Hamsun aptly portrays the eternal human predicament, the tension between the ‘what is' and the ‘what should be’, without flirting either with boring philosophy or casual fiction.Īnyone looking for a real glimpse at this inner inquisitor needs only to watch author David Foster Wallace with Charlie Rose, and see him grimacing with disgust and self-reproach at his own utterances. Reason becomes just another superstitious belief, which tunes its own endless faith of thoughts after thoughts, a faculty abused to the point of addiction.
There is a persistent sense of conflict in our hero’s meditations, blurring the lines between the rational and the irrational. No wonder Hamsun inspired a whole generation of modernists and post-modernists, stalwarts like Hemingway and Miller to name a few. The whole novel could be one long stream of consciousness, with incidents in the external world only adding material for our hero’s soliloquy. No spoilers…for this plotless masterpiece cannot be spoiled. I would like to talk about five features of the book that struck a chord with my constitution, and why I think you should read the book too. The memoir is a never-ending battle between projection and reality, a constant search for approbation and self-worth, and the consequential misery heightened by a brutal self-awareness. Make no mistake, he suffers as much from his own thoughts as from poverty and hunger.
That the theme, setting, plot, nearly everything in the book is the protagonist’s mind. Now, even if the sincerity of his opinion was only as true as the rest of his fictional expeditions, I had realized that I had to read Hamsun. I first got inspired to read Hamsun when, in one of Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical prose, he mentioned him as the world’s greatest writer.
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