Knut Hamsun
Growth of the Soil.
Penguin, 352 pages, $13

Nazi collaborator, Nobel laureate: the Norwegian writer Knut
Hamsun was both. Hamsun, born in 1859, died penniless and
disgraced in 1952, shortly after he was heavily fined by the
state for his activities during the war. His
Deutsches Reich sympathies as an elderly man obscured for
decades what had once been world-wide literary recognition;
to this day his fellow Norwegians revile his name, but new
translations of his writing have fueled interest in
Hamsun’s texts, some of which have never before been
translated into English.

Among his better known works is Hunger, a
ground-breaking psychological tale of its first-person,
desperately starving narrator. Mysteries and Pan, two other
early works from the 1890s, along with Hunger, considerably influenced
Kafka’s writings as well of those of other significant
modernist writers. They are charming in their poetic
language and subversive wit. Foreshadowing the modern
psychological novels of the twentieth century, they steer
away from depicting the physical conditions and morals of
their ne’er-do-well narrators. Instead, they portray
what Hamsun called “a bundle of changing emotions,
soul, rising and sinking moods.”

Stylistically and thematically, Growth of the Soil
represents a major departure from his earlier works. It is
the account of Isak, an Adam-like pioneer who appears in the
harsh wilderness of Norway to clear the land and eke out his
existence: “Man, a human being, the first one who came here.
There was no path