Search Results

“... If Knut Hamsun is remembered at all in Britain – he never really caught on here – it is as the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian writer who became a Nazi, and a betrayer of his country during the Second World War. For the majority of his compatriots, suffering under the German occupation and yet still, many of them, courageously resisting it, this fall from national hero to traitor was hard to fathom, and even harder to stomach ...”

“... and moves away as fast as his legs will take him, running with his small, geriatric steps. Knut Hamsun’s greatest novels – from which this is a typical scene – throttle reason. In Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892) and Pan (1894), the Norwegian writer founded the kind of Modernist novel which largely ended with Beckett – of crepuscular ...”

“... Cain lending Abel a jumper and a pair of socks seems unsurprising. The low-key domestic dramas and Knut Hamsun-like evocations of landscape make the book’s sudden outbreaks of violence – extra-biblical torture and infanticide on top of fratricide and mass death – all the more unsettlingly incongruous. Knausgaard doesn’t go in for seamless ...”

“... with most of his friends), the poet Richard Dehmel, the magazine editor Julius Meier-Graefe and Knut Hamsun, but not Sibelius – he couldn’t stand the noise. Wherever he lived, Strindberg needed such ‘clubs’, as well as a garden where he could grow things. He was also beginning to have success as a painter; Prideaux includes colour plates of 15 ...”

“... of male talent. ‘Now Spring Has Come’, her transparently veiled account of an affair with Knut Hamsun, explains her response to reading his work:When the book was finished I was consumed with a desire to see and know the author. I never reasoned that the whole struggle might only be an extraordinarily clever intuitive analysis of a possible ...”

“... surprising that large claims have been made for his work. Fante has been compared to Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Steinbeck, James Farrell, William Saroyan and Nathanael West. In 1977, a Washington Post reviewer compared The Brotherhood of the Grape to The Brothers Karamazov and King Lear. Hyperbole aside, both Fante’s ...”

“... in contemporary literature’. Gerard Donovan reminds him of ‘other great writers, not least Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and … Bernhard Schlink’. McCann is the high priest of high praise, always handy with a blessing. But his easy way with superlatives means that when he wants to pay a special tribute – to suggest that a writer is even better ...”

“... the speaker with their author (‘Bruce Ismay’s Soliloquy’ becomes ‘After the Titanic’, ‘Knut Hamsun in Old Age’ becomes ‘Hunger’.) Dreaming about the literary future, the poems cannot come to terms with time. The end of each poem is a death, a return to time, which many of the concluding lines nervously over-advertise (‘Will scarcely ...”

“... century distorted the myth, and Norway emerged from the Second World War jaded and humiliated. Knut Hamsun, one of the country’s finest writers, who came from an area just south of Tromsø, openly sympathised with the Norwegian National Socialists and Hitler during the war. There was an excruciating moment in his trial for treason, when he defended ...”

“... but wrote no more fiction. He wrote about religion, his old bête noire, and history. Unlike Knut Hamsun, he opposed Fascism and Hitler. I like the description – I don’t know whose – of The Serious Game as ‘a total novel’. It has a feeling, not of autobiography, but of reality. It processes time to trial and outcome, incorporating ...”

“... It is full of sneering manic depressives and churlish mystics. In order to cram some of them, like Knut Hamsun, into his box and then to be able to close the lid, Gay has to create the category of anti-modern Modernist. He arranges his protagonists in traditional groupings, visual artists first, followed by the literary crowd, the music consort, then ...”

“... stasis and neurotic introspection. Yet Svevo’s anti-religiousness, like that of Schopenhauer and Hamsun, is marked by what it has rejected. One might go further and dare the thought that Svevo’s vision is fundamentally religious. He represents, in a way, the logical fusion of Augustine’s religiously pessimistic view of life – ‘we must conclude that ...”

“... time, he is capable of a cautious, stodgy formality which leaves the reader numb. When he makes Knut Hamsun say, Besides, did I not once, as a young man, Cure myself of incipient tuberculosis Inhaling four sub-zero nights and days Perched on the screaming roof of a freight train? one longs for the racy immediacy of ‘The more a man has’, with its ...”