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Classic Literature. Fiction. HTML: Knut Hamsun's novel The Growth of the Soil won the Norwegian writer a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. English translator W. W. Worster summed up the novel with these words: "It is the life story of a man in the wilds, the genesis and gradual development of a homestead, the unit of humanity, in the unfilled, uncleared tracts that still remain in the Norwegian Highlands." "It is an epic of earth; the history of a microcosm. Its dominant note is one of patient strength and simplicity; the mainstay of its working is the tacit, stern, yet loving alliance between Nature and the Man who faces her himself, trusting to himself and her for the physical means of life, and the spiritual contentment with life which she must grant if he be worthy." "Modern man faces Nature only by proxy, or as proxy, through others or for others, and the intimacy is lost. In the wilds the contact is direct and immediate; it is the foothold upon earth, the touch of the soil itself, that gives strength." "The story is epic in its magnitude, in its calm, steady progress and unhurrying rhythm, in its vast and intimate humanity. The author looks upon his characters with a great, all-tolerant sympathy, aloof yet kindly, as a god. A more objective work of fiction it would be hard to find--certainly in what used to be called 'the neurasthenic North.'".… (more)
User reviews
But the exposition in GOTS is so pure, so organic, so fertile that the seedling of a story - a man, Isak, building a farm in the wilderness - sprouts, like Jack's beanstalk, like a fairy tale, into a mythic Yggdrasil, a tall and flowering tree of life.
Isak, as the epic begins, is a simple man, a homesteader coarse and almost brutish. A man who would carry a sledge on his back, if need be, say, for repairs. He's lucky to find a woman, any woman - in this case, one marginalized by a harelip - to become his mate. But he does, and they both accept life's harshness, set to work and persevere. They love and learn and develop despite and because of adversity and fate's cruelties. They are very nearly fatalists themselves but not quite. There's a very bright spark still. And so their farm grows, their children come and go, the community expands, and life happens - both good and evil.
I've read several Hamsun works, and like this one the best. The bitterness and cynicism which dominate in Pan and Hunger are subdued in GOTS in the Loki and low key personae of Oline and Brede. Warmth and compassion prevail. Hamsun loves Isak and his family and it shows.
Though the setting is in rural Norway, civilization and its discontents are never far off. There are telegraphs and newspapers. People read. It's not as though this is a bucolic idyll in a sheltered Eden. There's a "worldly" balance to the drama, yet Isak's simple virtues prevail - although he's constantly challenged by events, some beyond his control. There, to a degree, he's protected by his guardian angel of a friend, Geissler, a man as complex and mysterious as Isak is simple - but a man equally as virtuous.
In all, this is a a very Scandinavian work. Like an iconic Viking ship which combines beauty and simplicity with function, and is capable both of navigating rough seas and shallow rivers, Hamsun's writing has a biblical simplicity that narrates elegantly both life's small and meaningful events as well as its epic arc..
While I appreciated this book and am glad I read it, I'm not sure I really liked it. Something about the language really grated on me. Hamsun writes in brief grunts and I couldn't decide if it was intentional, to reflect the almost animal state of the back country people, or if it was bad translation, or just his style. The dialogue was really ridiculous. It seemed that no one listened or understood anyone else and it really reminded me of the stereotypical cave man grunting. If that was intentional, I think it did a disservice to the people that Hamsun was trying to portray. I was also really disturbed by a part of the novel that explored infanticide. Two different mothers in the book kill their new-born babies. It was for very different reasons with very different legal consequences, but I wasn't really sure what the point of it was and I found it really disturbing.
This is a book that I will rate as middle of the road considering that it won the author the Nobel prize for literature and is highly respected - I just didn't see it. But it is also a book that I won't be surprised if I think much more highly of at the end of the year than I do now.
For me, the
Talk of Growth in the Soil inevitably leads to talk of its author, Knut Hamsun, and the causes he championed. While a work is in many ways the child of the author, I do not think the author's concerns have any bearing on how one reads a work. The sins of the father are not the sins of the son, and vice versa. I think Isak in particular would agree with the notion that sons lead very different lives from that of their fathers.
Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
Selected Letters, pg. 176
Hamsun's descriptive style contributes toward an evocative account of his rural native Norway, whilst the novel's shifts in perspective and brief moments of rumination are reminiscent of Steinbeck at his most powerful. Isak's agrarian preoccupations binds indelibly the progress of the novel to the passing seasons, creating an impression of time not any less efficacious than that achieved in another, in some ways similar epic; One Hundred Years of Solitude.
But Hamsun verges on didacticism. The reader is pushed relentlessly toward the Rousseauian-sounding idea that the self-reliant exploiter of the soil, in this case Isak, is somehow morally superior, and the related view that the city - urban living - leads to moral decay and a rather superficial, meaningless state of existence. Take, for example, the difference in the way Hamsun chooses to depict Inger's and Barbro's attitude towards their respective acts of infantiside. The former is much more sympathetic, whereas Barbro is depicted as being callously indifferent. Barbro has, of course, been infected by the vast metropolis that was nineteenth century Bergen.
Overall, it's a good book. But no one likes being preached to, especially by someone with ideological sympathies as dubious as Hamsun's.
In regard to this edition: the typeface is too bold making the text difficult to read. The cover picture's quite nice though.
The book is basically a love affair with the earth, given the few people in this unbroken part of Norway that makes up the setting. Their lives revolve around earth and sky and seasons. Simple work, simple food. They don't spend time analyzing why they are unhappy or seeking remedy for their bad childhoods. They live forward, moving ahead.
Again, I had to try and control my isolation inclination as I read this. When they finally get other settlers up near Sellenara, inwardly I cringed because I'm thinking, what? Neighbors? Sheesh. Get rid of them! Make them move! And yet these people were happy for the company. I am so anti-social when I think living in the wilds with 8 other people within 10 miles is too much!
This also was a very peaceful book. It had tension and action and sadness and pain, but overall it felt calming and restful to read it and imagine this kind of life. I was disappointed a bit when I read a recent LA Times article on Hamsun, his personal and political views at the time, and that took something away from my love of this book.
Would the path, my path, be there without me? What difference does my footprint make upon the soil? Digging in 'til sunken, I reread the first paragraph with the second paragraph in mind. I am called to prepare for the path previously tested, trusted and harmless. Hamsun asks with his greatest novel ever, would there be reason enough, at the end of it all, to have been? This is only page one, paragraph two, I am encouraged by my interest and will follow through with the intent to learn more about the world as it was but first and foremost, to learn about the world as it is.
Good reading, good minds.
Ma
Well after that recommendation and my own memories of Rolvaag I picked up Hamsun's book (I should have done this long before when I was amazed by Hunger which I have read and reread) and found it to be the life story of a man in the wilds, the genesis and gradual development of a homestead, the unit of humanity, in the unfilled, uncleared tracts that still remain in the Norwegian Highlands.
It is an epic of earth; the history of a microcosm. Its dominant note is one of patient strength and simplicity; the mainstay of its working is the tacit, stern, yet loving alliance between Nature and the Man who faces her himself, trusting to himself and her for the physical means of life, and the spiritual contentment with life which she must grant if he be worthy. Modern man faces Nature only by proxy, or as proxy, through others or for others, and the intimacy is lost. In the wilds the contact is direct and immediate; it is the foothold upon earth, the touch of the soil itself, that gives strength.
The story is epic in its magnitude, in its calm, steady progress and unhurrying rhythm, in its vast and intimate humanity. The author looks upon his characters with a great, all-tolerant sympathy, aloof yet kindly, as a god. A more objective work of fiction it would be hard to find—certainly in what used to be called "the neurasthenic North."
On the positive, Hamsun's writing style is excellent- brief, concise yet descriptive and flowing. He paints a beautiful picture of life in the rural countryside in an era now long since past. Had this book ended about 50% sooner, I would have rated it at least
Unfortunately, the book is too long. The main characters, who were compelling, become lost among unnecessary story lines as to other less interesting persons. Further, Hamsun's seemingly never ending depictions of men who cannot take an intellectual stand and/or express themselves in any meaningful way to their scheming female counterparts is tiring.
I concur with a previous reviewer that Hamsun's book "Hunger" is a far better work.
Which is why, despite my thin veneer of urbane culture, I feel something like
The author later became a fascist reactionary - highly critical of this modern lifestyle. As a general rule, people don't sympathize with fascists - but one can try to understand why to feel what they do. Somehow, they feel threatened instead of comforted by this other culture. They feel swept aside by it.
Anyways - this is a good book, probably one of Hamsun's best. Recommended for those who want a good look at the farmer's life.
Independent People, unlike some of the other novels of this vein, focuses on the unpredictability of both nature and man as the decisive reason why farming succeeds or fails. While Hamsun stages a play where hard work and the willpower of the human spirit leads to the successful farm, Laxness sees the lonely farmer as ruled by the vicissitudes of fate more so than the noble human spirit.
I'm no farmer, and I don't pretend to know what interpretation is more accurate, but I can see the effect that the philosophies have on both stories. Hamsun's main character is essentially a simpleton, whose strength and work ethic are the source of success. His wife, neighbors, and children are all lesser beings even when more intelligent, whose virtues decrease according to how little they care for the farming lifestyle. In sum The Growth of the Soil is a showcase for the triumph of the human will and an ode to the farming lifestyle, even if the characters are rather flat and one dimensional given how long the book is.
In Independent People, in contrast, the characters feel more fleshed out, though all of them are insufferable to different degrees. Stubborn and proud even when they have done nothing to be proud of, a mix of bad luck and human foolishness means that life is a struggle in this novel even when things are going well. The main character is no supernaturally strong jack of all trades, and so he cannot be as independent and self-sufficient as he would like to be, and how the main character of Growth of the Soil actually is. Eventually the epiphany the man reaches and the message of the book as a whole is that there is no such thing as a truly independent person, as man is a social animal. It's a fairly obvious message, and not one that takes 450 pages to convey. John Donne did it more effectively in a single paragraph.
Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth is the best of the three, and also the least tethered to the setting or realism of a farm. Rural China as imagined by a Westerner is vivid, probably more vivid than it was in reality, but I'd happily sacrifice realism for a good story. In The Good Earth a farmer's success is also due to chance, but it is chance governed by man as much as it is by the weather or fate. The main character ultimately succeeds due to an act of theft, not hard work, and the final chapters of the book depict the corrupting power of wealth. The Good Earth also ends with a message in support of the farming lifestyle, not because of its nobility, but because the soil is permanent while other human endeavors are transient.
All three are solid books, and all three treat the subject in different and interesting ways. Nevertheless, I'm glad the Swedish Academy has since expanded its view of literature beyond the farm.
It's a rather
Isak, a young and very strong man, with no fear of work, goes looking for a good place to settle. He walks and walks, looking
When he finally finds it, he settles in. There is a coastal town a full day's walk away (20 miles? 10 miles?). He puts out word that he needs a woman's help--and lo and behold, Inger comes. She too has no fear of work, and she has a harelip--teased for much of her life, she finds a good man in Isak.
They work, they have several children, Inger is imprisoned for 6 years. Others come and settle the area between their farm Sellanra and the town.
A fascinating story of rural northern Norway in the 2nd half of the 19th century.
And this guy, he's above petty concerns like commerce and legislation and civic planning. He grows the soil, and as the book says, Growth of the soil was something different, a thing to be procured at any cost; the only source, the origin of all.
Yeah, that'll show those wasters, the foolish idlers who lay about in heated rooms eating food they didn't grow themselves, and designing things like labor-saving farm machinery!
It is, as they say, such a crock. The novel does not rise above this, either; every chapter, every page bludgeons the reader with the same simple moral lesson: tilling the soil good, everything else bad.
The tale itself is fairly well-told, though (Ho!). The presence of characters with more complicated motives, such as Geissler, saves this from being a heavy-handed morality tale, making it more of a social commentary. And who can resist a book with such delicate characterization as this:
She was utterly sick and tired of the farm and the wooden vessels, that took such a lot of cleaning; sick and tired, perhaps, of Axel and all, of the out-of-the-way life she led. But she never killed any of the cattle, and Axel never found her standing over him with uplifted knife in the middle of the night.
Now, truly, what more could a man ask for in a wife?
Part I was excellent. Part II really loses steam as others have mentioned.
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Omslaget viser titel og forfatternavn på en grøntonet baggrund der sikkert skal forestille en mark
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Gyldendals Tranebøger, bind 185
Gutenberg, bind 43724
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