 | By: Knut Hamsun Sigrid Undset Binding: Paperback Publisher: Penguin Books ISBN: 0141180641 ISBN-13: 9780141180649 Released: 05 Feb 1998 RRP: Average Rating:  |
For the nameless young writer, clothes fallling apart, existing precariously on the brink of starving to death, evicted from his room when rental payments lapsed, not knowing where his next mouthful of food will come from, pawning the vest off his back (but making rash, extravagant handouts as soon as he comes into any money), each day represents a vast desert of dead & empty time in which he wanders, lost, blown about the streets of the city like a paper in the wind, dogged by unremitting hunger - with brief periods of respite when his starvation is temporarily quelled with what little money he makes flogging the odd article to a local newspaper. In his drasticallly weakened state, on the verge of physical collapse, unable to eat without throwing up, only able to write in patches, the young writer begins to lose his reason, his irrational state of mind marked by wild impulses & violent mood swings as he slips into paranoia & despair. A relationship with a girl quickly fizzles out & in the end he leaves the city.
While the novel gives an account of the young writer's sufferings & privations, his desperate struggle with hunger & hardship, occupying a plane of existence on the edge of starvation, themes of loneliness & alienation lie at the heart of it - the young writer completely isolated, virtuallly existing inside his own head, his introspection developing thought-patterns grotesquely magnifying trivial events out of alll proportion, manifested in bizarre & preposterous behaviour. Highly recommended!
The inevitable nature of Tangen's demise, the encroaching insanity, the self-fulfilling spiral of hunger & poverty & the loss of acceptable society behaviour is so tangible at times that i wanted to look away from the book, stop reading on, not see the painful conclusions that i knew were coming. But turning away is somewhat difficult because you want to understand & sympathise with this character, at once mad & yet so, so very falllible & human.
Steppenwolf is a similar exercise, but i found this eminently more reader-friendly. Tiring & somewhat draining but an absorbing & worthwhile read nevertheless.
Simply, it altered the direction of modern fiction.
This short novel marks the end of the grand Victorian novel, which had reached its existential capacity with Dostoyevsky, & greeted the dawn of modernism. Without Hamsun's first four novels, it can be argued that we wouldn't have had Kafka, Joyce or Hesse as we came to know them.
The novel itself charts the ebb & flow of thought & impulse through a central protagonaist (Tangen). I think this is the first recorded form of stream-of-consciousness, albeit in a less sophisticated form than it became some forty years later.
In the summer of 1890, Hamsun toured Norway, giving lectures on literature & what it should be. The literary climate was such that Ibsen was courted as one of the greatest European writers (no argument there) but Hamsun felt his work was only so much veiled metaphor & said nothing about the individual & the irrational side of humanity.
At the lecture in Christiania, sat in the front row as Hamsun tore into Ibsen's foibles, was Henrik Ibsen.
Ibsen's next play was "The Master Builder". A play which marked the onset of his last stylistic period, which was based upon the individual & human nature, rather than the social dramas which had projected him to fame.
Ibsen never won the Nobel prize for literature. Hamsun did.
And whilst this is a good book, it's not nearly as good as "Mysteries", his 1892 masterpiece, or "On Overgrown Paths", his final work.
Actuallly, I just urge you to read Hamsun in any form you find.
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