The Famous Wanderer Plays on Tattered Strings — review of Hamsun’s “On Overgrown Paths”

“Pan” was the first book by Knut Hamsun I read. Over the years I read a few more, but not all of what Hamsun wrote. “On Overgrown Paths” — Hamsun’s last book — will be in most likelihood the last one that I will read by this author. Not because of any kind of disappointment but because of a certain emotional logic of the author’s narrative that parallels my reading experience.

“On Overgrown Paths” has in it what “Pan” had in it — the romance of mind-in-nature, that out-of- left-field pantheistic tangentiality of a human mind that now and then gets lost in the serenity of nature, and intimate encounters that require no explanation. While Hamsun offers no excuses for his ideology, he does lay out a humanizing rationale for his ideological choices while living under Nazi occupation. Therefore, the book is hardly an apologia but a diary of a mind that is undergoing a Kafkaesque “process/trial” with sage-like nonchalance. It reads as a farewell between a writer and his future (now past and present) readers (among which I am) — a rare kind of closure in the world of literature. Stylistically, Hamsun’s previously already muted narrative strings — in my opinion — are by now tattered: the thin red lines that you could always find in his prior works are quickly fading from a page to a page, and the paths of his narration are indeed progressively overgrown by seemingly indecipherable references and vignettes.

The effect is that of a rambling old man who is aware of his growing insignificance, a life-turn that he sees as existentially normal and acceptable. And amidst that rambling by a deaf man, we — whose reading ears are still attuned to the voice of a beloved author — we can still hear an occasional pure note of that familiar pagan mysticism. And it feels like enough. Hamsun leaves us to our devices, passing a relay torch of wandering from writer to reader.