Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter

The second best-known modern Norwegian writer after Ibsen—who remained a lifelong bugbear—Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) is an author of immense psychological insight and massive personal contradictions: surely one of the most controversial winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. This somewhat rigid biography by a Norwegian journalist and editor gets to the heart of the last word of its subtitle early and often. Growing up in poverty that left the seeds for a giant inferiority complex, strong anti-British sentiments and a more moderate dislike for the United States, Hamsun was a restless obstreperous, Nietzschean and an often alienating husband and father (though he remained married to the same woman—a much-younger actress, later a writer of children's and poetry books—for more than 40 years). Hamsun's reputation is tarnished by his embrace of Nazi ideology. Yet, in not untypical fashion, his outlandish meeting with Hitler left the Nazi leader quaking. Praised by the likes of Henry Miller, Thomas Mann and Isaac Bashevis Singer, Knut Hamsun is given his due, although at something of an academic distance, in this unsentimental portrait. 20 b&w illus. (Oct.)