Growth of the Soil

When Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1920, it was mostly because of this 1917 novel (Growth of the Soil), an epic vision of peasant life in Norway's backcountry. The saga of Isak and Inger (born with a harelip) and their hard times is by turns affecting and ponderous; the somewhat overheated first-person narrators of Hamsun's extraordinary early novels-"Hunger" and "Pan"-are replaced by a stately, almost distant third person. Yet Hamsun's eye and ear were still sharp; even his trees have special qualities ("Everybody knows that aspens can have an unpleasant, bullying way of rustling"). One of the greatest novels ever written, Growth of the Soil was described by H. G. Wells as "wholly beautiful; it is saturated with wisdom and humor and tenderness." The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun.