Growth of the Soil

Name: Kunt Hamsun

Year Won: 1920

Read: "Growth of the Soil"

Original Language: Norwegian

Reason: "for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil"

About: Growth of the Soil is about Isak, a man who grows his farm from a few goats and a patch of barely cleared land to a huge thriving farm with many cows and goats and sheep. He marries Inger, a woman with a harelip, has children, and...grows things. There's also a village and some stories that go on there.

This actually (to me) kind of reads like Stardew Valley - Literary Edition, which isn't a complaint. I LOVED Stardew Valley. It's got a lot of the same characteristics. I found it very soothing to read about farm life. Then when things switched to city life, it was often surprisingly dark and gritty.

What I Liked: It's exceptionally well written. I'd read Hamsun describing how to pull weeds. (And did and LIKED it.) It's the kind of book that's easy to lose yourself in. It's also written in a way that I think was considered very novel for the time, which is worthy of note even if the prose style is a bit more common now. All in all, it was an enjoyable read.

What I Disliked: I really enjoyed this book, so it's hard to find much that I disliked. If I was going to go for something, it's that infanticide seemed like this huge sub-theme, which felt a bit odd. (I mean...maybe it tied into the major theme in the way that made more sense than I thought it did? Unsure.

It was also rather jarring for Inger to nearly kill a relative just to have them later get along like No Big Deal. (To be fair, Inger did spend some time in jail after the altercation, but it still felt odd.)

Should it have won a Nobel: Yes. This is an extraordinary novel that likely would have seemed even more so when it was written. Next up: The Bloom of Life by Anatole France