Sven Birkerts on Hamsun

Sven Birkerts writes about Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil and Hunger in the new Bookforum:

A young man’s book, an old man’s book; the former an almost unremitting hallucination, the latter like something carved with patience into an obdurate oak. Hunger unfolds its unbroken inwardness in urban Christiana (now Oslo), “that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him,” over several seasons, though it also delves to touch a timelessness known to most of us only from dreams and illness. Growth of the Soil populates a simple square of rural canvas and fulfills its narration of labor’s travails and hard-won triumphs over many decades. The novel, sharply and sensuously rendered by Sverre Lyngstad, enacts a lifetime’s forward plod, though Hamsun’s strategic moments of omniscient retrospect (“Great changes at Sellanrå”) every so often telescope long years down until they seem but a cosmic eyeblink.