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Rating: 
Summary: Puzzling Hamsun, mysterious Nagel.
Review: "Mysteries" is the story of a bizarre man, John Nagel, who arrives at a little Norwegian town one summer's day. He decides to spend a couple of months there, apparently out of the blue, causing all sort of unexpected situations to the dull inhabitants of the village. Deep inside, he is a distressed, troublesome soul. A character that comes to be cherished by the reader, at times even pitiful. Again, Hamsun shows the grievance inherent to mankind through a singular man and his relationships with the people he happens to run into in this gloomy and forgettable town. Although at the beginning I could not easily find my way through this novel, I really enjoyed reading it. A book to be listened to, indeed, yet to a lesser extent than Hunger.
Rating: 
Summary: Mysteries
Review: "Mysteries" remains amongst the handful of pure existential novels before there was such a thing; before the very word became a contrived label. Nagel arrives in town as an eccentric outsider. He does not reveal a complete and thorough past -- partly because he guiltily enjoys the shroud of mystery people pin on him -- partly because he can not come to grips with it himself. Here is a man able to intelligently articulate (whilst drunk, mind you) on the scope of man's most pressing questions of existence, but struggles repeatedly with his own conscious and interactions with people. The genius of the novel is found in that the way one reacts to Nagel invariably reveals something about you, the reader! Do you hold the wealthy intellect in contempt for not breaking free from the situations he creates? Or do you sympathize with this man and relate to his own pattern of self destruction? The answer does not come easy. There are arguments for both disgust and pity. And out of our own curious need to finalize our opinions, to decide what we really think, we read on and on unable to prevent ourselves from being shaped by this novel . "Mysteries" contains one of the most complex character studies in literature while being completely void of pretentious airs. Nagel has a great mind, but that's exactly the problem, he can't reason out the cynicism he holds for himself. One of Hamsun's underlying themes is an illustration of how the great thinkers of the world end up so tightly wrapped with pessimism that they are unable to function in society. He dispels any sense of romanticism that we commonly hold for the struggling artists, philosophers, and eccentrics of the world. Oh, and carefully read the lines pertaining to "The Midget." The only place you might find a greater supporting cast member is in Shakespeare's canon.
Rating: 
Summary: overrated
Review: amazon favors good spouted reviews, so in this case this review will not be printed as all of my reviews go unprinted, but just for the record and you amazon judges, Mysteries in my personal
opinion is simply overrated! so there.
Rating:
Summary: A Cold Wind...
Review: He is one of the great writers of the twentieth century, though his best works were written before 1900. He is one of the most influential European novelists of the last hundred years, yet he is not well known in the United States. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the most important Norwegian author since Ibsen, he is often ignored in his own country. He is Knut Hamsun -- novelist of genius... Hamsun, in "Mysteries, Pan, and Hunger", wrote three of the greatest novels of the late nineteenth century, novels which created a new literary style and which delineated a new literary hero: the alienated loner. His work was widely admired in the first half of the twentieth century, with writers as diverse as Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Henry Miller citing Hamsun's work as being of special importance and influence. Isaac Bashevis Singer, in his essay "Knut Hamsun, Artist of Skepticism" goes so far as to claim that "the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun." Henry Miller said of "Mysteries" that it "is closer to me than any other book I've read." The second of Hamsun's great early novels, and my personal second favorite...!
Rating:
Summary: As good as "Steppenwolf"
Review: I have re-read this book a few dozen times. Johann Nagel, a dandyish/genius/maniac/ romeo type in a yellow coat, wanders from the eternal Nowhere into a small town, destroys all it's pretensions, and returns to the eternal Nowhere in the end, his suicide a protest against complacency of any kind. There are scenes in this novel which I simply cannot forget, such as when Nagel brings the town's hypocritical intellectual circle to the point of mortal desperation simply by his presence. He befriends a pathetic hunchback and teaches him how to assert himself. He simultaneously attracts and repulses the town's women with his pledges of undying love and bizarre subconscious visions. Hamsun is on a plane with Hesse and "Mysteries" is as good, if not better, than "Steppenwolf". The vial of Prussic acid he carries in his coat is a symbol for the dangerous line we are treading in Western Civilization. This is a dark descent into the mind of a complete outsider. I agree with another reviewer in that this has the subtlety and terror of a Greek tragedy. Hamsun treats his frenetic character with the compassion of a mother with a newborn child, but does not romanticize him a bit. Unforgettable.
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Summary: Blind angels
Review: I think Lyngstad is right on in translating midget into miniman because the midget is a double of Nagel and this translation reflects the intended meaning of Hamsun. Lyngstad's pacing is a little slower than the older translation perhaps because he is trying to be so very literal his english word count perhaps mounts a little to high. This is a small caveat however. I would rather see more of what Hamsun intended than read a free interpretation which the last translation was close to being. Lyngstad lambasts the other translations a little too much for my taste. If he didn't have his own translation to hawk his criticism would be more convincing. Like Hunger, Hamsun's first novel, Mysteries is great stuff, read it and experience a thousand miniature blind angels showering down on you.
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Summary: Madness, Beauty and Desperation at the Crossroads
Review: Mysteries is that rare breed of book which mesmerizes you and pulls you through its pages, transfixed, before you know what's happened to you. With Norway serving as the idyllic backdrop, we are suddenly living life through the eyes of the charming but insane Johan Nagel. Nagel lands as a stranger in a small coastal town and weaves the unwitting residents into the reckless schemes of his disturbed mind. As he does, he gives desperate vent to his frustrations, dreams, romantic yearnings, joys, rage, love, and compulsion to belong. Peopled by the midget Grogaard, the unattainable beauty Dagny Kielland, the disapproving magistrate's deputy Reinert, and the whimsical spinster Martha Gude, Knut Hamsun's narrative genius lies in the things he leaves unsaid at every stage of the story, and doing so especially brilliantly towards the book's end, where everything coalesces and resolves by subtle implication. Hamsun's artistic mastery is overwhelming and refreshing. I hope you enjoy the dazzling display of his talents as much as I did in this book.
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.
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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.
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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.
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