The Mysteries

Rating:
Summary: brilliant and still fresh
Review: This is a sketchy book to recommend. I've recommended it to friends who say it is among their favorites, others who say they don't get it, didn't like it. Arguably there is no plot to the story, yet something beckons you to keep turning the pages. For me it's the kind of book that I can open to any page and I'm into it. Hamsun has a tricky wit, his characters are quirky and unpredictable, and I guess that's the appeal -- you keep reading just to find out what the characters are capable of.

What I think is amazing about this book is that it had no forerunner (or so they say). Hamsun just decided he was going to sit down and change the course of fiction, and he did it. Basically, he was tired of the predictable course of Victorian literature, the predictable style, predictable endings, and wanted to shake it up, and in the process efforts like Mysteries became the forerunner of the Modern age in literature. The string of modern novelists that count Hamsun as one of their prime influences is too long to list here, and Mysteries (along with Hunger) are the classic favorites.

I don't know if this is my favorite novel of all time (it's close) but Johann Nilsson Nagel is my favorite character. I doubt you'll find a more tragically passionate character. And if you are a self-taught writer this is a tremendous book to learn from.

Rating:
Summary: Everybody's got something to hide
Review: This novel, about a strange and eccentric man, is itself a strange and eccentric story. Not as engaging or as personal as the novel Hunger, Hamsun still manages to look at both the joy and darkness of existence. If I were a first-time reader of Hamsun's work, I wouldn't start with this book, although it is a thought-provoking read as it examines the "mysteries" within other people's lives and of those within our own.

Rating:
Summary: Never quite matched his first novel
Review: Undeniably a book of mystery. The reader always gets a dual sense of distance with Hamsun. There is the proximity - at times alarming - between the narrator and the synaptic impulses of the main character's brain. Yet there is also this persistent sense of not being let into a secret, the key to the disturbing, possibly insane nature of the hero (if you can call the prominent figure in Mysteries that). What Hamsun, and I'm guessing now, was trying to let the world in on was a kind of proto-existential angst - Kafka before Kafka if you like. The hero lives in a constant tornado of emotional highs and lows at times appearing in control, at times not. And this is the unsatisfying, fascinating heart of Mysteries. I urge you to read it, but only after reading Hunger, which set high standards
not only for Hamsun but for modernist writers for decades to come.