Pan From Lieutenant Thomas Glahns Papers Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics

Pan is a short, terse, novel about a reclusive "wild" man, Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, gifted with sexual charisma who idealizes nature and himself but is blind to his arrested development, his cruelty, and his enslavement to his own compulsive actions, which, as the novel progresses, have tragic consequences. By showing the disparity between Glahn's perception of himself, which is rather romantic and lofty, with the "other" Glahn, the uncouth, abrasive one who clashes with other people, Knut Hamsun succeeds in writing an ambiguous, mysterious fable about the conflict between solitude and civilization, and how the "self" cannot be defined in its isolated state. For an updated theme of the man being taken over by his inner beast, check out James Lasdun's modern masterpiece The Horned Man. Read more

Knut Hamsun won the Nobel for literature in 1920 with his book GROWTH OF THE SOIL. After I read that book, I've been adding his books to my library and now have most of them. Some are better than others; PAN is one of the good ones. I'm glad that some of his books are being reprinted, albeit in paperback; but having a paperback is better than no book at all. If you are a Knut Hamsun devotee, you must have this book. Read more

Good writing, weird story. It’s worth reading for the imagery alone but the clever way events are entangled with perspective is also a big selling point I think. If you’re prepared for a moral landscape that isn’t compatible with modern sensibilities then would I recommend this book. Read more

Excellent condition & shipping speed for an incredible price!! very reputable seller, would use again!! Read more

Hamsun is my favorite author and this is one of his four best, in my opinion. Read more

A brilliant novella from Norwegian's nobel prize winner for Literature, Knut Hamsun. I read it in both Norwegian (modernized) and the English translation. The story may be short but the full extent complexity of human emotions was played out in a thrilling and mesmerizing fashion. The story has two parts. The first longer part is a story narrated in the first voice of the psychotic hunter with such handsome features and the women in the story just cannot resist being drawn by his charm. He spent his time somewhere in northern Norway while camping out in a cottage in a small rural island or peninsula. His cottage was near a community, where his escapades and psychosis were played out. What drives a man, if he is not psychotic, to shoot his own foot or trigger an avalange to kill his love competitor or kill his own dog out of spite and jealousy? The epilogue was the second part of the story where he and a jealous hunting companion found themselves somewhere in India. This time the jealous companion had the first voice and narrated the last part of the story. A most thrilling story, told in archaic norwegian, giving readers a glimpse into Norwegians living in the 1800s. They, like us modern beings, were prone to, love, infatuation, jealousy, psychotic rage and propensity for self-harm. Read more

A story about a pathetic, egomaniac who enjoys seducing women. Why Hamsun wrote this story, I have no idea. Why it is called "Pan", I have no idea again. The story itself is a depiction of a horrendous man and two pathetic women. It reads like a story of teenagers in a century that I have no intimate knowledge of, nor can I relate to it, outside of recognizing childish behaviors. I know no quality of purpose in reading this novel. I read it out of curiosity and because it was written by Hamsun, a figure who is very foreign to me. Read more

I once attended a social gathering where the topic of Knut Hamsun's novel PAN was brought up by someone who'd read it in school and found it "embarrasing." I praised it as one of the most intriguing and hilarious books I've ever read. My claim to have found the book funny particularly astounded the person, who responded by asking me, with a slightly sarcastic tone, what kind of humor I'd got; the person seemed convinced that what attracts my laughing bones is simple slapstick farce and nothing else. Indeed, perhaps I'd made too much emphasis on what I found to be PAN's humorous qualities. For while Hamsun's sense of humor is a striking characteristic of his early work, the thing which, perhaps, most of all makes his best novels so irresistible, is his ability to establish truly complex characters who we may not necessarily find particularly likeable, but whose shortcomings are elaborated in such a way that we may still find it curiously easy to identify with them. We may take it slightly for granted today, but the subtle suspense Hamsun established in PAN, by so successfully contrasting Glahn's inner life with how the rest of the world views him -- not being blessed with the information required to understand his motivations -- was a quite innovative approach in its time, and all the more so when brought to the level Hamsun did. Even more importantly, the approach works beautifully to this day. Another person at the gathering I attended suggested that it was perhaps unreasonable to expect young people of today to identify with what Hamsun wrote in the late 19th century, but also here I must disagree; while social norms and expectations have undoubtedly changed in the last hundred years, the human nature which Hamsun once himself observed has remained quite the same. It's also worth pointing out, perhaps, that while PAN may, in part, be treasured as a peephole into a bygone era, such was also the case back in 1894, upon the book's release, as the story actually takes place in the 1850s. Also, the beauty of Hamsun's prose remains, well, astounding. To people who have never read anything by Hamsun, my first recommendation would probably still be SULT ("Hunger"); if you do like that one (again, I'd be amazed if you didn't), there's no reason to let PAN pass you by. Read more