Books
Tackling Knut Hamsun
Oct. 25, 2009
Entertainment & Arts
In ‘Dreamer and Dissenter’ and ‘The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance,’ Ingar Sletten Kolloen and Monika Zagar, respectively, daringly take on the vitriolic writer.
Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun by Robert Ferguson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $30; 314 pages) The first time I can recall hearing the name of Knut Hamsun was during an interview with Henry Miller, who told me that the Norwegian novelist and playwright was among his favorite authors.
May 28, 1987
VICTORIA by Knut Hamsun, translated from the Norwegian by Oliver Stallbrass (Sun & Moon Press: $10.95; 155 pp.).
Dec. 18, 1994
Although I, too, have been moved by the work of Knut Hamsun, errors of fact and judgment and the critically narrow scope of Judith Freeman’s paean to “Hunger” (Aug. 11) move me to a few words of qualification.
Sept. 8, 1991
ENIGMA The Life of Knut Hamsun by Robert Ferguson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $14.95) Ernest Hemingway “tried to write like him”; Henry Miller called him “the Dickens of my generation”; Thomas Mann wrote that “never has the Nobel Prize been awarded to one worthier of it.”
May 15, 1988
It’s been said that Knut Hamsun is a writer’s writer.
Aug. 11, 1991
A little girl approaches a tall, distinguished-looking old man, throws a book at him and, saying her mother told her to, asks, “Why did you become a traitor?”
Nov. 21, 1997
Opinion
Knut Hamsun’s novel ‘Hunger’ is found on a bench in the south of France and completely disintegrates as it is read one last time.
Dec. 28, 2020
I enjoyed reading Judith Freeman’s article on Knut Hamsun “A Hunger to Be Heard”); but it was not Hamsun’s “stupidity and his naivete” that led him to collaborate with the Nazis, as she postulates.