I’ve never heard of anything so insane! - let's get the Knut Hamsun Mysteries readalong moving

What am I waiting for?  Here it is, the Knut Hamsun Mysteries readalong event, where a number of thrill-seeking readers enjoy one of the all-time craziest novels of the 19th century.

The way this usually works is that I kick things off with a light, superficial post, and then link to the subsequent, better, writing by other readers.  The only difference this time is that Jean at Howling Frog Books has already put up a clean summary of the 1892 novel, calling it “a mystery all the way through.”  I was ready to argue with that judgment, until I thought about the novel’s final page.  No, Jean’s right.  Maybe we can work out what kind of mystery it is.  Not a police procedural, not a cat mystery, not a locked-room mystery.

Jean read the most recent translation by Sverre Lyngstad, now a Penguin Classic; I read the 1971 Gerry Bothmer version; Pykk showed me a quote from the 1926 Arthur G. Chater translation that was so different in tone from what I read that it could be from a different novel.  I make no judgment about which is best.

In the Penguin edition, an important secondary character is named Miniman, while in Bothmer he is The Midget.  There is not just a vocabulary difference here, but rather an interpretive one, because as far as I can tell the character names The Midget is not actually a midget, and is not even unusually short in anything but self-confidence.  He has picked up the diminutive nickname as part of the degrading abuse to which he is subjected.  So one translator picks a word that we have but is not quite right, while the other goes for an invented word.

Maybe an abused Midget who is not really a midget gives an idea about the peculiarities of this novel.

The story is in the “stranger comes to town” category.  Nagel is a chaos seed, or wants to be one.  He descends on a little Norwegian town with the intent of disrupting it somehow.  He is insane: a pathological liar, a depressive, perhaps a sociopath.  He is something of a devil figure, in that he tries to corrupt the weakest members of the community.  Also something of a Christ figure in a very strange way.  Well, not Christ exactly, but rather a Christ-like Dostoevsky character, which is not the same thing.  That I want to save for tomorrow.

Reading Hunger, published two years earlier, I wonder how crazy the narrator is really supposed to be.  He spends the novel reduced to an extreme state of desperation, so he is hard to judge.  In Pan, published two years after Mysteries, the narrator is pretty clearly insane at certain points in the novel, although there is some question about other times.  Both novels are written in the first person, in retrospect, which by itself is a source of ambiguity.

The main character of Mysteries is a close copy of those other two, and since the novel is in the third person, the filter is removed.  The question is not is he crazy but how crazy?  The device of the outside disembodied floating narrator allows distance and eventually certainty.  The occasional moves into free associative stream of consciousness rants only emphasize the similarity of the three characters.

I was really wondering why Hamsun bothered to use the third person in Mysteries.  The answer is that he needed it for the last page, a bit of ambiguity-multiplying technical outrageousness that had me laughing.  Maybe I should stop writing about the last page.  There is plenty more to keep me busy.

The title quotation is near the end of Chapter 11.