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Title: Mysteries (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by Knut Hamsun, Sverre Lyngstad ISBN: 0141186186 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 02 January, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.78
Rating: 5
Summary: Madness, Beauty and Desperation at the Crossroads
Comment: Mysteries is that rare breed of book which mesmerizes you and pulls you through its pages, transfixed, before you know what's happened to you. With Norway serving as the idyllic backdrop, we are suddenly living life through the eyes of the charming but insane Johan Nagel. Nagel lands as a stranger in a small coastal town and weaves the unwitting residents into the reckless schemes of his disturbed mind. As he does, he gives desperate vent to his frustrations, dreams, romantic yearnings, joys, rage, love, and compulsion to belong. Peopled by the midget Grogaard, the unattainable beauty Dagny Kielland, the disapproving magistrate's deputy Reinert, and the whimsical spinster Martha Gude, Knut Hamsun's narrative genius lies in the things he leaves unsaid at every stage of the story, and doing so especially brilliantly towards the book's end, where everything coalesces and resolves by subtle implication. Hamsun's artistic mastery is overwhelming and refreshing. I hope you enjoy the dazzling display of his talents as much as I did in this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Blind angels
Comment: I think Lyngstad is right on in translating midget into miniman because the midget is a double of Nagel and this translation reflects the intended meaning of Hamsun. Lyngstad's pacing is a little slower than the older translation perhaps because he is trying to be so very literal his english word count perhaps mounts a little to high. This is a small caveat however. I would rather see more of what Hamsun intended than read a free interpretation which the last translation was close to being. Lyngstad lambasts the other translations a little too much for my taste. If he didn't have his own translation to hawk his criticism would be more convincing. Like Hunger, Hamsun's first novel, Mysteries is great stuff, read it and experience a thousand miniature blind angels showering down on you.
Rating: 4
Summary: Never quite matched his first novel
Comment: Undeniably a book of mystery. The reader always gets a dual sense of distance with Hamsun. There is the proximity - at times alarming - between the narrator and the synaptic impulses of the main character's brain. Yet there is also this persistent sense of not being let into a secret, the key to the disturbing, possibly insane nature of the hero (if you can call the prominent figure in Mysteries that). What Hamsun, and I'm guessing now, was trying to let the world in on was a kind of proto-existential angst - Kafka before Kafka if you like. The hero lives in a constant tornado of emotional highs and lows at times appearing in control, at times not. And this is the unsatisfying, fascinating heart of Mysteries. I urge you to read it, but only after reading Hunger, which set high standards
not only for Hamsun but for modernist writers for decades to come.
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Title: Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Robert Bly, Paul Auster ISBN: 0374525285 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: February, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Pan: From the Papers of Lieutenant Thomas Glahn by Knut Hamsun, Sverre Lyngstad, Anita Loos ISBN: 0141180676 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun ISBN: 0394717813 Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: May, 1972 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand D. Celine, Ralph Manheim ISBN: 0811208478 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: February, 1988 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: In Wonderland by Knut Hamsun, Sverre Lyngstad ISBN: 0970312555 Publisher: Ig Publishing Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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