Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers

I can only wish I were clever enough to absorb the full depth of this surprising novel in one reading. Instead, I look forward to revisiting this short work again, to see if my initial impressions hold up or change over time. The Nobel Prize winning Norwegian author Knut Hamsum published Pan in 1894, though I only found that out after I'd finished. As I was reading it, it had felt as though it belonged to the early to middle part of the 20th century. Regardless, its themes are not restricted to any time or place. No synopsis can really do this novel justice, since I feel the structure was simply a way for Hamsun to express some deeper psychological states - and I believe the title is the first clue that this is what he was trying to do. Very simply put, it is the story of a man, Lt. Glahn, who spends a summer in a rural part of Norway hunting and communing with the woods, who then becomes enamored of a local girl. The novel is written as though it is Glahn's memoir, recorded two years after the fact and spurred by a gift in the mail. The local girl that he'd fallen in love with, Edvarda, is an adept at the cat and mouse game of infatuation, and by toying with the Lt., events are set in motion that lead him into a kind of psychosis. The spare descriptions of the characters leave them open for broader interpretations, and I think it was Hamsun's intention that they represent archetype figures. The same is true of the natural scenes that Hamsun's narrator _does_ go out of his way to describe, down to the tiniest aspect. In one sense this may be read as a catalog of the flora and fauna of the region, but in another, it is the landscape of Lt. Glahn's mind, and a clue as to just how disturbed he is. Hamsun's writing is deceptively simple, and a welcome relief from the bloated prose of fin-de-siecle novels. The edition I read was a translation by James McFarlane, and in its simple sentances and growing unease, I was reminded of Robert Aickman's stories. They too have a way of beginning in a pedestrian manner, but transform into unsettling and sometimes bizarre accounts of hidden feelings and mental states. This book had quite an effect on me, and I think it is unfairly obscure. A classic, and highly recommended.

Hardly anyone I know has read Pan, even though I keep recommending it. Do yourself a favor and check this book out. It's a quick read, and very much worth the time.Pan starts out like a fairy tale and for the first 50 pages or so, I thought that not much would happen. It seemed like one of those beautifully written books which is short on plot. But let me assure you that Pan has plenty of plot, and a whole lot happens by the end of this book. I have since read other novels by Hamsun and to me, Pan is his finest. I could barely slog my way through Growth of the Soil, for which Hamsun won the Nobel Prize in 1920. Hunger, his first novel, is enjoyable but a little aimless. Mysteries (his second) is even more enjoyable but still fairly aimless, and Victoria (his fourth) is a beautiful love story with not much plot. But Pan really moved me and has become one of my favorite novels of all time. You may have heard that Hamsun was a Nazi sympathizer in his later years. I'm not sure if he was anti-Semitic or just attracted to the agrarian ideals of the Nazi Party, and perhaps a tool of Nazi propangandists. But don't let his ignominious later years stop you from reading this wonderful novel.

Pan begins as a nature story - detailed, lush, knowledgeable descriptions of nature, of living a solitary existence, of feeding off the forest and sea. Phrases such as "there was a sweet sulphurous smell from the old leaves rotting in the woods" lull the reader into an expectation of a pastoral romance novel. This is anything but. It is, rather, an exploration of the relationship of the solitary Lt. Glahn with two women in particular and society in general. Lt. Glahn is socially inept and impulsive. The two women? One is servile and unavailable; the other, more interested in the power of the chase than the capture. The resulting story is an intriguing study of human emotions, of motivation and of the honesty of self-revelation. An excellent book by an excellent author.

Pan is a short, terse, novel about a reclusive "wild" man, Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, gifted with sexual charisma who idealizes nature and himself but is blind to his arrested development, his cruelty, and his enslavement to his own compulsive actions, which, as the novel progresses, have tragic consequences. By showing the disparity between Glahn's perception of himself, which is rather romantic and lofty, with the "other" Glahn, the uncouth, abrasive one who clashes with other people, Knut Hamsun succeeds in writing an ambiguous, mysterious fable about the conflict between solitude and civilization, and how the "self" cannot be defined in its isolated state. For an updated theme of the man being taken over by his inner beast, check out James Lasdun's modern masterpiece The Horned Man.

The only think I regret in "Pan" is that it ends so quickly. A true masterpiece, with love and nature touching everything. A hymn to life, to the North, to women and to the men who are strong enough to leave the path set by society and leave the life they want. How could anyone write so well? In Norwegian must be even better, although this could be hardly believed!