Are Knut Hamsun's novels worth reading?

All he does in his novels is talk about incoherent religious garbage.

>>9065099
No, he doesn't? Are you thinking of Hermann Hesse?

Of course they are. Hunger is both hilarious and sad at the same time.

No, he was a literal nazi and on the wrong side of history.

>>9065164
this

>>9065164

Hunger is both boring and... no, it's just boring.

inb4 "it's supposed to suck, that's the point!"

Yep. Read Sult and Pan, both great.

>Sult ;)

>>9065363
Are translations good or do I have to learn Norwegian?

>>9065202
>wrong side of history
so was Stalinism, but that didn't stop a good handful of leftist artists and academics in the West from sucking the USSR's cock at that time

I've just finished (yesterday, actually) the Trilogy of the hobbo and it was just meh.

If you like Burroughs, Kerouac and all those dipshits you may enjoy Hamsun too because they're very obviously influenced by him (I would actually say they just copied him), but that's all. There's not much value on the book.

I don't know about Hunger, but the Trilogy is very average.

>>9065424
Can you name a few? And also, was there anyone crazy enough to continue sucking after The Purge™?

>>9065146
kys

>>9065448
>Can you name a few?

Sartre.

ITT

holy fucking pleb

>>9065202
>I judge artists by their politics

File: 1486147264525.jpg (68KB, 600x1129px) Image search: [Google]

68KB, 600x1129px

>>9065424
Stalin literally did nothing wrong.

>>9065414

The language in both of them is old, so even if you did learn the language i'd imagine you would strugle reading them.

How ever, if you learn Norwegian, tansitioning to Swedish and Danish is fearly easy.

>>9065091

Yes. His youth novels in particular. Hunger is the most widely known, but I think Mysteries and Pan are his greatest from that period. Victoria is pretty good in its own right, but I still consider it second-rate Hamsun. The poster comparing him to the beats isn't entirely off. In terms of frenetic energy and the depiction of radical anomie and rootlessness, there are distinct similarities. Still, Hamsun's prose is much, much better than the beats, at least in the original Norwegian.

The similarities end there though. Hamsun unequivocally rejects modernity and all it entails in his magnum opus, Growth of the Soil, which is one of the greatest of all time and won him the Nobel Prize. It's a simple story and a powerful allegory, told with remarkable beauty. The only other author off the top of my head that has managed something similar would be Tolstoy in his short stories.

It's definitely worth a read. Start with Hunger or Mysteries.