When Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1920, it was mostly because of this 1917 novel (Growth of the Soil), an epic vision of peasant life in Norway\'s backcountry.
Yet Hamsun\'s eye and ear were still sharp; even h.
The saga of Isak and Inger (born with a harelip) and their hard times is by turns affecting and ponderous; the somewhat overheated first-person narrators of Hamsun\'s extraordinary early novels-"Hunger" and "Pan"-are replaced by a stately, almost distant third person.
When Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1920, it was mostly because of this 1917 novel (Growth of the Soil), an epic vision of peasant life in Norway\'s backcountry