Mysteries

Nagel, steps off a boat, the stranger in town, like Clint in High Plains Drifter. Sort of. Then sets to championing the outcast and the lost cause in his yellow suit with his empty violin case full of dirty laundry.Nagel is a mysterious fellow. In modern parlance probably 'bi-polar', suffering severe fluctuations in his mental stability. To begin with, mad on righting injustice, mad on love. Which even the conservative reader might consider acceptable aberrations. But Hamsun cleverly takes it further, with excruciating precision he unwinds the tight spool of Nagel's delicate psychology.At each turn one agrees, one empathises, one delights - Nagel, hero of a painful, uncaring world. Yet, increasingly, happy episodes unravel into overthought, chaotic self-immolation and delusion. 'Mysteries' is a tragic, haunting, bittersweet mystery of the mind. The portrayal of Nagel's slow disintegration as vivid and compelling as Vinnufossen.

To dissect Knut Hamsun's Mysteries as one would an ordinary novel is impossible. This is a book in which nothing is quite as it seems to be, and the more closely the reader examines it or tries to make sense of it, the more inexplicable it becomes. At the core of the story is Johan Nagel, easily one of the most enigmatic characters in literary history. His arrival in a small Norwegian town in 1891, with no visible aim or purpose, is the first piece in a puzzle that doesn't ever quite fit together. Moreover, we are left wondering, at the end, if it was actually meant to.Something that the reader cannot ever accuse Hamsun of is imitation. Many writers may have followed in his footsteps, but, in spite of the fact that he was inspired by a variety of sources, including August Strindberg and Dostoesvky, he was nonetheless an absolute original. Introspective, individualistic, uncompromising, he was a genius in every sense of the word.Mysteries, a novel that the American author Henry Miller once said is "closer to me than any other book I have read" was published in 1892, two years after Hunger and two years before Pan. Hamsun garnered the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Growth of the Soil in 1920.I first read Mysteries in my early twenties and twenty five years on I am still reading it and finding something new to take away after what must be ten reads. I can not recommend this book highly enough or indeed any works my the master of Norwegian literature

I enjoyed this book for all the reasons mentioned in the earlier reviews. The style is contrasting and somewhat mysterious like the plot itself. However I don't know why but I did find the intricacies of the story annoyingly unmemorable such that I couldn't relate a lot of the underlying treads and whether they were later resolved or not. A lot seems to happen and the conclusion of the story is exciting but I couldn't help think the allusion to opium use by Nagel, towards the end, might render the story just another disappointing "only a dream" (paranoia/drug flash back) type finale. It is a story not unlike Master and Marguarita, in my view, only more real, sinister, darker and not so much fun. In the end it does what is says on the tin, provides "mysteries".

Good read

Really happy with the quality of the book and the delivery from US to EU. Totally recommend ThriftBooks-Dallas USA!