knut hamsun/james kelman

(btw this is a terrific juxtaposition, right OR wrong)

I loved Hunger, it made me shiver.

yeah, they both are - so's dan fante! my copy of ask the dust is the US black sparrow press one, tho (who also publish bukowski). no point to this either, other than that i really like the black sparrow press's binding and the way their books look. reading hamsun in a thong in midwinter strikes me as an act of extreme masochism.

Seriously, I loved the atmosphere of Hunger and although entirely different, the atmosphere of Fante's Ask the Dust too. I think Rebel Inc's jewel in the crown is Richard Brautigan. I don't know if he's been discussed much on here as I rarely look, but he makes me laugh like chimp.

oh don't start that again! cf siegbran on black metal and burzum, dave q on skrewdriver, me tearing strips off both of them and then wildly recanting when it came to homophobic dancehall.

i usually take this as a given - hey, i'm english, i'm allowed...

i thought kelman was more influenced by the russians, esp. chekhov.

yeah, this is very well documented. he lectures on checkov and he spoke at length about him in an observer(?)(may have been saturday guardian magazine) interview a while back.

but it's just the spiralling, out-of-control feeling of both books that really hit me.

there's some of this in victoria, first the struggling writer, then victoria's illness. but victoria has the gentle tone of that later book i read, so it's harder for me to see the discontinuity. and going out of control in a pastoral society has a different feeling than say in crime and punishment.

Also...I wrote to D@n F@nte once, and now we kind of have of an email correspondence thing going- he's actually a very funny, normal guy!

A friend bought me "Sombrero Fallout" and that is excellent.

A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings, Victoria and Dreamers are all great. Go read them!

Revive

scott shd read SHE -- haggard is way nuts

i've read SHE, knut hamsun is just depressing

I've read Hunger, Pan, Mysteries, and Growth of the Soil and liked them all pretty well but was never sure if it's cause they were objectively good or because I was trying to connect with my Norskness.

I've always been vaguely interested in reading Hamsun.

Hamsun went through some very distinct phases in terms of the types of characters and stories that interested him, but he was always an ace storyteller. Well worth a read, imo.

Hunger is the best of the early stuff; it has been imitated half to death since then. Growth of the Soil may be his best later work, but I also like Wanderers from that period. It's a bit less ponderous than GotS.

It's too bad he marred his reputation by a very-late-in-life infatuation with the Nazis. He thought they would bring back some kind of lost purity and peasant virtue that had been besmirched by modern over-sophistication. Or some such curmudgeonly delusion. He was a sad old man at the time.

He thought they would bring back some kind of lost purity and peasant virtue that had been besmirched by modern over-sophistication.

Didn't they all.

growth of the soil is pretty astounding

I mean it doesn't do anything new, but the way he just delicately introduces troubles is pretty great. I'm about halfway through and don't know if I'll finish it, the second half of the books seems like it's gonna be a p big departure from the first but wtvr. This book is totally like a low-key 100 yrs of solitude.

sry thought this was in ilb

i really didnt like growth of the soil v much

thats not a critical or thoughtful opinion just an instinctive one smthn in me was deeply saddened by reading it

do you like any other hamsun

i liked mysteries okay and struggled w/ hunger. too alienating mb the voice in hunger reminded me of certain things in modern fantasy novels that i dont like the way they place themselves in a world

kinda unrelated but have u read don carpenter's hard rain falling? for sum reason i thought of hunger reading that book but i really liked it

I seem to remember really liking that one character who pops up every now and again. Geisler or something? Think he's some sort of traveller? Reminded me of some of the protagonists from his earlier works and also Knulp in the Hermann Hesse novel of that name.

yeah geissler was the loner dude who would do shit like pop up and build an irrigation system and leave

Haha yeah, that's the feller!

never read hard rain falling, but I'll check it out
I loved hunger but I read it on a plane
and for whatever reason I love anything I read on planes

"I love anything I read on planes"

Never mind Knut or Jim, you could get a grant just to study that statement.

Are there any translations of Hunger its best to avoid?
I just found a couple of different copies of it in a bookshop yesterday. Put one aside and the other is on one of the staff recommendations shelves but twice the price.
THink I've been wanting to read the book for a few decades and just not found it anywhere. Which now has me wondering if i just forgot about it when i was reading through the University library back in 2003. Also not sure why I never ordered it from anywhere else.
BUt do remember putting a request in with the bookshop I foun dit in a very long time ago.

Is it mentioned in something like Colin Wilson's The Outsider? Or another of his works?

seem to remember someone (not if it was another translator or a critic) berating the robert bly version from the sixties for some reason, but that's the one i read and have never come across an alternative translation so can't compare.

or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_%28Hamsun_novel%29#Translations_into_English

reading the wiki of the first translator of hunger: looks like someone worth following up on. don't think i've ever heard of her or her fiction before.

The current us penguin edition, published in uk by canongate, is supposed to be the best translation. It certainly contains an extensive and bad tempered essay by the translator, Sverre Lyngstad, explaining with many examples why the earlier versions suck balls.

George Egerton is well worth reading, though: i did a short thing about her for Writers No-one Reads: http://writersnoonereads.tumblr.com/post/37510350783/australian-writers-no-one-reads-george-egerton

Looks like I scored, this is a Sverre Lyngstad translation. So I can finally read it.
Does look very thin though, kind of fitting I guess.

xpost: ah, excellent thanks. local bookseller has a virago collection of her first two volumes of stories in stock, so shall seek it out next time i'm in there!

I read the introduction yesterday, this being the Rebel inc Lyngstad edition, & the writer makes the same Kelman comparison. Is that just coincidence or had the initial poster here read that intro by Duncan Mclean and skipped mentioning it?
Or is it a standard cf I'm not aware of? Possibly would be if this was the standard edition for a while?

This also has the translator's essay slagging off the Bly translation. I got a few pages into that before going to sleep last night.