I lived for a time in Copenhagen, trying to learn Danish, and that’s when I discovered the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, whose career was one of the strangest of the last century. Hamsun is not so well known in America—perhaps the curse of a minor language—but his influence is certainly felt; Isaac Bashevis Singer argued that “the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century ‘came out of Gogol’s greatcoat.’

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