That last sentence is called an excuse, but what we have here is a warts-and-all biography or, in Hamsun’s case, haemorrhoids and all. ‘Hamsun used the complex workings of his subconscious in his work, which we nor anyone else can have full insight into, while the more rigid, logical workings of his political development are easier to map.’ This book has thus been created in the fertile space between the factual and the artistic poles.’Īnother reason. The reason? ‘Along the way I have continually had to ensure that the storytelling urge has not disrupted the factual base. Kolloen goes on to explain his aims, which, he states six paragraphs into the preface, are ‘to depict as truthfully as possible the life of Hamsun the writer, Hamsun the politician and Hamsun the private person’. Hamsun was a ‘poor country boy’ with ‘only 252 days of schooling’ who ‘chose to support a totalitarian regime’. Kolloen is clear in the opening paragraph of his preface how he wants to present Hamsun to the reader.
The Gyldendal Norsk editions must have been vastly superior to this English language edition, which if nothing else will put Hamsun in the demonised place the Americans and the British believe he deserves, that of a Nazi-loving, flawed writer who should never have been awarded the Nobel Prize.ĭespite the author’s insistence that this biography is built around ‘twenty thousand items of research’ it is not the literary masterpiece it might have been in different hands. This is the portrayal Hamsun’s latest biographer, publisher, journalist, commentator, professor and editor Ingar Sletten Kolloen, paints in Dreamer and Dissenter, a biography that won the Norwegian Readers Award in 2004 in its original two volume form. Knut Hamsun, the 1920 Nobel Prize winner, was an argumentative, money-grabbing, womanising, drunken control freak with a chip on his working-class shoulders about the chattering classes, who saw him variously as an uneducated lout with pretensions to be Norway’s greatest writer, a Nietzsche-like fascist who made no apology for supporting Hitler and a man uncomfortable with his success. BLUE: Review - Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter – Ingar Sletten Kolloen: Robert Allen - September 2009 - book reviews
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