Brilliant Mind, Troubled Soul: Remembering Nobel-prize winning Writer, Knut Hamsun

Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian writer, Knut Hamsun, died 62 years ago today on February 19, 1952.

From Nobel Prize website:

Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was born in Gudbrandsdalen, Norway, and grew up in poverty in Hamarøy in Nordland. From early childhood he was a shoemaker's apprentice, but was also a road worker, stonemason, junior-level teacher. He spent some years in America, traveling and working as a tram driver, and published his impressions, chiefly satirical, under the title Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (1889) [The Intellectual Life of Modern America]. The novel Sult (1890) [Hunger] and even more so Pan (1894) led to Hamsun's literary breakthrough and Sult is regarded as the first genuinely modern novel in Norwegian literature."

Hamsun's work reflected his the belief that humanity's only true fulfillment lies with the soil, finding its expression in his epic Growth of the Soil (Markens Grøde) (1917), the seminal work that positioned him to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.

Of the homestead the protagonist built in the far north out of the Norwegian forest, called Sellanra, Hamsun writes:

"Let's take you people at Sellanra: you look every day at the blue mountains, they're not invented things, they're old mountains, rooted deep in the past; but they are your companions. There you are, living together with heaven and earth, at one with them, at one with the wide horizon and the rootedness. You have no need of a sword in your hand, you walk through life barehanded and bareheaded in the midst of a great kindliness. Look, there is nature, it belongs to you and yours! Man and nature do not bombard each other, they are agreed; they do not compete or run a race for something, they go together. 

You Sellanra folks live and have your being in the midst of all this. The mountains, the forest, the moors, the meadows, the sky and the stars--there is nothing paltry or apportioned about all this, it is without measure. Listen to me Sivert: Be contented! You have everything to live on, everything to live for, everything to believe in; you're born and you bring forth, you are vital to the earth. You sustain life. You go on from generation to generation, fulfilling yourselves through sheer breeding; when you die, the new brood takes over. What do you get in return? An existence that's just and strong, an existence based on a true and trusting relationship to everything. What do you get in return? You Sellanra folks can't be pushed around or bullied, you enjoy calm of mind and authority, and this great kindliness all around."

Buy Growth of the Soil.

His mental faculties deteriorated with age. His widely publicized admiration for the German culture and the Nazi movement left him after the war impoverished and temporarily under psychiatric observation.

With the passage time, his native and beloved Norway, forgave him this betrayal -- at least some did. Because his sensibilities never came across in any of his literary works his publisher celebrated his literary legacy with a 27-volume of "Collected Works."

Nevil Shute's Little-known Classic: A Town Like Alice

Nevil Shute was born 115 years ago today. While most people have not heard of him, he remains one of Britain's most acclaimed and revered writers. His was born Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 - 12 January 1960) and rose to become a popular novelist and a successful aeronautical engineer. He described in the in an anonymous epigram in one of his books how engineering and design could improve human life: "An engineer is a man who can make something for five bob that any bloody fool can make for a quid!"

He adopted the name Nevil Shute as his pen name and wrote several novels including On the Beach and The Rainbow and the Rose. He his best known for his novel, A Town Like Alice (1950), a World War 2 novel set in Malaya and Australia. The protagonists Jean Paget and Joe Harman are based upon people whom Shute met, both of whom suffered heroically as prisoners of war and who later fell in love redeemed their lost years.

Herbert James "Ringer" Edwards,
real-life inspiration for Joe Harman

Shute based the character of Harman on Herbert James "Ringer" Edwards, an Australian veteran of the Malayan campaign, whom Shute met in 1948 at a station (ranch) in Queensland. Edwards had been crucified for 63 hours by Japanese soldiers on the Burma Railway. He had later escaped execution a second time, when his "last meal" of chicken and beer could not be obtained. Shute appropriates both episodes in the novel.

The novel was ranked in 1998 by the Modern Library ranked 17th on The Reader's List of the 100 best English language novels of the 20th century.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the novel contains the earliest known use of the word dicey: "He.. made a tight, dicey turn round in the gorge with about a hundred feet to spare."

Shute possesses a steady narrative voice and drives the plot relentlessly forward, though his plots are often complicated. His magic makes them plausible and wrenching.

Bryan Brown and Helen Morse in Masterpiece Theatre's
wildly successful mini-series (1981) A Town Like Alice

From A Town Like Alice [the narrator as an old man remembering his friends in Australia]:

 "I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf Country, dreaming of blazing sunshine, of poddy dodging and black stockriders, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection."