Hunger


Book Description

Hunger by Knut Hamsun - The Original Classic Edition Finally available, a high quality book of the original classic edition. This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work, which is now, at last, again available to you. Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside: From there his parents moved when he was only four to settle in the far northern district of Lofoden--that land of extremes, where the year, and not the day, is evenly divided between darkness and light; where winter is a long dreamless sleep, and summer a passionate dream without sleep; where land and sea meet and intermingle so gigantically that man is all but crushed between the two--or else raised to titanic measures by the spectacle of their struggle. ...But when Kareno, the irreconcilable rebel of At the Gates of the Kingdom, the heaven-storming truth-seeker of The Game of Life, and the acclaimed radical leader in the first acts of Sunset Glow, surrenders at last to the powers that be in order to gain a safe and sheltered harbor for his declining years, then another man of 29 stands ready to denounce him and to take up the rebel cry of youth to which he has become a traitor. Hamsuns ironical humor and whimsical manner of expression do more than the plot itself to knit the plays into an organic unit, and several of the characters are delightfully drawn, particularly the two women who play the greatest part in Karenos life: his wife Eline, and Teresita, who is one more of his many feminine embodiments of the passionate and changeable Northland nature. ...From 1897 to 1912 Hamsun produced a series of volumes that simply marked a further development of the tendencies shown in his first novels: Siesta, short stories, 1897; Victoria a novel with a charming love story that embodies the tenderest note in his production, 1898; In Wonderland, travelling sketches from the Caucasus, 1903; Brushwood, short stories, 1903; The Wild Choir, a collection of poems, 1904; Dreamers, a novel, 1904; Struggling Life, short stories and travelling sketches, 1905; Beneath the Autumn Star a novel, 1906; Benoni, and Rosa, two novels forming to some extent sequels to Pan, 1908; A Wanderer Plays with Muted Strings, a novel, 1909; and The Last Joy, a shapeless work, half novel and half mere uncoordinated reflections, 1912. ...I turned to a shop window and stopped in order to give him an opportunity of getting ahead, but when, after a lapse of some minutes, I again walked on there was the man still in front of me--he too had stood stock still, --without stopping to reflect I made three or four furious onward strides, caught him up, and slapped him on the shoulder.




Knut Hamsun


Book 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.




Knut Hamsun Remembers America


Book Description

When Americans remember him at all, they no doubt think of Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) as the author of Hunger or as the Norwegian who, along with Vidkun Quisling, betrayed his country by supporting the Nazis during World War II. Yet Hamsun, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1920 for his novel The Growth of the Soil, was and remains one of the most important and influential novelists of his time. 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. Hamsun’s feelings about America and American ways were complex. For the most part, they were more negative than positive, and they found expression in many of his writings—directly in his reminiscences and indirectly in his fiction. In On the Cultural Life of Modern America, his first major book, he portrayed the United States as a land of gross and greedy materialism, populated by illiterates who were utterly lacking in artistic originality or refinement. Although the pieces in this collection are not all anti-American, most of them emphasize the strangeness and unpleasantness, as the author saw it, of life in what he called Yankeeland. Arranged chronologically, the pieces fall into three categories: Critical Reporting, Memory and Fantasy, and Mellow Reminiscence. The Critical Reporting section includes articles that appeared in Norwegian or Danish newspapers soon after each of Hamsun’s two visits to America and that give his views on a variety of American subjects, and includes an essay devoted to Mark Twain. Memory and Fantasy comprises narratives of life in America, most of which are presented as personal experiences but which actually are blends of fact and fiction. Mellow Reminiscence includes later and fonder recollections and impressions of the United States. The pieces in this collection provide variations on a theme that runs through much of American history—European criticism of American ways. They give vivid, at times distorted, pictures of life as it was in the United States. They 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. Knut Hamsun Remembers America will appeal to anyone interested in the history of American civilization or, more specifically, in the history of anti-Americanism.




Mysteries


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Shallow Soil


Book Description

Reproduction of the original.




Victoria


Book Description

The Nobel Prize winner’s poetic, psychologically intense portrayal of love’s predicament in a class-bound society A Penguin Classic Set in a coastal village of late nineteenth-century Norway, Victoria follows two lovers whose yearnings are as powerful as the circumstances that conspire to thwart their romance. Johannes, a miller’s son turned poet, finds inspiration for his writing in his passionate devotion to Victoria, a daughter of the impoverished lord of the manor, who feels constrained by family loyalty to accept the wealthy young man of her father’s choice. Separated by class barriers and social pressure, the fated duo hurt and enthrall each other by turns as they move toward an emotional doom that neither will recognize until it is too late. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.




Mysteries


Book Description

Mysteries is a classic of European literature, one of the seminal novels of the twentieth century. It is the story of Johan Nagel, a strange young man who arrives to spend a summer in a small Norwegian coastal town. His presence acts as a catalyst for the hidden impulses, concealed thoughts and darker instincts of the local people. Cursed with the ability to understand the human soul, especially his own, Nagel can foresee, but cannot prevent, his own self-destruction.




Knut Hamsun


Book Description




The Women at the Pump


Book Description

In their gossiping at the pump the women express the poetry, the tawdriness and, above all, the sheer vitality of life in Hamsun's small coastal town. A birth (where did those brown eyes come from?); a marriage (shotgun?); a death in strange circumstances (the victim flattened by a barrel of whale oil); the up-and-down career of the town's leading citizen and philanderer; the elderly spinster's pregnancy; the sinking of the steamship that is the town's pride and joy. Above all, talk centres on the doings of Oliver Andersen and the large family that he and his wife contrive to create despite growing suspicions that his mysterious accident at sea has deprived him of more than a leg... The Women at the Pump overflows with a prodigality of invention and sardonic humour typical of Hamsun's work at its best. First published in 1920, the year Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for Literature, it has a universal quality that transcends time and place. Hamsun's women live on the Norwegian coast but their soulmates flourish in every small community around the world.




Knut Hamsun


Book Description

An absorbing biography of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Knut Hamsun, based on a wealth of previously unavailable sources Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (1859-1952), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, was a man both brilliant and controversial. Lauded for his literary achievements by Hemingway, Gide, Hesse, and others, he also provoked outrage for his open collaboration with the Fascists during the German occupation of Norway and for his insistent refusal to renounce his Nazi sympathies. This gripping biography of Hamsun, now available for the first time in English, offers a nuanced account of this morally ambiguous man. Drawing on Hamsun's extraordinary private archives and on his psychoanalyst's notes, Ingar Sletten Kolloen delves deeply into Hamsun's personal life and character. In vivid and telling detail, he describes Hamsun's early years in a peasant farming family, his tempestuous and jealousy-racked second marriage, his erratic relationship with his children, and his infamous love affair with Nazi Germany, the roots of which Kolloen traces to Hamsun's earliest days. Much like the characters he created in novels such as Hunger, Growth of the Soil, Mysteries, and Pan, Hamsun was irrational, eccentric, strange, and compelling--a man uncomfortable in his own time.