Customer Reviews

Mysteries (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

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"Mysteries" remains amongst the handful of pure existential novels before there was such a thing; before the very word became a contrived label. Nagel arrives in town as an eccentric outsider. He does not reveal a complete and thorough past -- partly because he guiltily enjoys the shroud of mystery people pin on him -- partly because he can not come to grips with it himself. Here is a man able to intelligently articulate (whilst drunk, mind you) on the scope of man's most pressing questions of existence, but struggles repeatedly with his own conscious and interactions with people. The genius of the novel is found in that the way one reacts to Nagel invariably reveals something about you, the reader! Do you hold the wealthy intellect in contempt for not breaking free from the situations he creates? Or do you sympathize with this man and relate to his own pattern of self destruction? The answer does not come easy. There are arguments for both disgust and pity. And out of our own curious need to finalize our opinions, to decide what we really think, we read on and on unable to prevent ourselves from being shaped by this novel . "Mysteries" contains one of the most complex character studies in literature while being completely void of pretentious airs. Nagel has a great mind, but that's exactly the problem, he can't reason out the cynicism he holds for himself. One of Hamsun's underlying themes is an illustration of how the great thinkers of the world end up so tightly wrapped with pessimism that they are unable to function in society. He dispels any sense of romanticism that we commonly hold for the struggling artists, philosophers, and eccentrics of the world.

Oh, and carefully read the lines pertaining to "The Midget." The only place you might find a greater supporting cast member is in Shakespeare's canon.

This book was the #1 hugest influence on me as a teen. I can't say enough good things about it. It's prose poetry in motion. Hamsun wrote about what nowadays we'd call a manic-depressive or bipolar man who is living on the edge of a deep, mystical Norweigan nightmare where the nights never end. A choir of a thousand voices, violin cases, apothecary smells, lifesaving medals...Johan Nilsen Nagel is the most fully-realized character of all time. This is probably literature's first paranormal, too. The Midget is unforgettable as well.

He is one of the great writers of the twentieth century, though his best works were written before 1900. He is one of the most influential European novelists of the last hundred years, yet he is not well known in the United States. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the most important Norwegian author since Ibsen, he is often ignored in his own country. He is Knut Hamsun -- novelist of genius...

Hamsun, in "Mysteries, Pan, and Hunger", wrote three of the greatest novels of the late nineteenth century, novels which created a new literary style and which delineated a new literary hero: the alienated loner. His work was widely admired in the first half of the twentieth century, with writers as diverse as Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Henry Miller citing Hamsun's work as being of special importance and influence. Isaac Bashevis Singer, in his essay "Knut Hamsun, Artist of Skepticism" goes so far as to claim that "the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun." Henry Miller said of "Mysteries" that it "is closer to me than any other book I've read." The second of Hamsun's great early novels, and my personal second favorite...!

Undeniably a book of mystery. The reader always gets a dual sense of distance with Hamsun. There is the proximity - at times alarming - between the narrator and the synaptic impulses of the main character's brain. Yet there is also this persistent sense of not being let into a secret, the key to the disturbing, possibly insane nature of the hero (if you can call the prominent figure in Mysteries that). What Hamsun, and I'm guessing now, was trying to let the world in on was a kind of proto-existential angst - Kafka before Kafka if you like. The hero lives in a constant tornado of emotional highs and lows at times appearing in control, at times not. And this is the unsatisfying, fascinating heart of Mysteries. I urge you to read it, but only after reading Hunger, which set high standards
not only for Hamsun but for modernist writers for decades to come.

I honestly do not know exactly what to say about this novel, other than I am thankful I stumbled upon it.

I just finished it several minutes ago and it was one of the most fascinating, thought provoking, and mesmorizing books I have ever read. The manic main character is easily one of my favorites found throughout all of fiction. His rambling, yet calculated monologues, never cease to amaze me in what direction they end up taking the reader and the audience in the book. His inner monologues are intense in their portrayel of a highly intelligent mind alternating between exuberance and utter despair. He can analyze and attack the main theories and thinkers of the day, yet in his own life he seems incapable of curbing his self destructive and impulsive actions. Frankly, I am in awe that anyone could write a novel like this without having gone over the edge from genius to madness and back again.

I must admit many of the books "mysteries" remain very much unclear to me, though the ending (the last page) hit me like a smack in the face---I thought better of the particular character of whom much is revealed. I, after the novel sinks in a little bit, plan on rereading it and trying to decipher more out of it.

Once again I am brought back to Hamsun....brilliant and ahead of his time.

This is a sketchy book to recommend. I've recommended it to friends who say it is among their favorites, others who say they don't get it, didn't like it. Arguably there is no plot to the story, yet something beckons you to keep turning the pages. For me it's the kind of book that I can open to any page and I'm into it. Hamsun has a tricky wit, his characters are quirky and unpredictable, and I guess that's the appeal -- you keep reading just to find out what the characters are capable of.

What I think is amazing about this book is that it had no forerunner (or so they say). Hamsun just decided he was going to sit down and change the course of fiction, and he did it. Basically, he was tired of the predictable course of Victorian literature, the predictable style, predictable endings, and wanted to shake it up, and in the process efforts like Mysteries became the forerunner of the Modern age in literature. The string of modern novelists that count Hamsun as one of their prime influences is too long to list here, and Mysteries (along with Hunger) are the classic favorites.

I don't know if this is my favorite novel of all time (it's close) but Johann Nilsson Nagel is my favorite character. I doubt you'll find a more tragically passionate character. And if you are a self-taught writer this is a tremendous book to learn from.

Mysteries is that rare breed of book which mesmerizes you and pulls you through its pages, transfixed, before you know what's happened to you. With Norway serving as the idyllic backdrop, we are suddenly living life through the eyes of the charming but insane Johan Nagel. Nagel lands as a stranger in a small coastal town and weaves the unwitting residents into the reckless schemes of his disturbed mind. As he does, he gives desperate vent to his frustrations, dreams, romantic yearnings, joys, rage, love, and compulsion to belong. Peopled by the midget Grogaard, the unattainable beauty Dagny Kielland, the disapproving magistrate's deputy Reinert, and the whimsical spinster Martha Gude, Knut Hamsun's narrative genius lies in the things he leaves unsaid at every stage of the story, and doing so especially brilliantly towards the book's end, where everything coalesces and resolves by subtle implication. Hamsun's artistic mastery is overwhelming and refreshing. I hope you enjoy the dazzling display of his talents as much as I did in this book.

An eccentric stranger comes to a small Norwegian town and proceeds to shock, bewilder, and beguile its bourgeoisie inhabitants with his bizarre behavior, feverish rants, and uncompromising self-revelations.

Mysteries is, perhaps, Hamsun best novel--the fullest, most effective expression of his major preoccupation with social hypocrisy and personal honesty--a novel that illustrates, as do all Hamsun's to one extent or another, Schopenhauer's maxim that a man is only himself when alone. In Johannes Nagel, Hamsun has created a man divided against himself, as we all are, but so hyper-aware of his own inherent duplicity that his very existence is a kind of exquisite torture between opposites. He's dishonest even when he's being brutally honest, selfish even when he's selflessly giving, base even when acting nobly.

Nagel is never free of his awareness of the psychological shadow that dogs everything he thinks and does, the reaction to every action, the no to every yes. No motive--and no man--is pure; and Nagel feels compelled to point out this fact constantly in his own dealings with everyone he meets.

The things we do and think that we'd never tell a soul? Nagel blurts them right out. He has a kind of spiritual Tourette's syndrome. He pushes his worst side forward as if to dare us, as if to say, "love one side, love the other, they are both mine."

Naturally, the conventional, one-sided townsfolk, each of who keeps his or her own ugly shadow-twin carefully hidden from public view (and hidden even from themselves), don't know what to make of someone as ruthlessly self-critical as Nagel. After all, few people ever seriously consider whether "maybe it's me!"

He's not in town long before he becomes hopelessly infatuated with the unavailable fiancée of a naval officer away on duty. This woman has already been the rumored cause of one young man's recent suicide. Nagel, while scorning the young man's melodramatic self-demise, seems nevertheless to be rapidly heading in the same direction in spite of himself. Because for Hamsun, much of what we do is in spite of ourselves and even to spite ourselves. It's a theme Hamsun has also explored in two other great novels, Hunger and Pan.

Mysteries is an unusual novel. It doesn't have a follow-the-dot plot. Nagel is given to wild flights of fancy, to telling stories, and recounting dreams that are symbolic and tangential to the main storyline and may not even be true. In the end one isn't sure what to make of Nagel--and that's to be expected. Nagel doesn't know what to make of himself--or anyone else. That is the "mystery" in Mysteries--the ultimate unknowability that each of us represents--to each other and to ourselves.

Hamsun gives voice to both the dilemma and the despair of the insoluble puzzle of identity and does it in language that is surprisingly straightforward--and ephemerally subtle. It may be that few, if any, have done a better job at dissecting human character to lay bare the mystery at the core of our being than Hamsun--a mystery that eludes even the sharpest of scalpels. A vivisection that, like all, leave behind a corpse and more questions than answers.

The existential nightmare par excellence of unrequited love.

This is the third book of Hamsun's I've read at this point - Growth of the Soil and Hunger being the other two - and I'd say, probably the best of these. It is an obvious offshoot of Hunger in that it deals with one man's existential crisis, and contains a slight amount of foreshadowing for the pastoral ideals attempted in Growth of the Soil. Like Hunger, Mysteries depicts a man at wits end, alienated and starving for fulfillment in a crass and forsaken world. Johan Nilsson Nagel randomly decides to take up residence in a small Norwegian village and involve himself in its social life. In fact, he falls in love ("obsesses over" might be more accurate) with two different women and befriends the village idiot, Miniman, about whom he is curious as though he were his own doppelganger. Nagel is living off an inheritance and could care less about money, which he gladly attempts to dispense with in every bar, shop and encounter with his newfound subjects. There's really not much plot to speak of and that's part of the "mystery" of it all: Where did he come from? Why is he here? What's he doing? It is a testament to Hamsun's success in this most self-reflecting and self-conscious of novels that you'll be looking around yourself and over your own shoulders asking these same questions and reflecting as to whether Nagel's increasingly paranoid delusions and wild dreams are his, or your own. Quite disturbing!

On the whole, Nagel is a philanthropic and philosophical man who seeks to do good, but whose deeds are largely unaccepted, much like Christ. His simple wish is to have "a mission in the world", but failing this basic requirement, he seeks to somehow achieve something "that would scandalize the carnivores" of the world (p.228). A vial of Prussic acid hangs around his neck and its clear from his nightly wanderings through the local forest that these are his only compensations for an otherwise spiritless existence. As we and the villagers come to know him his conversations grow stranger and stranger and yet they are full of strange paradoxes and premonitions. Whereas in Hunger Hamsun focused almost exclusively on one man's internal battles with starvation, with Mysteries we get a more rounded depiction of a man living from contingency to contingency. Hamsun largely does away with the literary conventions of his day, and ours, and by doing so has divided critical opinions about the success of this novel. Following Nagel's meanderings through town, in the forest, and in his own psyche is often uncomfortable and even a little frightening; a bit like watching a train-wreck in slow-motion, but always compelling and stimulating. On the whole, this is a fascinating and refreshing novel with many potential ideas for modern novelists.

This 2001 Penguin edition contains an informative introduction by the translator, Sverre Lyngstad, a comparative literature professor from Norway who is somewhat of an expert on Knut Hamsun. There are both textual and explanatory notes as well as suggestions for further reading (not to mention a great Edvard Munch woodcut on the cover!) making this paperback the sine qua non of Mysteries. Go crazy!! ("To be well adjusted to a sick society is no sign of good health").

I think Lyngstad is right on in translating midget into miniman because the midget is a double of Nagel and this translation reflects the intended meaning of Hamsun. Lyngstad's pacing is a little slower than the older translation perhaps because he is trying to be so very literal his english word count perhaps mounts a little to high. This is a small caveat however. I would rather see more of what Hamsun intended than read a free interpretation which the last translation was close to being. Lyngstad lambasts the other translations a little too much for my taste. If he didn't have his own translation to hawk his criticism would be more convincing. Like Hunger, Hamsun's first novel, Mysteries is great stuff, read it and experience a thousand miniature blind angels showering down on you.