What is it about Knut Hamsun's books that stops me dead in my tracks everytime I want to write about one of them? Two years ago I read Wayfarers (1927), my introduction to him. No review followed, although the book made a real impression. Last year it was Hunger (1890). It made an even stronger impression, but again, no review. This brings me to Pan, my 2024 read. The plot here doesn't convey the same sense of economic deprivation and wasted lives as the other two did, but still, it would never be considered upbeat.

Twenty-eight year old Lieutenant Thomas Glahn went to northern Norway in the summer of 1855 on furlough. Although he easily could have lived in the village, he chose to live in a hut in the mountains. There were interactions with the people of the village, usually followed by spells of self imposed isolation, which he spent hunting with his dog Aesop.

All this is recounted by Glahn himself, who says he is writing this memoir of that summer two years ago strictly for his own amusement. Like Pan in his forest, Glahn was living in a world of great natural beauty, but like Pan's world, there was always an undercurrent of sexual tension as the natural world began its own rites of spring. As Tore Rem says in the introduction, In the Nordland spring, the forest is filled with pheromones, and Glahn's hut is their epicentre.

Glahn found himself willing partners, each unsuitable in her own way. As he wrote his memoir though, looking back he seemed to select one, Edvarda, as a sentimental favourite, with no evidence that it was so at the time. His behaviour toward her and others was erratic, boorish, and uncontrolled. Alone, he tended to immerse himself in the natural world, imparting feeling and purpose to it. The two alternating strands result in the kind of frenetic activity, often with a sinister undertone, leaving the reader to lurch along with Glahn until he brings it all to a sudden end.

At the end of Glahn's narrative, is another piece by Hamsun, here titled "Glahn's Death, A Document from 1861". This was actually a short story Hamsun had written and published the year before he wrote Pan. The title is sometimes a subtitle for the later work. Once again there is a first person narrative, this time by an unidentified writer. This writer states clearly about Glahn "I hate him". He recounts how and where Glahn died, judging him harshly as he writes, and like Glahn before him, excusing his own behaviour. It's an odd somewhat jarring addition to Pan. Either piece could stand on its own; together the reader has to consider Glahn more carefully. In this way, it works.

I spent most of my younger reading years, reading Stephen King and others like him. Sometime in high school I discovered classics and read pretty much nothing but books written many years before I was born. Then I started to enjoy books from the 1960s-80s or so. Around fifteen years ago I started to read almost exclusively modern novels, with the occasional dip in the classics for old time's sake. Sometimes I would become obsessed with a certain author and not only read everything they wrote, but also try to explore the people who influenced the people who were influencing me. I discovered Knut Hamsun during my Charles Bukowski phase, read one of his books (Hunger), and liked it.

Another reviewer on Goodreads called this book, "Walden for emotionally-stunted teens trapped in adult-sized bodies." I couldn't agree more. The protagonist, Thomas Glahn, is living an ascetic life in a cabin on the woods of Norway. He tells time by the sun, ocean, birds, and grass. He hunts and fishes for all his food. These are things that often make a character likeable, but not this guy.

Glahn is obsessed with multiple "young girls," and hooks up with at least two of them. Whenever one of them doesn't give him the attention he desires, he throws a fit. At one point he threw her shoes off of a boat because he thought she was ignoring him. When he's jealous that she's talking to another man, he goes up to that man and spits in his ear. Finally, when he's leaving town and she asks if she could have his dog to remember him by, Glahn shoots his dog in the head and then sends the body to the girl. He's an immature, spoiled, racist (not surprising, since the author was good friends with Hitler, Goebbels, and the like) character.

The final part of the book is written by someone who hates Glahn and eventually murdered him...because he's jealous of the effect Glahn has a very young Tamil girl he's courting. What a waste of time this book was. ( )

Magical, melancholic, perhaps Hamsun's finest. ( )

Käesolev raamat on trükitud eriväljaandena Ü. Eesti Kirjastuse ORTO liikmetele sünnipäevakingiks.

“He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.”

Hamsun wrote this in 1945, after the suicide of Hitler.
It certainly adds "color" to a novel, when you find out its author was a lackey for Hitler.

Before you fling Pan out the window however, the author Isaac Bashevis Singer said this about him:
“The whole school of fiction in the 20th century stems from Hamsun...".

So there's definitely two-sides to the man, and Pan, though a minor novel compared to Hunger, is worth investigating. ( )