My God, the hatred! The vindictiveness they mete out to each other! Finally, the book is about how such 'love' changes us forever. Glahn's love object is a silly fickle girl-child called Edvarda. There's beautiful description of the Norwegian countryside that reminded me of Per Petterson and Hallidór Laxness, though the latter was an Icelander. Glahn, records his trips into the woods to hunt. That it's set in northern Norway and narrated by a man who lives in a bucolic setting with his hunting dog, all that's interesting too. The magnificent heights of lovemaking, the impossible megalomania of it all, to the lowest lows. It's brilliance lies in how it neatly crystallizes the entire range of emotions experienced in erotic love affairs. I simply can't imagine 300 pages of this. The novella is mercifully short-120 pages. From initial lusting, to growing interest, to first titallations of physical contact, to record-breaking Olympic coitus, to a sense of routine and boredom, to the first bickerings of leave taking, to heartbreak, heartbreak, heartbreak and yearning that only makes one's suffering worse.

This novella is so emotionally affecting! It is so on the money! The reader goes through the entire exhausting emotional cycle here.

Show More blurb applies perfectly to Pan. This 1998 Penguin edition, translated by Sverre Lyngstad, also includes some explanatory notes and editorial annotations tracing the reconciliation of the Norwegian first edition and later issuance in Hamsun's Collected Works. The book is short, even with the translator's introduction, which is divided between biographical information on author Knut Hamsun and interpretive concerns regarding Pan which would probably be better appreciated after reading the novel. The epilogue 'Glahn's Death' is written about Glahn in the third person, but anonymously, and its preoccupations are suspiciously similar to those in the body text, although the colonial Indian setting of the epilogue furnishes an altogether more caustic and 'modern' tone. His rhapsodies over details of the forest are perhaps a little insincere, a cover-story for the amorous pain that he experiences with the reminiscences offered in this memoir-styled tale.Įrotic jealousy is a keynote of the story with its multiple love-triangles, and there is no assurance that Glahn is being honest with himself or with the reader.

Show More alienation from cultured society.

Pan thomas glahn