Readings: For the Fall

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More Hamsun: Penguin Classics’ continuing restoration project of the world’s great authors continues this month with a reissue of Knut Hamsun’s lovely novel ‘Growth of the Soil’ (352 pp., $13 paper). The novel tells the story of Isak, a wanderer who carves a place for himself out of the unfriendly Scandinavian wilderness. It comes accompanied with a helpful introductory essay by Brad Leithauser which highlights, among other things, Hamsun’s enduring sympathy for the Nazi regime and how this has affected all subsequent assessments of him.

What shines through ‘Growth of the Soil,’ however, is a vision of a determined individual that seems unpolluted by the author’s politics. In fact, some of the most beautiful passages in this book, freshly translated by Sverre Lyngstad, have to do with the simple harmony Isak achieves with the natural world around him:

‘The days were taken up with work on the soil, ever more work; he cleared new parcels of roots and rocks, plowed, manured, harrowed, chopped , and crumbled lumps of dirt with his hands and heels--always and everywhere the tiller of the soil who turned the fields into velvet carpets. He waited a few days, until it looked like rain, then he sowed the grain.... It was a solemn act on a mild, quiet evening with no wind....’

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‘Law Lit’ is legit: The premise of ‘Law Lit’ (The New Press: 296 pp., $26.95) seemed uninspiring--create a literary anthology consisting of excerpts from fictional lawyers and such. But the editor, Thane Rosenbaum, who writes for Book Review on occasion, brings the imagination of a fiction writer (which he is, in spades) to the project. How foolish I was: I expected this would be a slog akin to Richard Posner’s sometimes tedious work on law and literature.

Despite the ‘love-hate relationship... between laymen and lawyers,’ Rosenbaum explains in a brief introduction, ‘we retain lawyers who bring us before the law--the refuge of last resort.’

Then, with a minimum of commentary, he lets the selections speak for themselves, demonstrating in the process how thoroughly the legal system permeates Western literature. We find excerpts from one of the Western canon’s foundational texts, Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus, the King,’ as well as selections that come as no surprise--of course he includes a passage from ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ and from Atticus Finch’s splendid, futile defense of Tom Robinson in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’

But there also are lesser-known legal moments here to startle and fascinate the unwary reader. There’s the odd trial before the King and Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ as well as Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Self-Seeker,’ in which the practice of seeking damages is cast in a murky light: ‘The sin is/Accepting anything before he knows/Whether he’s ever going to walk again./It smells to me like a dishonest trick.’ Next time someone cites Shakespeare’s familiar line in ‘Henry VI’ (‘The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers’), you might tell them: Now wait! I have just the right book for you.

Nick Owchar