During the German occupation of Norway in the Second World War, Hamsun had been a collaborator he had met Goebbels and Hitler, and was unrepentant to the end. Several times when I asked about Hamsun’s works, the man behind the counter (it was always a man) would shake his head and declare, “He was a traitor!” I’d try to remember the shop so as not to embarrass myself again. During those months in Copenhagen, I occasionally walked into one of the antiquarian bookstores that could be found all over the city’s Latin Quarter. 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.’ ” In Scandinavia, though, Hamsun meant trouble. 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.
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