Growth of the Soil

Isak walks alone into the Norwegian highlands and starts building a farm, Sellanraa, entirely from nothing, and Hamsun writes his labor in the same patient, unhurried prose no matter how many years or seasons pass, refusing the novel any of the urgency a more conventional pioneer story would supply. Isak's near-total silence and his indifference to anything beyond the next practical task make him less a conventional protagonist than a fixed point the rest of the book's modern disruptions arrive at and eventually recede from without leaving much mark.

Inger, who joins Isak with a harelip that has shaped every social interaction of her life, bears him children, and when their second daughter is born with the same disfigurement, kills the infant out of a shame and fear for the child's future that the isolated farm has given her no one to talk her out of. Her arrest and imprisonment in Trondheim, where she has corrective surgery and encounters an urban modern world entirely unlike Sellanraa's silence, complicate her on her return in ways Isak's own steadiness never has to reckon with directly.

Geissler, an itinerant former district official who keeps reappearing at exactly the moments Isak's growing farm brushes against the outside economy, a mineral prospect on the land, tangled legal paperwork, opportunists eager to exploit a smallholder's ignorance, functions as Hamsun's proof that modernity can touch Sellanraa, briefly enrich it, and withdraw again without altering its underlying rhythm. That is sharpened by the contrast between Isak's two sons: Eleseus drifts to the city and fails at every position he tries there, while Sivert stays and simply continues the work, Hamsun's clearest verdict on which choice the novel actually endorses.

The same vision of rooted, self-sufficient agrarian life that won Hamsun the 1920 Nobel Prize curdled, two decades later, into open enthusiasm for Nazi Germany's occupation of Norway. He met Goebbels, publicly supported Quisling's regime, and mailed his Nobel medal to Goebbels as a gift, a fact that sits uneasily but inescapably beside Growth of the Soil's celebration of blood-deep attachment to the land, since the same soil-worship the novel renders as heroic endurance is recognizably the same instinct fascism would later weaponize as ideology.