Growth of the Soil

I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It is a story so evocative of the feelings of a bygone era that it is almost heartbreaking! The story begins with a lone man setting out from a small village (which by the end of the book has grown to a bustling township) to simply make a life by working the land. Along the way he meets a girl--who is to become his wife--, has children, meets a large number of interesting characters, and generally experiences all that life has to offer for a simple farmer in the hills of Norway on the cusp of two entirely different centuries. I found myself longing to be transported back in time so I too could live the simple, fulfilling life (though Hamsun does not white-wash the experience at all; all the characters have their share of great hardships). The book is written in Hamsun's trademark 'clipped' style that did so much to inspire Hemmingway. Growth of the Soil is a must read. Regarding this version of the book, there are a few problems with spelling at a few points, but it's nothing that will interrupt your enjoyment of the book. I don't think there were more than five or six instances. I just thought I'd throw that out there to be complete. (And it goes without saying that if you can read the book in its original Norwegian, you would be much better served doing that. I found that there was a lot of nuance and suggestion that, despite the great translation, could not be conveyed in English.)

Growth of the Soil begins in the wilderness. There is a man, 'A strong, coarse fellow, with a red iron beard...'. He seeks a woman to help bear the burden of his new home, built in the wilds, miles away from the nearest town. Nobody is interested - they believe the man, Isak, is too much of a loner. They believe he has chosen poor land, with little potential. Finally, Inger arrives. She is disfigured, a cast-off, ridiculed in the village for her appearance. Isak is happy with her if she is able to work - and she can. Thus one man becomes a couple, thus a life begins. Soon, there are children. The farm grows. Buildings are added, animals are born. What was once a wilderness becomes tendered, tamed. Isak stubbornly works at the soil, harnessing its potential, cajoling food and life from the ground. Growth of the Soil is not a novel based on plot. No, instead we experience the steady growth of Isak's farm, christened Sellanraa. Attached to this growth is Isak's family, as well as the surrounding area. What begins as a wilderness ends as a moderately prosperous community on the cusp of becoming a town. We are presented most obviously with an allegory of man's rise from nothing into civilisation. We begin with a lone man and his wife, we end with writing, with culture, with mistakes and with money. A good chunk of the novel at the beginning is virtually devoid of dialogue - most of the end is rife with it. Similarly, money does not play a part until midway, and then it becomes a major focus for everyone except Isak. There are villains, but only if we consider villains as being people who do not directly follow Isak's way of life. His son, Eleseus, after tasting the refined morsels of town life, becomes useless around the farm. He clearly represents the corrupting forces of too much literacy, too much culture. Eleseus drains Isak's money, buying frivolities like umbrellas and alcohol. Hamsun writes as though we are reading one giant parable. The novel is a huge fairy tale of a way of life that the author agrees with on so many levels that it is impossible to disagree with the text as it stands. Hamsun writes so persuasively of the positive qualities of life attached to the land, but what is more appealing is that he does not openly criticise Eleseus' - and other's - choices. No, he reveals the mistakes that people make, but he offsets that with Isak's sheer goodness, leaving the reader to come to the only conclusion possible - Isak's way of life is the way that life is meant to be lived. This is subtle grand-standing on the part of the author, but it works. The novel attains a timeless quality by the way in which tense is used. Sometimes, characters will act and speak in present tense. 'Isak says', 'Oline walks', etc. Other times, descriptions will be past tense - and these change about within the same paragraph, page, chapter. A poor writer would create a nightmare of tense shifting confusion with such a technique, but Hamsun manages to control

Knut Hamson is a fascinating character and his personality comes through in his fiction. From Hunger on through to this novel he explores the psychology of man more intelligently and with more humour than anyone has ever done (with the possible exception of Dostoyevsky). Yes, Hamson was a racist, and a Nazi sympathizer. This has held many people back from reading his novels, assuming that someone who believes these things must not be worth reading. This is a huge mistake. The Gods of great art (assuming such a thing exists) don't care if your morals are in check, they don't care if you are a "good" person in accordance with our modern morality. The gifts of artistic skills fall upon people randomly and without regard for who they are. People may critisize Hamsons politics but his talent as a writer is untarnished, and his contribution to literature indisputable. Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein's "American" style of writing, whcih was very editorial, is seen first in Hamson's Hunger, written in 1888 and he has lost none of his power by the time he got around to writing "Growth of the Soil". So sensitive people who can only read novels by people they agree with might want to avoid his writing, but anyone who is interested in how twentieth century writing came to be should read Hamson, and I recomend this novel after reading his first three (Hunger, Mysteries, and Pan).

This book is in my top-twenty list of 20th-century novels. I can't fathom how anyone with any literary sense could call the prose "stilted." Simple, yes, prosaic, perhaps; but spare and lean does not mean devoid of grace. Hemingway strove all his life to write this way. And let's not forget, Henry Miller held Hamsun and Celine (another politically incorrect master-novelist) in the highest possible regard and wrote that they both influenced him greatly. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough to anyone who loves literature. As far as the political context is concerned, let's remember that Zubin Mehta performed Wagner in Israel after a long ban and received an enthusiastic reception. I'm a little weary of those politically sensitive souls that want to remove Twain from school reading lists and find Shakespeare too chauvenistic, etc. etc. I certainly can find no evidence of Hamsun's political views expressed in any of his novels. Give this one a chance and decide for yourself. Don't be put off by the thought-police.

People have different opinions of which was the greatest of Knut Hamsun's novels, and very often one of the works from the 1890s will range highest. People also have a lot to say about Hamsun's terms with Nazi-Germany and which made the common Norwegian to see him as a betrayer. He was their greatest hero, up there with King Haakon and Fridtjof Nansen. All these circumstances are more complex to be drawn up here, so let's stay with the fact that Hamsun was one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time. "Growth of the Soil" is the book that secured him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920, the book the common man of the day valued more than any other of his works, the book that the Germans had printed in "field-editions" to send with their soldiers to the fronts. But this is not an ideally portrait of the values in life - it is a very accurate description of how the life was in the outback for these early settlers, how extremely simple they were. It was not because they had achieved a great understanding of the meaning of life, readers in that belief are totally wrong. They had no choice, were not on terms with their inner-self at all, did not know comfort and beautiful music, could not afford to be fastidious. I can't think of any other book in world literature that comes anywhere near "Growth of the Soil" in portraying these simple, unsophisticated people breaking the land and struggle to live. I am sure this could be the life story of several of my ancestors in North-Norway, the diaries of their lives, but they (like Isak) could not read or write or tell their story. Instead Knut Hamsun has done it with such wisdom, humour and tenderness and most of all his great talent, that in many respects this is his best work