Mysteries (Penguin Twentieth-
Century Classics) by Knut Hamsun
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The main character, like the title says, is a mysterious guy. Nagel arrives
in a Norwegian town with plenty of money and goodwill, and though kind
of an eccentric, seems to start to fit in with the loc al crowd. But its almost
as if Nagel only just landed on Earth, and while he wishes to live correctly,
has no idea how to do it. Published at the end of the last century,
Mysteries is an existentialist novel, very strange, often very funny, often
sad and largely asking the question, Why live?
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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 f eels 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 hi mself--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 sc alpels. A vivisection that, like all, leave behind a corpse and
more questions than answers.
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