The Ring is Closed by Knut Hamsun

The Ring is Closed by Knut Hamsun

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Ringen sluttet

Translator – Robert Ferguson

Souyrce – Personal copy

It was hard to pick this up as Hamsun is a writer that is full of controversy later in his writing life his connection with the Nazis during the world war. But Hunger is still held up as a masterpiece and I had brought several other books by him a few years ago when the Dear Rob of Robaroundbooks a much missed lit site, highlighted the Spuvenir press collection of his lesser-known books, which all featured paintings by the Norweigan artist Edvard Munch which seem to go well with the books. Anyway, this is his second to last novel, written in 1936, which has at its heart a flawed character trying to escape his small-town roots only to go full circle in his life. Like his father, the lighthouse keeper, keeping a light going full circle every night, we see Abels’s life do the same, and as we do, like the lighthouse light, it hits the rocks and pitfalls in his life.

are!

Now that the old lighthousekeeper was a widower he couldn’t manage without a little female help around the house. He advertised for a housekeeper and got Lolla. A great bit of luck! Lolla would be fine, she was quick around the house, used to chickens and pigs, unmarried, four years older now, in good health and quite pretty. Tengvald was after her, a trained blacksmith now and working as a journeyman, they could have got married any time and started a family. But Tengvald held back. Why? Probably because he lacked the courage. He was a quiet, rather shy blacksmith, nothing especially outstanding about him, but honest and steady. It wasn’t easy for him to break up with Lolla, but she had those crazy nostrils that fluttered every time she looked at him.

His excuse was that he had to take care of his mother. Okay then, said Lolla, who wasn’t too brokenhearted about it. What was Tengvald the blacksmith to her? But when, a little while later, the very same Tengvald began courting Lovise Rolandsen, and even ended up marrying her, Lolla started started passing alot of sly remarks: that, by God, those two were made for each other

His father the lighthousekeeper

At the heart of this book is the life of a care free male, as he drifts and floats through life, Abel and his life. He has a love interest all through the book with Olga, the local chemist’s daughter; we see this man drift away from his small-time life in a book written by an older. Man, in a way, Hamsun thinks of a more carefree world for him as a younger man is Abel part of Hamsun he never quite got too. Was there an Olga for him. We follow as Abel tries to escape the small-town life. He inherits and gives away to those around him an inheritance, and he fritters away. He eventually ends up in the US. But then things happen, and he has to escape that world and head home for a simpler life in a way echoing back to his father’s life. The title may be a clue to the book: Can we escape Fate, or are we just running towards it?

ABEL WAS INFORMED BY TELEGRAPH OF HIS FATHER’S DEATH, but he was in no great haste to travel. The months passed, and if he responded at all to announcements and calls to attend meetings of the beneficiaries of the will it was only to answer that he was doing just fine where he was and felt no call to travel home.

But things must have been pretty tough for Abel one way and another, because he wrote that he had neither clothes nor money for his ticket.

No clothes and no money for his ticket… and him the son of a wealthy man!

Hisa father left him a little bit of money

Its fair as I l, liked part of this book. Abel had a feeling of a character we see in a lot of books that young man escaping his world, Holden Caulfield or even a character like Blaugaust, where you never escape your fate his fate I sto be like his father a man in the solitary world in a way. I also see a connection in a way with How Hamsun maybe connected with Nazis like Henry Williamson had that a simpler world was sold as part of fascism’s false dreams. But Abel also felt like part of an older man, maybe living a different life through his narrator looking maybe at that love that he never quite had a dream of a different lie he never quite got. It also captured a world gone after the war, a world where a young man could be carefree with money yet, because of who they are, get around the world. Some years ago, I read Hunger, his other book, but it also had a strong character at the heart of the book. Anyway, this is my second book for Norway in November. Have you read any Hamsun?