Growth Of The Soil

Such a great book! This was a much better translation than a different copy I tried reading.

This book is an amazing testament to the way things used (ought..?) to be. In this mythical world Hamsun has created a lone man comes to wild land with a PURPOSE. His purpose is to cultivate and build and inhabit and 'grow' the land into something human, something sculpted, something meaningful. Some people still live this purposeful existence, or try to, in places very remote (there are few left), such as Northern and Western Alaska and Siberia. It's a hard life but also a wonderful one. Few people get to experience it in our modern world. Can you imagine leaving the comforts of your city, suburban, or even semi-country life, and moving out into the middle of the wilderness on your own, constructing your own dwelling, growing crops, and raising livestock? Not for the feint of heart. No one wants to do this kind of thing anymore and it's sad. This is a very powerful way to stay connected to the land and the inhabitants of the land. Hamsun does a wonderful job of illustrating this way of life and it's encroachment by more and more humans as time goes on. Most of the people in the novel don't get corrupted by the influence of the encroaching civilization except one of the main character's sons who goes very astray in a sad (and at times depressing) strain of the story...but he represents all (or many/maybe most) of us. Hamsun is a crafty and thoughtful storyteller. I've also read his book 'Hunger' which is extraordinary and worth reading. Don't be put off by his Nazi sympathies. An artists prejudices and other personality traits/quirks or what have you, should not be confused in most cases with the art they create. You can dislike Hamsun the person and love his work. And you should love his work it's some of the best written material around.

Growth of the soil Knut Hamsun (Pedersen) The translator gives us a lovely paean to the story: “The story is epic in its magnitude, in its calm, steady progress and unhurrying rhythm, in its vast and intimate humanity. The author looks upon his characters with a great, all-tolerant” eye. And the translator is right about the unhurrying rhythm – it’s a 200-page story told in 350 pages. The story line, the writing style, the characters are stolid: slow-moving but substantial in their depth. In fact, the slow, rhythmic movement of the prose is part of the attractiveness of the writing—the unchanging world of agriculture and of Isak himself: “Look! the tiny grains that are to take life and grow, shoot up into ears, and give more corn again; so it is throughout all the earth where corn is sown. Palestine, America, the valleys of Norway itself—a great wide world, and here is Isak, a tiny speck in the midst of it all, a sower. Little showers of corn flung out fanwise from his hand; a kindly clouded sky, with a promise of the faintest little misty rain.” Part of the slowness is that Hamsun is writing from the point of view of a narrator who rarely sees into his characters. The most conversation we get out of Isak is the occasional “Ha.” As a Minnesotan, I understand this, since we have a lot of Norwegians in our population. We look to the Germans in the southern half of the state for humor and laissez-faire insouciance. Usually, stories have some sort of character arc that animate their plots and draw the reader along. This one has an interesting twist, which I guess one might call the environment arc. The farm, to some degree the people involved with it change and grow, but Isak is a rock-solid constant, “A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without respite. A ghost risen out of the past to point the future, a man from the earliest days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine hundred years old, and, withal, a man of the day.” That is lovely writing, but it also makes for a great deal of repetition and not much movement. Stolid. It was interesting to read, marvelous in some parts, soporific in others.

It’s hard to understand different types of human consciousness. If it was easy we’d all be experts in Hegel. But it’s undeniable that consciousness has changed as society has become more literate and technological and governments have become more free. While it’s possible to access some of the earliest civilizations’ kinds of consciousness—one need only, for example, read the Hebrew Bible—Growth of the Soil is at its finest when it portrays what life was like for a farmer and his wife settling untilled land in the far northern part of Norway during the late nineteenth century. Knut Hamsun actually thought that the solution to the problems of the twentieth century was a return to this way of life but that lack of foresight doesn’t diminish from the power of the novel. As it progresses, the nineteenth century catches up with the farmer and one sees the contrast between modern urban life and the more staid ways of the country. To put its themes into words would, unfortunately, be to engage in a number of cliches. But I can guarantee that any reader will come away with a new appreciation for what the first settlers were like—their manners, customs and ways of thinking. I don’t mean to suggest this is an exercise in cultural anthropology. With a slow but steady pace, mirroring the growth of the tilled land, Hamsun introduces a panoply of characters from the Lutheran villages nearby as well as fellow farmers in the Arctic Circle’s wilderness. And these characters have adventures and dilemmas ranging from the tragic to the comical. You couldn’t really even describe a way of life without the necessary drama of human living. But it’s perennial interests comes, not from a great sense of the landscape—which actually is barely described, not from the story arcs and plot twists—though there are many, but from the insight into the manner in which almost all human beings used to live and which turned out to be on the point of almost vanishing (at least in Europe). Because of this unique perspective, I would argue that Growth of the Soil is almost a must read to fellow explorers of the human condition.

I gave this as a gift to my adult granddaughter with a child of her own and another on the way. I read this book back in the 70's and just re-read it. Hamsun is an amazing Norwegian writer. One does well to read his other works to fully appreciate his skill. Most reviewers see Growth of the Soil dominated by patient strength and simplicity. All that is a backdrop to the real issue addressed. That is a woman's right to kill her baby. The book was written before 1917 and it would seem Hamsun was a bit ahead of his time although the issue is as old as humanity. His development of the argument is complex and persuasive. His character development is central but maybe difficult to follow for one not immersed at childhood with people from northern Scandinavia. Like two adults, standing in the snow, looking out over a North Dakota field, saying "Ya".

Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun is a strange, somewhat off kilter story about Norwegian peasants settling the far north of the country, creating homesteads from wilderness. The main character is Isak, and it is obvious that Hamsun considers him a kind of peasant/messianic character. Halfway through this book I felt some fascist vibes here. I knew nothing about Hamsun, and then found out he was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and Nazism. That took the steam out of the book for me. It also explained a great deal about the philosophy exposed in the novel. That aside, it seems Hamsun should have stuck with Isak’s family in the next generation for the second part of the book. He veers away from them, impeding the flow of the novel.

I had heard of Hamsun's fame as a novelist and infamy as a Norweigian. I picked up this book to examine the fuss. I am not a Norwegian, but I think they should be proud of Hamsun and I do not take his wartime sympathies as any detraction from his literary work at all. History is written by the winners. No I am not a Norwegian, but I am a gardener, and a husband and father however, and the life of my home and hearth follows many of the same slow, steady, fertile rhythms of blood and soil that Hamsun paces in his work. Like other reviewers, I found the work slow yet comforting, just like planting little seeds in black loam and watching them sprout and grow. I did travel to Norway once and on the Sonne fjord I visited a farm, a young but enterprising Norwegian man and his sturdy wife who had a flock of goats they milked to make gjet ost, the delicious brown cheese of Scandanavia, samples of which they served with crepes and ligonberry jam. This was years before I read the book, but my memory of the place and people, the tastes, the look of the water in the fjord and the cliffs above, the smells and sounds of the bleating goats, the ruddy cheeks and blonde hair of the farmer and his wife, all accompanied me throughout my enjoyment of this novel. As an American, whose primary vocation is intensely active and full of interpersonal conflict, I marvel at the peaceful life that many of the good peasant folk of Europe and other nations had in pre-industrial times before globalization and the rest of it. The farming of yesterday was physically hard work but remembering the Benedictine slogan "Ora et Labora" maybe hard work has a place in the life well lived.

This is my first experience with Knut Hamsun and at first I was totally bored. But then I got into the rhythm of the book and began to enjoy it. It's about a man, Isak, who appears in the wilds and begins to carve out a farm. He marries a woman with a harelip named Inger. Through the ebb and flow of a simple, hard working life, Isak is able to carve out an existence and survive. Over the years he goes beyond existence and begins to enjoy prosperity. Along the way Inger gives him 2 sons but she smothers their 3rd child, a little girl born with a harelip. Inger decides, on the spot, that she knows best how to handle the situation and her answer is to murder the child. Her cousin, Oline, figures out what she's done and Inger is sent to prison for 8 yrs. Oline moves in with Isak and his 2 sons while Inger is gone and keeps the household together. But Oline is much like Les Miserables' Inspector Javerts. She's the letter of the law but not the heart of it. She's malicious and manipulative to her own advantage. Inger's time in prison somehow turned into working in town and was hardly hard time. I didn't understand that. When she came home she felt like she was better than everyone else because she had lived 8 years in town and "she done got uppity". Where was the shock that someone would murder the baby they gave birth too? And Inger was not the only one. Another character, Barbro, becomes the servant of a young man named Axel. He has a farm not far from Isak and Inger. Barbro soons becomes pregnant by Axel and Axel gives her a silver ring to indicate he's willing to marry her but Barbro isn't interested in marrying Axel. As soon as the child is born, she drowns the baby. And Axel finds out this isn't the first time Barbro has killed her own child but he still loves her. And Barbro doesn't stop with 2 murders for her own convenience and Axel doesn't stop being her enabler. To me, the truly good characters were Isak and his son, Sivert. All the other characters have their dark side. The narration of the story is as dispassionate as Nature itself without judgment for or against actions made by the characters that people the village and wilds of Norway. It's a very good representation of the hard life that people of the land had and the harsh realities of life before our modern technology changed all that. How hard it must have been to not only survive but to succeed in those days. I recommend this book.

excellent book and seller

The awful translation pretending to be country side Americans is very distracting. The novel having so many characters also doesn't help. This particular edition with black cover says it's printed by amazon with no mention of translator as well. I recommend trying other editions or just. learning norwegian and getting the original

To put it simply, I like this book. No great surprise, nor twist, just a nice read allowing the reader to see how life develops in places that seem inhospitable. Hamsun lets you draw whatever conclusions you desire and leaves enough hints to allow you to imagine how the lives of the characters continue after the story ends.

Bien escrito y con trasfondo

Published in 1917 and instantly recognized as a masterpiece 'Growth of the Soil' marked the high point of Knut Hamsun's literary career. The plot of the novel is at once simple, sublime, elemental and transcendental, for it is the story of creation. A man, Isak, comes to an uninhabited part of Norway. In this cold, forbidding place he makes his covenant with the land. He is joined by Inger: his wife, partner and co-creator. Isak has a visceral bond with the earth and through sheer physical strength and will he creates a home, a homestead and in time a community of fellow settlers who come in his wake. Through the viscissitudes of life, it's flourishes and disappointments Isak never breaks his covenant. He tends to the earth, his animals and they, unfailingly, tend to him. For Isak the soil is not a means to get food or clothing, his relationship with the soil is primordial. He farms because he must, not only because he needs. The covenant between man and earth is ancient, hallowed, mystical and Isak sustains it. The novel is pastoral and goes into considerable detail about the life on a farm. Hamsun's experience working as a farm hand lends authenticity while his consummate skill makes a three page description of cowshed building a gripping read. The novel is didactic in tone, without being overbearing or preachy. It covers multiple themes, as is wont, in a story of biblical aspirations. The primary theme is the relation of man and nature. Isak is a simple man, a few passage of Psalms and stories from the Bible being the sum total of his formal education. He is a man of few words, fewer emotions and of simple certainties. He works the earth and the earth gives him all he needs. Sometimes the weather is inclement but Isak is judicious and the Lord rewards him with a bumper harvest the next year. He has faith, patience, strength, a companion: Inger, and that is enough. For people like me, who live in a city but are only one generation removed from a pastoral life,reading the book is to face a sense of loss, of a bond having been irrevocably severed. It brings to mind this passage from VS Naipaul's India : A Wounded Civilization "... the custom was possible only with an open fireplace. To have to give up the custom was to abjure a link with the earth and the antiquity of earth, of the beginning of things. ... So that awe in the presence of the earth and the universe was something to be rediscovered later, by other means" The corrupting influence of the City is the other major theme of the novel. This does seem overdone at times. Inger is arrested for infanticide and spends five years in prison. The prison is progressive and they teach her sewing, provide education and perform surgery on her harelip yet the affectations of City, it's pretensions and superfluous nature leave a mark on Inger. Everyone who comes from the city or spends time there is worse for it. From Isak's son Eleseus (a rather overdone caricature of Hamsun himself), his neighbour Brede and even his benefactor Giessler all show flaws of character. The City is a necessary evil, it is parasitic upon the village. This view of the City isnt terribly original or nuanced and is the one weak point of the book. The sacred union of man and wife, the strength of this bond is a recurring theme. Isak has Inger and she shares his world, nurtures it. She gives him a family, a purpose and children. Aksel, a later settler as hardworking as Isak, lacks a wife and his farm never rises above providing for bare necessities. Aksel looks at a wife in terms of a utilitarian transaction of recruiting a co-worker while Isak's union with Inger has a sense of providence. As far as love stories go it is hard to top Hamsun's narration: "They entered the hut, ate of her food and drank his goat milk; then they made coffee. They lingered pleasantly over their coffee before going to bed. At night he lay feeling greedy for her and took her. In the morning she didn't leave, nor did she leave the rest of the day, but made herself useful, milked the goats and scrubbed the pots with fine sand. She never left. Inger was her name, Isak his. " Another aspect of the novel which, for an Indian reader, would stand out is the supportive role of the State and its bureaucracy. Geissler, the sheriff, is supportive of Isak and helps him get a formal title to the land he has worked on, a fair price for the copper that is discovered in Isak's land. Geissler, a worldly wise man, knows that Isak, and people like him, are the true engines of civilization. Inger, in prison, recieves education, skills of a seamstress and a sense of self worth. This benign, welfare state is not without its flaws. As the remit of the State grows it invades the private and communal space of the settlers. The simple Christian morality of Psalms, embodied by Isak and Aksel, comes in conflict with the progressive ideas of the new bureaucracy. Hamsun shows the inevitable conflict and the hollowness of liberal ideas of progress. Deracinated officials, who succeed Geissler, try to impose liberal, enlightenment values onto an ancient tradition. Hamsun evokes this in the differential treatment of Inger and Barbro(the daughter of one of Isak's neighbor) at the hands of the State for the crime of infanticide. Inger is treated with sympathy, her crime was one of necessity, her remorse genuine but the scales of justice have to be balanced and she serves 5 years in prison, the minimum possible and is treated well. Barbro commits her crime a few years later, she does it to escape marriage, responsibility, never confesses and feels not a sliver of guilt. Yet the wife of the new sheriff, the paradigm of liberal progress, holds up Barbro as the emblematic victim and frames the murder of an infant as an act of freedom. Barbro is found not guilty. The scales have come unstuck. At the end of the novel we find Isak, still at work even as his prodigal strength begins to desert him with age. Inger is there, by his side and his younger son Sivert, a chip off the old block. They are happy, Isak knows the worth of what he has done. He has created a city; he was the first man, from his sweat and blood life has sprung forth. Hamsun encapsulates the meaning of his novel in this elegant passage "The settlers didn't make themselves suffer on account of goodies they hadn't got: art, newspapers, luxuries, politics were worth exactly as much as people were willing to pay for them, no more; the growth of the soil, on the other hand, had to be procured at any cost. It was the origin of all things, the only source." The book, a literary sensation, has had an eventful afterlife. Hamsun's support for Nazism has bedevilled his ouvre and no other book has suffered more than Growth of the Soil. After all it was the book Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, gave to German soldiers as they marched to conquer Europe. Heidegger, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, and a Nazi supporter recommended in 1926 that Hannah Arendt (his student and sometime lover) read Hamsun. I found this extremely interesting. In 1926 no one would have accused Heidegger or Hamsun of being proto Nazis / Fascists. Yet here we have a meeting of minds, Heidegger's attraction to Hamsun prefigures the dark turn both were about to take. Study of intellectual history is peppered with such Aha! moments. Isak is the Ubermensch of Maistre. 'Growth of the Soil' is a canonical work in every sense of the word. Read it we must, life itself depends on it.