I want to begin reading Knut Hamsun and was hoping to get some recommendations on what to start with. The Hunger too obvious?

Apparently, giving ones Nobel Prize to Goebbels makes Barnes & Noble disinclined to stock your books. I'll have to buy them online and I just wanted to make sure I didn't waste my time and money if someone has a better recommendation.

Knut Hamsun and the Cause of Europe (http://library.flawlesslogic.com/hamsun.htm) by Mark Deavin

I want to begin reading Knut Hamsun and was hoping to get some recommendations on what to start with. The Hunger too obvious?

Apparently, giving ones Nobel Prize to Goebbels makes Barnes & Noble disinclined to stock your books. I'll have to buy them online and I just wanted to make sure I didn't waste my time and money if someone has a better recommendation.

The title is just 'Hunger'. And read 'Mysteries' instead.

I have read with pleasure, "Growth of the Soil" which is a pretty famous book.

Here is an excellent link from VNN main page about Hamsun, thanks Alex!

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/051226crat_atlarge


IN FROM THE COLD
by JEFFREY FRANK
The return of Knut Hamsun.
Issue of 2005-12-26 and 2006-01-02
Posted 2005-12-19



I lived for a time in Copenhagen, trying to learn Danish, and that’s when I discovered the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, whose career was one of the strangest of the last century. Hamsun is not so well known in America—perhaps the curse of a minor language—but his influence is certainly felt; Isaac Bashevis Singer argued that “the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century ‘came out of Gogol’s greatcoat.’ ” In Scandinavia, though, Hamsun meant trouble. During those months in Copenhagen, I occasionally walked into one of the antiquarian bookstores that could be found all over the city’s Latin Quarter. Several times when I asked about Hamsun’s works, the man behind the counter (it was always a man) would shake his head and declare, “He was a traitor!” I’d try to remember the shop so as not to embarrass myself again.

I knew what that was about, of course. During the German occupation of Norway in the Second World War, Hamsun had been a collaborator; he had met Goebbels and Hitler, and was unrepentant to the end. It was baffling: how could the man who wrote “Hunger,” “Mysteries,” and “Pan”—those surpassingly original books—have had any sympathy for Nazis? Hamsun was not some bitter second-rater. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1920, and, unlike other Fascist sympathizers, such as Céline and Pound, he had a deep and lasting grip on his public, that of an enchanter. Singer admitted to being “hypnotized” by him; Hesse called him his favorite writer; Hemingway recommended his novels to Scott Fitzgerald; Gide compared him to Dostoyevsky, but believed that Hamsun was “perhaps even more subtle.” The list of those who loved his sly, anarchic voice is long.

Half a century after Hamsun’s death, his politics and, especially, his wartime behavior remain confounding. But, with the recent publication, in Norway, of a two-volume biography by Ingar Sletten Kolloen, of nearly a thousand pages, he no longer seems quite so elusive. And, if there is not yet a Hamsun revival, certainly a Hamsun reëmergence is under way. Books that were never available in English, such as a bizarre journal about a half-imagined journey to the Caucasus (“In Wonderland”), some of the short stories, the “wanderer” novels of middle age, and even some early journalism, have recently appeared in translation, along with new editions of his most famous books. Two competing English versions of both “Hunger” and “Pan” are available, and last month Penguin issued a fresh translation of “Victoria.” In Norway and Denmark, early editions of Hamsun are fetching ever-higher prices, though these are mostly the books he wrote long before the rise of Fascism.........