The Midget is not the only person that interests Nagel since Nagel also catches a glimpse of the beauty of the town – soon-to-be married Dagny. He also immediately makes friends with one of “the lowest members” of this community, with a person everyone calls “The Midget” and who is the butt of all jokes in town.
Nagel is dressed in yellow and has a habit of talking to himself. Hard to figure him out”, says one character. He says he’ll be here for several months. Nagel is a man of extraordinary visions and eccentric ideas, but what is the real truth here, and what should we really expect? Hamsun is clear that there are no easy answers when it comes to the spontaneity of the human nature or the restlessness of the human spirit.Īt the start of the novel, Nagel, a stranger, arrives to a small provincial town in Norway, and first impressions of him are hazy: “ he’s an agronomist, and he’s just returned from abroad. A journey is probably the word for our experience of this main character because Hamsun was really the author ahead of his time in terms of creating characters that disrupt societal status quo, making this story particularly intriguing, even if uneasy to consider. But, who is he really? And, what is his agenda in this ordinary little town in Norway? We are taken on a journey into the mind of this eccentric character as he meets a typical-to-every-small-town parade of characters: a local beauty, a town’s misfit/clown and a proud deputy, among others.
Nagel is a total stranger to the little town, but he soon makes an unforgettable impression on its inhabitants, and people are taken aback by his unusual opinions and contradictory nature. A stranger by the name of Nagel appeared, a singular character who shook the town by his eccentric behaviour and then vanished as suddenly as he had come”. Translated from the Norwegian by Gerry Bothmer, Mysteries begins with the following lines: “ In the middle of the summer of 1891 the most extraordinary things began happening in a small Norwegian coastal town.
I previously enjoyed Knut Hamsun’s book Hunger, which I reviewed in May, and, following the recommendation from CakeorDeathSite, I am now reviewing Mysteries by this Nobel Prize winner. “ Is there any way of knowing? There are so many strange things between heaven and earth, beautiful, inexplicable things, presentiments that can’t be explained, terrors that make your blood freeze”.
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