Customer Reviews

Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

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Pan begins as a nature story - detailed, lush, knowledgeable descriptions of nature, of living a solitary existence, of feeding off the forest and sea. Phrases such as "there was a sweet sulphurous smell from the old leaves rotting in the woods" lull the reader into an expectation of a pastoral romance novel. This is anything but. It is, rather, an exploration of the relationship of the solitary Lt. Glahn with two women in particular and society in general. Lt. Glahn is socially inept and impulsive. The two women? One is servile and unavailable; the other, more interested in the power of the chase than the capture. The resulting story is an intriguing study of human emotions, of motivation and of the honesty of self-revelation. An excellent book by an excellent author.

Pan is a short, terse, novel about a reclusive "wild" man, Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, gifted with sexual charisma who idealizes nature and himself but is blind to his arrested development, his cruelty, and his enslavement to his own compulsive actions, which, as the novel progresses, have tragic consequences. By showing the disparity between Glahn's perception of himself, which is rather romantic and lofty, with the "other" Glahn, the uncouth, abrasive one who clashes with other people, Knut Hamsun succeeds in writing an ambiguous, mysterious fable about the conflict between solitude and civilization, and how the "self" cannot be defined in its isolated state.

For an updated theme of the man being taken over by his inner beast, check out James Lasdun's modern masterpiece The Horned Man.

Knut Hamsun has been called the father of modern fiction. First published in 1894, Pan is a perfect, beautifully written novel. The words, the construction, the atmosphere, like a long poem, where not a line nor punctuation could have been done differently. As thousands of readers before me and surely thousands that will come after me, I totally admire this wonderful little book, and I don`t know how many times I have read and re-read it, both in Norwegian and in English. This is a book not to be missed by anyone with a desire to read good literature.

This is a lyrical, beautiful novella in the most hated sense of the word. It is absolutely overwrought, emotive, undone and adolescent, and that is what makes this story and the lieutenant at its center wonderful.

If you can't accept a marriage of 19th century pomp and the truly modern -- if [stated another way] you really must put on airs, steer cleer of Hamsun. If on the other hand you can lower your brow and smile, secure in your own intellectual prowess and unthreatened by self-consciously exquisite prose and a manipulative story... then read on. You'll find no better.

I certainly enjoyed it.

Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize in 1920 after writing The Growth of the Soil, but his earliest novels are his finest, with Pan as the pinnacle of his career. In Hunger (his first) and Mysteries (his second), Hamsun is still playing with his ideas, and while these novels fascinate, they leave the reader with a somewhat rambling, directionless feeling. In Pan, Hamsun has perfected his craft. Pan is one of the finest novels in any language and it is a shame that more English-speaking people are not familiar with his work. Forget what you heard about him being a Nazi sympathizer in the 1930's. He got suckered into the anti-industrialist, pro-agrarian philosophies of the Nazis and probably was just a tool of their propaganda artists. Hamsun is worth the read. If you haven't become familiar with his work, you'll be doing yourself a favor by reading Pan.

To give a brief synopsis a Norwegian man goes to a rural area of Norway to spend several months hunting and living in a cabin in the forest. Most of this book deals with his interactions with the locals of this rural community, in particular two women. One is married but makes herself available in all ways to the main character, the other who fancies herself an aristocrat of some sort seems to be mainly interested in mind games and seeing how many hoops she can make him jump through to please her. Because he is socially backward he often acts in inappropriate ways in social settings and towards her, which both enrages and makes her all the more intrigued by the outsider.

I liked this book, as I do everything else by Hamsun I have ever read, but he always writes good or very good novels but seems to fall short of writing a truly great book. Hamsun was a good writer but I think he is overrated in some quarters. One thing I do like about him is his stories are VERY Scandinavian, not just in predictable ways, but also in very subtle ways that unless you've lived in Norway/Sweden/Denmark that you probably wouldn't pick up on. Overall I liked his Growth of the Soil and Hunger much more than Pan. My favorite piece of Scandinavian literature however would be by another author Beyond Sing the Woods by Trygve Gulbranssen.

The beauty and uniqueness of Hamsun's work is often overlooked as a consequence of his Nazi sympathizing. Although I don't dismiss the significance of his support for the Third Reich, dismissing his writing is a tragedy, for he is one of the most gifted writers I have ever come across. I debated which Hamsun novel to recommend, as I'm a fan of many (including "Hunger", "Victoria", "Mysteries" and "Women at the Pump" among others), but chose "Pan" if only to offer the added recommendation that you seek out the recent movie "Two Green Feathers" based on the novel. "Pan" is a beautiful, brilliant, eccentric little novel...I suspect that many readers who pick up a Hamsun novel will end up (like myself) with a shelf full of multiple editions of his work, much loved and oft-read.

I sat up all night, reading the whole story. This tale about a lonely, self-destructive man in Norway, who happens to meet a young girl and starts to love her, looks like "Wuthering Heights" written by Virginia Woolf. Introspective, but not too much "stream of consciousness" that might make you bored. Basically a love story and tradegy, it is an absorbing story; sometimes very violent, but surely it touches the innermost recess of most unaccountable aspects of humans'

heart: passion of love and hate. Still, beware; sometimes its violence sounds like "Takeshi" films and sexual nuance is always there, though much less than DH Lawrence.

Hamsun so thoroughly blurs the lines between poetry and prose in this work that there is no use in trying to discern the difference. As powerful, enchanting and horrifying as the story is, the real prize here is the language. Every turn of Hamsun's pen is a masterstroke. Perhaps the most gorgeously written work of the last 200 years.

There is little to add to Mr. McMahon's astonishing review of this novel. However, I think there's a worthwhile point to make on the symbolism here. The character Lt. Glahn is Pan, a symbolic equivalent of the satyr Marsyas. In Greek mythology, the god Apollo skins Marsyas alive after beating him in a music competition. In Hamsun's book, the wealthy merchant Mr. Mack functions as Glahn's nemesis, as Apollo, and torments him in various ways throughout the book (won't spoil too much as this is Amazon.com.)

However, in this angle on the myth, the Apollonian vs. Marsyan/Dionysian, the satyr bites back, hurting Mr. Mack and his daughter Edvarda (Glahn's lover) with various schemings. Although Glahn suffers the greater helping of the grief, it calls into question how much those who live by logic/Apollonian standards suffer due to their oversight and brutal intolerance of the emotional, spontaneous forces which Glahn/Pan has mastered. In other words, if goat-men were so inconsequential, why would sun-gods have to torture them? Thou dost protest too much, Apollo, and I wonder if the punishment is disproportionate to the goat man's crime.