The Review of Contemporary Fiction

On Overgrown Paths by Knut Hamsun
Thomas Hove

Knut Hamsun. On Overgrown Paths. Trans. Sverre Lyngstad. Green Integer, 1999. 244 pp. Paper: $12.95.

This swan-song memoir is the latest of Sverre Lyngstad’s admirable translations of Hamsun’s work into English, all of which vividly convey both the rawness and the lyricism of Hamsun’s style and the abrupt, random shifts of his narrators’ moods. On Overgrown Paths documents the events and memories of Hamsun’s life during his 1945-1948 confinement and trial for his Nazi affiliations in World War II. Except for some brief details of his arrest and trial, Hamsun comments very little on the political climate of Norway’s postwar years. He does, however, include a transcript of his defense speech, which is a fascinating account of the insoluble conflict of obligations he faced and a muted challenge to his accusers’ self-exculpatory scapegoating impulses. But most of this memoir dispenses with self-vindication and instead reads like one of Hamsun’s early novels, meandering through the random everyday events of his life: encounters (sometimes politically charged, sometimes not) with ordinary Norwegians; meditations on nature’s beauty; bittersweet memories of youthful friendship and romance; and above all, world-weary assessments of life, chance, and the individual’s place in history. Hamsun constantly notes that, no matter what happens in the political sphere, the ultimate problem of existence is one’s private rendezvous with death. Whether or not we feel we can judge Hamsun’s moral and political failings, or excuse his indirect complicity with the Holocaust, or accept his peculiar combination of nationalism and fatalism, this memoir, like act 5 of Hamlet or the philosophy of Schopenhauer, is the disturbingly comforting testament of a man who is utterly fed up with existence but has learned to accept its inevitable disappointments and injustices. “But let us not turn tragical in our disappointment,” he says in a variety of ways. “The whole thing isn’t worth that much.” [Thomas Hove]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction On Overgrown Paths by Knut Hamsun Thomas Hove Knut Hamsun. On Overgrown Paths. Trans. Sverre Lyngstad. Green Integer, 1999. 244 pp. Paper: $12.95. This swan-song memoir is the latest of Sverre Lyngstad’s admirable translations of Hamsun’s work into English, all of which vividly convey both the rawness and the lyricism of Hamsun’s style and the abrupt, random shifts of his narrators’ moods. On Overgrown Paths documents the events and memories of Hamsun’s life during his 1945-1948 confinement and trial for his Nazi affiliations in World War II. Except for some brief details of his arrest and trial, Hamsun comments very little on the political climate of Norway’s postwar years. He does, however, include a transcript of his defense speech, which is a fascinating account of the insoluble conflict of obligations he faced and a muted challenge to his accusers’ self-exculpatory scapegoating impulses. But most of this memoir dispenses with self-vindication and instead reads like one of Hamsun’s early novels, meandering through the random everyday events of his life: encounters (sometimes politically charged, sometimes not) with ordinary Norwegians; meditations on nature’s beauty; bittersweet memories of youthful friendship and romance; and above all, world-weary assessments of life, chance, and the individual’s place in history. Hamsun constantly notes that, no matter what happens in the political sphere, the ultimate problem of existence is one’s private rendezvous with death. Whether or not we feel we can judge Hamsun’s moral and political failings, or excuse his indirect complicity with the Holocaust, or accept his peculiar combination of nationalism and fatalism, this memoir, like act 5 of Hamlet or the philosophy of Schopenhauer, is the disturbingly comforting testament of a man who is utterly fed up with existence but has learned to accept its inevitable disappointments and injustices. “But let us not turn tragical in our disappointment,” he says in a variety of ways. “The whole thing isn’t worth that much.” [Thomas Hove]

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