The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Rosa by Knut HamsunDarryl Hattenhauer
Knut Hamsun. Rosa. Trans. Sverre Lyngstad. Sun & Moon, 1998. 254 pp. Paper: $12.95.
A Nobel laureate, Hamsun is often regarded as Scandinavia’s greatest novelist. When he was nine, his family was obliged to surrender him as a laborer to his uncle, who beat and starved him. He escaped five years later and became a nomadic laborer, almost dying of starvation and disease several times. As a result, Hamsun and his protagonists were loners who nonetheless sought others, however passively and hopelessly, for validation. In his earlier work Hamsun thematizes dreams, hallucinations, and the unconscious, using interior monologues and even stream of consciousness. His later work turns to social and environmental concerns.
Rosa, first appearing in 1908, is noteworthy as a transition between the two periods. The protagonist and first-person narrator, Parelius, is another of Hamsun’s lonely, insecure artists. Yet Parelius focuses so much on the other characters rather than himself that he almost becomes a participant observer. Accordingly, Hamsun’s technique here is far from interior monologue or stream of consciousness. Yet the attention to the villagers does not mark this novel with the quaint regionalism and traditionalism of Hamsun’s later work.
Atypical in Hamsun’s oeuvre, this text displays a subtle tragicomic humor. The tasteless village capitalist is equal to those of Sinclair Lewis: Hartvigson makes his consumption conspicuous by wearing a diving suit to church; he also changes his company name to Hartwich, thinking it makes him more cosmopolitan. The sea captain, to get even with his wife, runs across a shoal and takes her down with the ship. The Don Juan succeeds because of his two prized commodities, a bathtub and a feather bed.
Rosa is another fine edition from Sun & Moon, a leading source of Scandinavian literature in translation. [Darryl Hattenhauer]