Hamsun, Knut "Growth of the Soil"

(Norwegian: Markens Grøde) - 1917

 

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

So far, I have only read one book by Knut Hamsun, "Pan". That was part of our international book club. One of our members was from Norway, and Knut Hamsun was her favourite author. I liked "Pan", it's a great novel and probably a good one for a book club since it's not too large.

"Growth of the Soil" was just as great. Apparently, this gained him the Nobel Prize for Literature. You can tell that the author loves nature and what it does for us. In this case, Isak, the protagonist, comes to an area where nobody lives and which seems hard to farm. He makes something of it and becomes one of the richest man in the area after some others follow.

It's not just the story, it's the way the people are described, their hard work, their love of nature, their will to become more, also those who don't agree with that style of life.

It's a quiet story, a calming story. An epic story about a time long gone.

From the back cover:

"The epic novel of man and nature that won its author the Nobel Prize in Literature, in the first new English translation in more than ninety years.

When it was first published in 1917, Growth of the Soil was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. More than one-hundred years later it still remains a transporting literary experience. In the story of Isak, who leaves his village to clear a homestead and raise a family amid the untilled tracts of the Norwegian back country, Knut Hamsun evokes the elemental bond between humans and the land. Newly translated by the acclaimed Hamsun scholar Sverre Lyngstad, Hamsun's novel is a work of preternatural calm, stern beauty, and biblical power - and the crowning achievement of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century."

Knut Hamsun received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 "for his monumental work, 'Growth of the Soil'". 

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.

Original Post on Let's Read.