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A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings

Knut Hamsun

Translated from the Norwegian by Oliver and Gunnvor Stallybrass

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Author winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Related to and sometimes paired with Hamsun's Under the Autumn Star, this beautifully lyric novel picks up with he same characters as the other book, but is set in time six years later. The central character of the former fiction, Knut Pedersen [Hamsun's real name], is little more than an observer in this work. His former friend Grindhusen has grown from stubborn independence to a shifty and vacillating man; and his companion Lars Falkenberg has dwindled into a small land-holder with a perpetually pregnant wife from whom he is deeply estranged. These two comedians play out a tragi-comedy that is painful through the very irony and humaneness with which Hamsun paints his figures.

The great Norwegian writer, Knut Hamsun—winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920—continues to explore in this early work (first published in 1909), through his lyrical and passionate language, the figure of the "wanderer," an itinerant of the Norwegian countryside taking such work as he can find, but simultaneously involving himself in the lives of the farmers and small townsfolk in encounters along his route.