While we looked at the farmhouse, Syvertsen told me something that raised the hair on the back of my neck: in the postwar years, Norwegians would stand just where we were and throw copies of Hamsun’s books over the fence, as a gesture of rejection. Hamsun published his early output during a period of great artistic ferment in Norway Knausgaard pointed out to me that the country’s consensus triumvirate of artistic giants-Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, and Edvard Munch-all came to prominence in, broadly speaking, the same era. Buried on the property are the remains of the most famous novelist in the nation’s history, Knut Hamsun, who lived there for several decades in the latter half of his life.Ī major influence on Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway, Hamsun in many respects anticipated the twentieth-century novel in works such as “Hunger” (1890), his début, a nearly plotless first-person account of an impoverished and self-denying young writer as he wanders about the capital shedding all sources of stability or belief. He wanted to show me a large white farmhouse situated behind a gate and a veil of trees. Along the way, Syvertsen stopped the car at an unmarked spot in the town of Grimstad, on a road that winds along the southern coast. In February, a retired high-school teacher and critic named Emil Otto Syvertsen showed me around the area where Knausgaard, who is his former student, grew up.
But one element of Knausgaard’s story is spoken of more often in a whisper: What is it with that title? In Norway, the appropriation of Hitler’s words is only more obvious Knausgaard’s series is called “Min Kamp.” I interviewed his editor, Geir Gulliksen, in Oslo for a profile of Knausgaard, and when he described his initial response to the title, his thinking sounded familiar: “Why should you link it to Hitler? Why?”
0 kommentar(er)
