it? it also is packed full ofanecdotes from hamsuns life. but then again, what did you expect?

didyou know that he was a nazi sympathiser? did you know that he found afingernail in a graveyard when he was a child and was consequentlytormented by a ghost for some time?

oh yeah, if you were worried aboutwhether its "well written" or not, i can assure you that it is.but maybe ive presumed too much. ... Read more

Product Description
Knut Hamsun's "Hunger," a groundbreaking psycho-novel, shows a man reduced by his condition to a point where physiological and mental impulses blow him around like a paper in the wind. The hero in "Hunger" entertains grandiose ideas but can't sustain them for more than a few moments. He engages in pointless antics and gives way to spur-of-the-moment impulses. Though he wails and cries, it's clear he enjoys his degradation. He may be the genius he thinks he is, but could equally well be a charlatan. His contacts with other people are minimal and glancing, and only add to his degraded state. You see life as lived from the bottom, in an atmosphere where desperation acts as a kind of drug. Despite the rambling, the novel's violent mood swings and the violation of fictional protocols actually give it strength. "Hunger" remains a classic not because it was influential or important in the history of the novel, but because it still seems so readable and so true. Though "Hunger" was written in the late 1800s, it is still painfully fresh today. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Fresh and Poignant
Although this book has its dull moments and a lackadaisical absence of direction, its poignancy and penetration into the soul of a man--a young writer struggling to avoid the slow asphyxiation of death via hunger, and to stay afloat atop the dark waters of sanity--is well worth the read.The book owes its success to its brutal honesty (few people reveal their thoughts as completely as Hamsun does; who would want to?) and its fastidious attention to the mental churnings of the protagonist.Although some critics have commented on the protagonist being a narcissistic, egotistical artist, I couldn't disagree more--I suspect that any human being being pushed to the limits of human existence, as the protagonist is, would behave in an similar manner.

Note:The George Egerton translation was done in the early 1900s and many of his word choices have fallen out of popular use; that being said, I felt that this translation captured a poetical quality of the author's speech.

A Norwegian masterpiece
This book is one of Norway's best pieces of literature. It's written by Knut Hamsun, the world-famous author of so many great works. It centres on a young artist; a writer, and his struggle to uphold himself in every way. The book is largely autobiographical from what I can deduce, although we never learn the protagonist's name, and it mirrors the challenges Hamsun himself had as a young author in Norway's capitol. As most of Hamsun's books, it has a lot of bizarre episodes and dialogues, but contrary to what many people seem to think, it's also hilarious. It made me laugh out loud several times, when the main character invents all these surreal ideas and thoughts in his head. As the book progress his hunger takes more and more control over him, and in an unforgettable situation he tries to eat his own finger. He is in a steady decline throughout the book, but I won't reveal much more than that. I love the book, and the fact that it's written by a "right-wing" anti-modern conservative, makes it even better in my view. Hamsun got the Nobel Prize for his later work "The growth of the soil", but this is almost alongside that book in quality. Great, just great!

(I read a different edition of the book) ... Read more

Product Description
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was a towering figure of Norwegian letters. He was also a Nazi sympathizer and supporter of the German occupation of Norway during the Second World War. In 1943, Hamsun sent his Nobel medal to Third-Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as a token of his admiration and authored a reverential obituary for Hitler in May 1945. For decades, scholars have wrestled with the dichotomy between Hamsun's merits as a writer and his infamous ties to Nazism.

In her incisive study of Hamsun, Monika Zagar refuses to separate his political and cultural ideas from an analysis of his highly regarded writing. Her analysis reveals the ways in which messages of racism and sexism appear in plays, fiction, and none-too-subtle nonfiction produced by a prolific author over the course of his long career. In the process, Zagar illuminates Norway's changing social relations and long history of interaction with other peoples.

Focusing on selected masterpieces as well as writings hitherto largely ignored, Zagar demonstrates that Hamsun did not arrive at his notions of race and gender late in life. Rather, his ideas were rooted in a mindset that idealized Norwegian rural life, embraced racial hierarchy, and tightly defined the acceptable notion of women in society. Making the case that Hamsun's support of Nazi political ideals was a natural outgrowth of his reactionary aversion to modernity, Knut Hamsun serves as a corrective to scholarship treating Hamsun's Nazi ties as unpleasant but peripheral details in a life of literary achievement.

Monika Zagar is associate professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Minnesota. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

On the collision of brilliant art and repugnant politics
"Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Zagar's book interview ran here as the cover feature on December 23, 2009. ... Read more

Product Description
One of Knut Hamsun's most famous works, "Pan" is the story of Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, an ex-military man who lives alone in the woods with his faithful dog Aesop. Glahn's life changes when he meets Edvarda, a merchant's daughter, whom he quickly falls in love with. She, however, is not entirely faithful to him, which affects him profoundly. "Pan" is a fascinating study in the psychological impact of unrequited love and helped to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for Hamsun. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A beautiful tale
Pan is a beautiful and broody narrative set in rural scandinavia in the C19th.A love story and a tragedy, and a mystery, all rolled into one.And like many of Hamsun's tales it has far more depth than it appears at first reading.Pan is dedicated to Nagel, the character of Mysteries, which should alert any reader familiar with the book. The same degree of complexity exists in Pan but its often obscured, like hidden paths in the forestland in which its based.And the narrator isn't reliable; he will lie to you as he delivers the tale; to find your way through you need to be receptive to any information. This makes the novel fascinating.

Hamsun is often reviewed through the lens of his old-aged follies, or as some kind of literary punk rocker, but try not to lose sight of the fact that he was always an outragiously talented artist. This is the writer often cited as the father of C20th literature.And this is one of his tender moments.Enjoy!

A splendid glimpse of Norwegian nature and culture in the late 1800's
The book is about lieutenant Glahn that spends a summer in a hunting-cabin in Northern-Norway, living off what he can hunt and generally enjoying nature. He becomes something of a typical Germanic man, at ease in nature, but feeling estranged by the meaninglessness of the modern "West". The descriptions of the nature in coastal Northern-Norway in summertime are quite famous and magnificent. He takes long strolls with his dog, and sleeps out in the wild when he feels like it. He is slowly dragged into the local bourgeois life of the tiny town nearby, and falls in love with the lovely Kielland. The book then takes many strange twists and turns, and I won't reveal much of it. The book is one of his very best, and therefore naturally some of the best literature of Norway. The fact that it's written by one of the few Scandinavian "right-wing" anti-modern conservatives makes it even more of a classic. I don't think you'll find anyone that has read Hamsun that will disagree when I say that this is one of his 5 best books. Highly recommended!

(I read a different edition)
... Read more

Product Description
First published in 1894, Knut Hamsun's PAN recounts Thomas Glahn's retrospective narrative of his life and adventures in the Norwegian woods. 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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (20)

Paradoxical Nature of Man
I am not certain what this book is about. Journal of a psychopath? Man's relationship with Nature? Man dealing with his inadequacies? Man having no idea of his true self? All of the above? All I can say is that Glahn is a paradox in himself and that's why the title Pan. A good read if you like analyzing people's characters and trying to fit them in buckets to find explanations Freudian or Jungian or Apollonian and Dionysian.[...]

Very funny story, very common man
Just a few hours ago I was at a party where the topic of PAN was brought up by a girl who'd read it in school and found it "embarrasing." I argued it's one of the funniest books I've ever read. "What kind of humor have you got!?" was the response I received. Preparing myself to be called a snob by whoever reads this, I really got outraged and wanted to leave the whole setting, but decided to swallow the anger and asked her, diplomatically, why she didn't like it. Her explainations were vague, but what I interpreted out of them was that she found the book inconsistent and the main character just insane. In other words, a more adequate question for her to ask me would be not what sort of humor I've got but what sort of human being I am.

When Lieutnant Glahn throws a woman's shoe overboard, I laugh. "That's what makes you laugh!?" the girl said, as if to indicate that what attracts my laughing bones is primitive slapstick farce. Well, that's not quite it. Place a real man in a real boat and let him throw a real shoe overboard without giving me his motivation, and I'll probably just think he's insane. And that's just it. When I view this episode with Glahn on the boat in context to what is going on inside him, I not only understand but identify myself with him. I can tell you; every single thing this man thinks is something which I, given the right situation, could have thought, and in some instances even have done. There is nothing more mysterious here than a desirable mind led by very common emotional strain, but these are hidden beneath a burlesque surface created by people who don't understand him. If you don't see this, then you may belong to the cathegory of these very people, analyzing everything out of mainstream as sick, and that's your loss. Or the book may simply not be in your taste, which is okay, but I beg anyone to at least try to read this masterpiece before you dismisses it, and then I mean r-e-a-d, not just read. It made me realize quite a few things about myself, gave me a number of great laughs, and is beautifully written as well, so what more can you ask for?

Another person at the party pointed out it was to demand too much that young people of today should be able to identify themselves with what Hamsun wrote in the 1890's. Damnit, back in 1956 you had young men asking girls up to dance with "Heartbreak Hotel" hammering on the grammophone; in 2009 you have young men asking girls up to dance with "Womanizer" (or something) buzzing from the iPod. When I was about 15, just a few years back, I didn't even ask girls up to dance as I was too shy to make such "obvious moves," usually just waiting for them to take contact, and I'd probably have done so in 1894 as well. The settings have changed but we haven't.

A journey into the heart of romantic darkness...
In this thin, powerfully condensed novel, lyrical and poetic and often (and oddly) reminiscent of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," Knut Hamsun delivers a love story that deconstructs love itself--a tale as sharp and deadly as a stiletto, as timeless as a fable, and as thoughtful and thought-provoking as it must have been when first published.

Lieutenant Glahn lives alone in a hut deep in the northern forest. He sleeps when he's tired; hunts game when he's hungry--and in between he does what suits his fancy. He is, by his own estimation, living as freely as a king. Alone in the woods with his thoughts, his gun, and his dog Aesop, Glahn has everything he needs to be perfectly happy. So you know that when he meets and quickly becomes caught up in a game of eroto-psychological peek-a-boo with a woman named Edwarda, there's nowhere to go but down.

Why does Glahn get involved with Edwarda--a flighty, childish, fickle, and unsatisfiable archetypal femme fatale--when he all but knows from the start that the whole affair will make him miserable and end disastrously? It's a mystery--we do irrational things all the time, often against our best interests and our better judgment, in obedience to some irresistible internal force stronger than even the will to live. One of these irrational things we do, Hamsun asserts, is to fall in love.

In Glahn, Hamsun has created a character who memorably illustrates the paradoxical, unpredictable and non-rational nature of the human psyche, which even in so-called "sane" people, is, upon closer enough examination, pitted with lacunae of insanity.

*Pan* is a fierce and bittersweet tale of the impossibility of love and, alas, the impossibility of leaving it behind.

Another good (but not great) novel by Hamsun
To give a brief synopsis a Norwegian man goes to a rural area of Norway to spend several months hunting and living in a cabin in the forest. Most of this book deals with his interactions with the locals of this rural community, in particular two women. One is married but makes herself available in all ways to the main character, the other who fancies herself an aristocrat of some sort seems to be mainly interested in mind games and seeing how many hoops she can make him jump through to please her. Because he is socially backward he often acts in inappropriate ways in social settings and towards her, which both enrages and makes her all the more intrigued by the outsider.

I liked this book, as I do everything else by Hamsun I have ever read, but he always writes good or very good novels but seems to fall short of writing a truly great book. Hamsun was a good writer but I think he is overrated in some quarters. One thing I do like about him is his stories are VERY Scandinavian, not just in predictable ways, but also in very subtle ways that unless you've lived in Norway/Sweden/Denmark that you probably wouldn't pick up on. Overall I liked his Growth of the Soil and Hunger much more than Pan. My favorite piece of Scandinavian literature however would be by another author Beyond Sing the Woods by Trygve Gulbranssen.

The gospel of new romanticism
After disclosing his own eccentric nature in the semi-autobiographical and often hilarious Hunger, all of Hamsun's books got this certain sadness to them, as if he knew his moment of surprise was gone forever and he could never top it.

But to me, Pan is absolute beauty. Because this is the magic of a full integration of man into nature. Because this is dealing with an absolute and unattainable freedom. And because it depicts the irrationalities and hazardousness of mans journey into love.

To acquire the necessary distance to it, Hamsun sat in Paris and wrote it, the story takes place in the Nordland region of Norway where he grew up. Every page is like a poem (although 'the Nordland summer, with its endless day' doesnt at all do justice to the yen singing of the original 'Nordlandssommerens evige dag'). I try to read it every spring and it always sets me back to my youth, to the days of a comfortable lack of concern and to the hurtful struggles of romance.

This book is, as the title suggests, pure pantheism and it is the most precious of poetries out of nordic litterature. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

The final novel by the hands of the storyteller from the North
This is the final book by Hamsun, if you disregard minor material published after he left us, or "On Overgrown Paths", which isn't really a novel in the ordinary sense of the word, but more of an autobiography. Here we meet quite a few characters, but the main one is Abel, the son of the strange and niggardly lighthouse keeper and his alcoholised and dull wife. It starts out very charming, detailing the childhood of Abel and his fellow citizens in the North, like Hamsun does as few others. Abel quickly falls in love with Olga, the prettiest girl in the village, but also a very aggressive and telling representative of the new blend of woman that was emerging in the early part of the 20th century.

You can more or less draw the lines between Edvarda in "Pan", and the Olga we meet 40 years later in Hamsun's life, she is still the calculating and manipulating female that many men have the bad luck of encountering. Few have detailed the game of love as skilfully as Hamsun, although his characters are a bit too promiscuous to my taste at times, they are still charmingly Hamsunesque while they are at it. Abel eventually becomes a sailor on the high seas at a young age, and winds up in Kentucky, where he marries a woman and lives a careless but tramp-like existence. As his father passes away, he is eventually lured back home by the promises of inheritance, and here he is forced to take a more active part in the troubled modern world than his previous way of life made him take.

The book is also very political, as you perhaps could guess from the year of publishing (1936), containing many fine pieces of opinion on the decadent age they lived in, and that has worsened a hundred times over since then. They go dancing at jazz-bars where black musicians play, they drink and they live far above their economical means. Eventually we discover that it is not only Olga that has a dark side to her, also Abel carries with him an awful secret from America that he has fled ever since. Eventually Olga learns his secret, and the results are quite harsh for both of them, perhaps deservedly so.

I quite enjoyed the book, the title being very wisely chosen, bringing Hamsun back to where he started, and more or less marking the end of his active period as an author. Highly recommended reading for everyone from this great "right wing" radical Norwegian author.

(I read a different edition)

The final novel by the hands of the storyteller from the North
This is the final book by Hamsun, if you disregard minor material published after he left us, or "On Overgrown Paths", which isn't really a novel in the ordinary sense of the word, but more of an autobiography. Here we meet quite a few characters, but the main one is Abel, the son of the strange and niggardly lighthouse keeper and his alcoholised and dull wife. It starts out very charming, detailing the childhood of Abel and his fellow citizens in the North, like Hamsun does as few others. Abel quickly falls in love with Olga, the prettiest girl in the village, but also a very aggressive and telling representative of the new blend of woman that was emerging in the early part of the 20th century.

You can more or less draw the lines between Edvarda in "Pan", and the Olga we meet 40 years later in Hamsun's life, she is still the calculating and manipulating female that many men have the bad luck of encountering. Few have detailed the game of love as skilfully as Hamsun, although his characters are a bit too promiscuous to my taste at times, they are still charmingly Hamsunesque while they are at it. Abel eventually becomes a sailor on the high seas at a young age, and winds up in Kentucky, where he marries a woman and lives a careless but tramp-like existence. As his father passes away, he is eventually lured back home by the promises of inheritance, and here he is forced to take a more active part in the troubled modern world than his previous way of life made him take.

The book is also very political, as you perhaps could guess from the year of publishing (1936), containing many fine pieces of opinion on the decadent age they lived in, and that has worsened a hundred times over since then. They go dancing at jazz-bars where black musicians play, they drink and they live far above their economical means. Eventually we discover that it is not only Olga that has a dark side to her, also Abel carries with him an awful secret from America that he has fled ever since. Eventually Olga learns his secret, and the results are quite harsh for both of them, perhaps deservedly so.

I quite enjoyed the book, the title being very wisely chosen, bringing Hamsun back to where he started, and more or less marking the end of his active period as an author. Highly recommended reading for everyone from this great "right wing" radical Norwegian author.

(I read a different edition) ... Read more

Product Description
novel (1920), tr Norwegian by Oliver G Stallybrass ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A very decadent but amusing view of a town in Norway
This tale almost felt like a relative of "Mysterier" by the same author. We never know nor learn for sure quite what is going on, and everyone seems to have secrets of their own. There is also a cripple involved, the main character; Oliver Andersen, a sailor forced ashore when he became crippled after an accident at the high seas. I won't reveal much of the tale, it spins around this character, and all the degradation he and his family go through, both uncalled for and self-inflicted. It is a very humorous book, and feels more like a satire than a serious tale. I felt very unsure if this book is a 3 or a 4 star, but because of all the decadency and promiscuity running rampant throughout the book, I decided on a 3 star review.

All in all, an amusing tale with well-developed human characters, but also somewhat annoying because of its theme. I'd say the book is a 3,5 star book. Not one of Hamsun's best, or amongst his worst. It won't appeal to as many of his fans as his other books do, but for the thoroughly devoted it's a must-read from our very own "right-wing" anti-modern conservative Norwegian.

(I read a different edition)

A satire of the time
1920: The year Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize for his brilliant "Growth of the Soil", this novel was published. While "Growth of the Soil" was the story of the early settlerscultivating the land, "The Women at the Pump" is set in a smalltown and around the time it was written. Again the story spans a couple ofdecades, and is still totally in the grip of the master. Hamsun againdisplays his skills for portraying people, both their inner feelings andhow others see them from the outside. We follow the events and gossip ofthe town, and the author guides us through the citizens' hopes and dreams,joys and miseries. Hamsun moves elegantly between the differences andsimilarities of the peasant and the academic, man and woman, the spinster,the cripple, children and youths. With his finger on the pulse of the time,ironically and tongue-in-cheek, he gives a full picture of the people andtheir day.

Hamsun subtlely reveals one man's ultime shame & degredation
In this brilliant novel from Norway's Knut Hamsun, the readerfollows the activities of Oliver Anderson, a cripple who was maimedwhen a barrel of whale oil crashed down on him, & the gossip about him. Many questions regarding Oliver's home life & family preoccupy the minds of the women at the pump. Many things just don't add up or seem right.Hamsun uses brilliant subtlety and ambiguity to keep the reader wondering what these burried secrets really are. The novel also brilliantly juxtaposes the concepts of the primary concern for the individual & the importance of a village (society) in regards to the consequences of their actions as a whole. Don't let this one pass you by! ... Read more

Product Description
Knut Hamsun Remembers America is a collection of thirteen essays and stories based largely on Hamsun's experiences during the four years he spent in the United States when he was a young man. Most of these pieces have never been published before in an English translation, and none are readily available.Arranged chronologically, the pieces fall into three categories: Critical Reporting, Memory and Fantasy, and Mellow Reminiscence. The pieces in this collection tell us something about the development of the worldview of a man who became a great writer, only to jeopardize his reputation by defending the Nazi oppressors of his own people. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Growth of the Author
"Knut Hamsun Remembers America" is about the 10th book by this Norwegian author that I have read.I was fascinated by his work ever since I read "Growth of the Soil".In "Knut Hamsun Remembers America" we get 13 seperate stories/essays about America and/or his observation of life in America.I was particularly interested in the accounts of his time spent on a bonanza farm in North Dakota, my state of residence for over 25 years now.Hamsun isn't above complaining about a variety of the aspects of American life.He especially seems bothered by the extent of our work ethic (at least in the last 15 years of the 19th Century).His thoughts on the subject are that we do not take sufficient time for relaxation, arts, and literature.It was an interesting insight to the European perspective of American culture that is largely still true in the 21st Century.

The best part of "Knut Hamsun Remembers America" is to be found in the middle of the book amongst his semi-autobiographical fiction about life in the Upper Midwest.Several of these stories were part of the collection found in Hamsun's "Tales of Love and Loss".The stories display the talent of Hamsun as he engrosses us in stories that lack much flair but convey an atmosphere worth experiencing.His final story is another fine example of that style.I enjoyed it yet had to admit that it concerned a recollection hardly worth sharing.Hamsun has always been a shrewd observor of people around him.Unfortunately, his observations during WWII left him without much support as an author in later life.Enjoy the man for what he wrote rather than what he was and you'll see why he won the Nobel Prize for Literature back in 1920 or so.

Absorbing perspectives on American civilization
Written by Knut Hamsun (1920 Nobel Prize winner for his novel "The Growth of the Soil", and who later became infamous for betraying his country of Norway to support the Nazis even as Vidkun Quisling did), Knut Hamsun Remembers America: Essays And Stories 1885-1949 is inherently interesting presentation of thirteen essays and stories based on Hamsun's experiences during the four years he spent in the United States when he was a young man. Translated into English and edited for a contemporary readership by Richard Nelson Current, these individual pieces reflect the negative side of "Yankeeland" all too well, though they are not unilaterally anti-American, and some even recall fond images. Knut Hamsun Remembers America is recommended for its gripping and absorbing perspectives on American civilization, while reflecting Hamsun's anti-Americanism in his perceptions and writings. ... Read more

Product Description

First published one hundred years ago, and now translated into English for the first time by the noted Norwegian scholar Sverre Lyngstad, In Wonderland is a diaristic account of a trip Hamsun took to Russia at the turn of the century. This detailed travelogue is a rich and loving portrait of the people and culture of Russia, and is filled with the trademark style and keen observations of the author of such classics as Hunger, Mysteries, and Growth of the Soil.

In Wonderland is unlike any other book written by Hamsun, and offers not only an intimate glimpse into the mind of the Nobel Prize winning author at his unguarded best, but a rare view into a Russia that would soon vanish in the fire of revolution.

Customer Reviews (6)

Knut is knuts
This book is a very much condensed version of the original, as told to me by old-timers, which detailed Knut Hamsun's trip through Russia in 1900. The original book was about 4 times longer and was worthy of a Nobel prize winner. This book only has a few stupid anecdotes, and portrays Knut Hamsun as an idiot.

Beyond a Travel Book
I have read a number of books by Knut Hamsun who is certainly an interesting writer.Recently I read several accounts of his travels in America where he freely expressed his opinions of the USA and various aspects of its' culture circa the 1880's.He has a keen sense of observation and a unique perspective of his fellow man.This is true in his book "In Wonderland" where he details an account of his travels in Russia just before the turn of the previous century.He details a lot of interesting observations from food to ethnic groups to travel accommodations.It comes across as a very interesting trip (with his "companion") and an interesting look at a world that has changed greatly since his visit.That look at a world that no longer exists is the real greatness of "In Wonderland".

Hansun was a gregarious individual with freely expressed opinions that will (or, at least, SHOULD) ruffle some feathers.His disdainful comments about Jews keep popping up.However, looking past that you'll find he is disdainful of others as well.The bedbugs kept me from wishing I was along for the ride but I was able to appreciate the scenery nonetheless thanks to Hamsun's candid literary skills.

An excellent view of both Hamsun and Imperial Russia
This is a travel journal of Knut Hamsun and his first wife from their trip to the Caucasus. The book begins in St. Petersburg, and details their journey by both train and horse-carriage towards Asia and Persia. The book captivated me totally, and I felt I saw the world of a hundred years ago through the words of Hamsun. As in all his books, he includes surrealistic episodes and warm humour from his small encounters with various characters and situations. He made me laugh several times, and it was wonderful to read about the different cultures and races he meets. He has a unique Germanic Norwegian view of things, and it's very interesting to follow his train of thought around what he witnesses. It's also a bit more of a political book than his other early novels, but I enjoyed that. As one of the few "right-wing" anti-modern conservative Norwegian authors, for once this fact really shines through in the text. I enjoyed his various racial descriptions, and for once his anti-Zionism is open. It's strange to think about that a famous author only 100 years ago could write so openly about this issue, compared to today's censured intellectual climate. A lovely light read, that makes you get to know Hamsun as a person even better. Highly recommended!

(I read a different edition)

Ignore the previous review
This means you, "Gill Doyle". You are an idiot.

Hamsun's "In Wonderland" is not an anti-Semetic diatribe. The tired old charge of Hamsun's "collaborationism" during WWII has been discussed to death and has been proven to be a red herring. Drop it, please.

Nothing to add, review wise. It's a damned fine read, although something of an afterthought in the Hamsun canon. Be sure to read the more famous works, and come back to this as a completist, if thou art so inclined.

Hamsun's anti-Semitism
The publisher calls this a "loving portrait of the people and culture of Russia."Hamsun's anti-Semitism, though, leaves a bad taste in the mouth.It is more evident here than in any of his other writings.

I'll give a few examples.I translate directly from my own Norwegian edition of the book:

"Two Jewish ladies, apparently mother and daughter, complain to the waiter that their napkins are not clean.Other napkins are brought to them on a plate, but neither do these seem clean to them, and they must have new napkins for a third time.Then they wipe glass, knife, and fork before they use them.Their fingers are fat and dark, covered with jeweled rings.Then they eat.They are obviously very rich, and they sit and act so fine with their thick fingers.When they've eaten, they demand water bowls and wash their hands.It is as though they do this every day at home when they eat with their Abraham or Nathan.Then each takes her toothpick and cleans her teeth with it, while she covers the toothpick with her other hand as she has no doubt seen other fine folk in Batum do."

"I thank the officer.He's a fat, slightly older man with strangely foppish manners.He speaks many languages loudly and boldly, but incorrectly.His face is unpleasant, Jewish [ubehageligt, jødisk]."

"One hears singing from the Armenian Jews farther back in the car.It's a really fat old Jew [en rigtig fed gammel Jøde] and that fat eunuch who are singing a kind of call and response song.The unseemly behavior goes on forever, for two hours.Now and then they both laugh at what they've sung, then begin again with their monotonous song.The eunuch's voice is more a bird's than a person's voice."

"He was a swindler, a Jew who tried to blackmail me."

"A Jew can swindle ten Greeks."

Lyngstad's translation is fine.He doesn't hide anything.All of the passages that I've translated here appear in Lyngstad's translation.Perhaps he softens Hamsun's ugly racism here and there.Take Hamsun's description of the Jewish ladies at table.Hamsun wrote:

"De sidder og bærer sig saa fint ad med deres tykke Fingre."

Lyngstad translates this:

"They use their thick fingers so daintily."

My translation is closer to the original and suggests, as I think Hamsun meant to suggest, that these women are not at all fine.They are merely aping their betters.

It's interesting that Hamsun describes in this book his encounter with a Jewish peddler who attempts to sell him a cheap and useless watch that has one special feature that makes it valuable -- "there is a highly obscene picture in there.The picture seems to amuse him.He lays his head to one side and looks at it."I find the incident interesting because Hamsun resurrects the Jewish peddler of cheap watches ("klokkejøden" -- really a swindler) in Landstrykkere (Vagabonds), one of his better novels.

This book (In Wonderland) should be of interest primarily to Hamsun enthusiasts who may not know about the writer's anti-Semitism.In his preface, editor Lyngstad acknowledges "the prejudiced and reactionary attitudes displayed in certain passages of the book."He points to Hamsun's "racial and other slurs on Jews."One has to take Hamsun as he is.Those interested in Hamsun as a stylist would be better off reading the novels -- Pan, in particular.Those interested in the Caucasus can no doubt find better books on the subject.Those interested in Hamsun as flawed human being should read this book. ... Read more

Product Description
Trade paperback edition, Noonday Press (Farrar, Straus), 1959. Translated from the Norwegian by James W. McFarlane. 192 ppAmazon.com Review
The story takes place in what feels like a timeless,fairy-tale era of Europe, along the misty edges of Norwegian fjords,in ancient game-filled forests. As seems to be the case with the usualHamsun hero, Lieutenant Thomas Glahn is a rather alienated guy, almostchildlike in his innocence of the interpersonal politics betweenpeople in general, men and women in particular, and between him andEdvarda, the woman he falls in love with, most particularly. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

A short work of art
The only thing I regret in "Pan" is that it ends so quickly. A true masterpiece, with love and nature touching everything. A hymn to life, to the North, to women and to the men who are strong enough to leave the path set by society and lead the life they want. How could anyone write so well? In Norwegian it must be even better, although this could be hardly believed!

Take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead
I can only wish I were clever enough to absorb the full depth of this surprising novel in one reading.Instead, I look forward to revisiting this short work again, to see if my initial impressions hold up or change over time.

The Nobel Prize winning Norwegian author Knut Hamsum published Pan in 1894, though I only found that out after I'd finished.As I was reading it, it had felt as though it belonged to the early to middle part of the 20th century.Regardless, its themes are not restricted to any time or place.

No synopsis can really do this novel justice, since I feel the structure was simply a way for Hamsun to express some deeper psychological states - and I believe the title is the first clue that this is what he was trying to do.Very simply put, it is the story of a man, Lt. Glahn, who spends a summer in a rural part of Norway hunting and communing with the woods, who then becomes enamored of a local girl.The novel is written as though it is Glahn's memoir, recorded two years after the fact and spurred by a gift in the mail.The local girl that he'd fallen in love with, Edvarda, is an adept at the cat and mouse game of infatuation, and by toying with the Lt., events are set in motion that lead him into a kind of psychosis.

The spare descriptions of the characters leave them open for broader interpretations, and I think it was Hamsun's intention that they represent archetype figures.The same is true of the natural scenes that Hamsun's narrator _does_ go out of his way to describe, down to the tiniest aspect.In one sense this may be read as a catalog of the flora and fauna of the region, but in another, it is the landscape of Lt. Glahn's mind, and a clue as to just how disturbed he is.

Hamsun's writing is deceptively simple, and a welcome relief from the bloated prose of fin-de-siecle novels.The edition I read was a translation by James McFarlane, and in its simple sentances and growing unease, I was reminded of Robert Aickman's stories.They too have a way of beginning in a pedestrian manner, but transform into unsettling and sometimes bizarre accounts of hidden feelings and mental states.

This book had quite an effect on me, and I think it is unfairly obscure.A classic, and highly recommended.

Love in the Wilderness
In Greek mythology, Pan, the God of wilderness, is depicted as having a human torso and head with a goat's horns, ears and legs.This book centers around the story of one Lieutenant Glahn's sojourn to the Norwegian countryside as he lives in a remote cabin on the edge of the forest.Not much there you might think, but this book is less visible action than of the currents in the mind.

This isn't to say that what does occur is boring-in fact some of the acts are almost overwhelming at the end-but the action, like Hamsun's more famous novel Hunger, ultimately is an inward happening.It is when Glahn falls for local heartthrob Edvarda that the book moves away from its meditative beginnings and into the intensity of feeling found in Hunger.Soon it is this love-embraced, unrequited, and scorned-that consumes everything in the vain, but intensely perceptive Lieutenant Glahn.

Difficult read
I personally preferred his other works much more. Pan seemed to be really hard to read. It has some really beautiful prose with lyrical descriptions of the forests, but even though its a very short novel, I couldn't finish it.'Mysteries', 'Growth of the soil', 'wayfarers' and 'Hunger' were much better !

Devastatingly Accurate Depiction of the Male Psyche
I wish I had read Hamsun when I was a teenager with wild emotions, but it's just as well that I read Pan at 29, as I'm now old enough to fully appreciate his work.Hamsun's insight into the male psyche is devastatingly accurate.At times I wanted to leap to my feet to say, "that's me!that's me he's writing about!!"Hamsun demonstrates how a love gone bad can destroy a man's mind. ... Read more

Product Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Product Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more