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The Last Joy

Knut Hamsun

Translated from the Norwegian by Sverre Lyngstad

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The Last Joy (1912) brings to a close Knut Hamsun’s “Wanderer Trilogy,” preceded by Under the Autumn Star (1906) and A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings (1909). 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 that ensured his Nobel Prize for Literature.

The middle-aged narrator of The Last Joy is a Hamsun double who leaves the country for the city. He meets Miss Torsen, a beautiful schoolteacher, and follows her sexual escapades, including rape, with the intense, vicarious interest of a voyeur. Considering himself too old for love, he encourages Miss Torsen’s interest in Nikolai, a hulk of a man, whom she marries, thereby escaping the supposedly sorry lot of a career woman.

The novel combines a rapturous celebration of nature with an excoriating satire of modernity, and ends with a call to return to the soil.