Book description
Abel is the only son of a miserly lighthouse-keeper and an
alcoholic mother growing up in a remote Norwegian village. As a boy he
loves Olga, the pharmacist's daughter, and on returning from America
as a young man they fall in love. However, Abel is haunted by the
secrets of his travels and his only ambition is to live on the barest
of necessities and pursue a life without desire or ambition.
With
a central character as iconoclastic as Hunger and an evocation of the
restrictions of small town life as acute as Mysteries this is one of
Hamsun's greatest novels.
Born in 1859, Knut Hamsun's early works were forceful and polemic
before he became more compassionate in his later work. He was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil. He has
been recognised as one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth
century, the inspiration for much of Modernist fiction, especially the
work of Ernest Hemingway.
