Synopses & Reviews
Published in Norway in 1912, The Last Joy (Den Siste Glaede) appears at an important transition point in Hamsun’s career, as he moved any from his intense observations of individual characters to focus on a broader canvas of small town and farm life social units of the Norwegian culture. If Hunger (1890) represents the epitome Hamsun’s focus on the individual, his works of the late teens and 1920s, particularly Growth of the Soil (1917) and Women at the Pump (1920) best represent the latter. The Last Joy lies somewhere between, with all the comic eccentricity of Hamsun’s great individualistic portraits and the small-town pretensions and social inter-relationships of his later works.
Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1920, Knut Hamsun is one of the most beloved writers—although reviled for his "collaboration" with the Nazis during the German occupation of Norway—of the 20th century.
Synopsis
A novel by the famous Nobel-prize winning novelist.
Synopsis
Fiction. THE LAST JOY (1912) brings to a close Hamsun's "Wanderer Trilogy," preceded by UNDER THE AUTUMN STAR (1906) and A WANDERER PLAYS ON MUTED STRINGS (1909), both available from SPD. With its richly varied contents, this work straddles the lyrical Hamsun of Pan (1894) and the epic creator of Growth of the Soil (1917), the book after whose publication he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel combines a rapturous celebration of nature with excoriating satire of modernity, and ends with a call to return to the soil.
About the Author
Kurt Hamsun is a Nobel Prize-winning novelist.