Comments about Knut Hamsun's "Growth of the Soil"

This is a work in which a man and a woman go into the wilds of Norway and carve out a farm. It discusses the nature and virtues of different modes of employment, prefering honest farming to mining, shopkeeping, service, working as a clerk etc.

My first reaction to this was to grow despondent about my own writing. This book had so many similarities with my own DIftW that I felt as though I had unconsciously plagiarised it somehow. Perhaps I had seen it as a film and forgotten about it? One of the things that Growth of the Soil shares with my own attempts is the sense of pace and its relationship with time: in both, time is expressed through changes in the seasons and the progress of natural events. The settings of both are an isolated farm in the woods, and both treat the idea of "town" in the same way. Both seek to instill moral judgements by presenting raw data and leaving it for the reader to transform it into information. I was ready to throw my work away when I realised that the two shared the same inciting incident: infanticide. But I will go on, I have a different flavour to offer, and would be greatly flattered if anyone ever considered my writing to be as scandinavian as Growth of the Soil.

Is Growth of the Soil a novel? There is very little structure to the work, and it trots along in a very naturalistic way with one event coming after another. It would be lazy to describe it as saga-like, but it does share a quality with the sagas in that there is a structure at work which completely disrespects the greek-derived idea of writing in acts. Growth of the Soil has an introduction of a page, and, arguably, an ending of a single, brilliant sentence: "Then comes the evening." I was so relieved when it ended like that because I had grown so emotionally attached to the faultless yet human Isak that I dreaded seeing him get old and die. Leave him in the woods working his farm.

I read the W. Worster translation, which I was somewhat wary of in comparison to the recent Sverre Lyngstad version. Should I wait and get a copy of that before reading the Worster? There was a smattering of unnecessary archaisms, although perhaps that is appropriate for an author like Hamsun, who is so tied up in the development of written Norwegian. At any rate, the Worster translation read easily. "Ho!"

Later in life, Hamsun supported Quisling's Nazi government in Norway and eulogised Hitler at the end of the war. I was on the look out whilst reading this, trying to assess whether there was anything right-wing or nationalistic about it. There is, but it is subtle and moderate, and at no point did I find anything as disturbing as, for a contemporary example, H.G. Well's occasional "nigger". The whole book is a work describing the relationship between people and land, but there is little "blood" to accompany the "soil". It might be possible, if you were insistant upon it, to denounce Hamsun through his portrayal of Sami people. At one point he describes them as lazy and keen to avoid the town, and he portrays them as beggars and, through the hare incident, a vector for immorality. I do not think it is reasonable to ascribe this to racism, as he treats the sami way of life as he viewed it in the same way he treats many other cultural modes within the book. If Hamsun had died in the 1930s we would not even be talking about it.

Growth of the Soil sits easily in the top 1% of books. If it has a flaw it is that it need not be so long: everything of value is communicated in the first hundred pages, and the rest is just reiteration and detailing. However, I was completely engrossed by it and loved every page. The emotional dips are so poignant that I was greatly relieved each time Hamsun reprieved his characters. This is a delicacy of a book, and to gorge on the full 450 pages has been one of the great delights of my life.

Review of Knut Hamsun's "Hunger"

Just a quick one; I'm reading Growth of the Soil at the minute and have loads to say about it, but I read Hunger first and just want to sketch down a few things about that before they're gone from my mind.

This book was a gift, and I had not heard of it and knew nothing about the author except for his name and a vague recollection that he had something to do with the codification of written Norwegian. I was taken aback when I received it and did not quite know what to do with this object that was in my hands.

It is a book about an unemployed middle class character who struggles to acquire food in Victorian Oslo.

After reading a few pages I was completely hooked. At first I did not enjoy it; I was fully rapt but it was more a grotesque appeal than pleasure that I was experiencing. In the anonymous narrator (almost the only character in the book) I saw a mirror of myself, showing me my own madness in uncomfortable detail. At first, I understood this work as an extremely sophisticated portrayal of the realities of a certain class of mental illness (though I would not try and categorise it). Later, I came to see how shockingly innovative it is. I am still struggling to accept that this novel was written as early as 1888: if it were a new novel published today I expect people would still be astonished by its artfulness.

I find myself still meditating on it, and doubtless I'll come to understand it better in time. Already, however, I have repeatedly caught myself acting out weaker versions of the hero's oddities of behaviour and have come to understand myself and others a little better than I had before I read this work. It is as if I have been granted a few additional algorithms for understanding life. My universe is slightly more complex, yet better understood than it was before. Truly this is a valuable book.

I read the recent Sverre Lyngstad translation, which was excellent.

One more thing I would like to jot down is the way in which, towards the end of the book, the author very gently shows how the narrator had got himself into this state. It is so subtley delivered that a thoughtful reading is required to bring it out, but it is objectively there. Sympathy for this mad character turned into empathy, and in doing so the insanity is no longer some alien other, but a different facet of us.