Recommendations
Books Like Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil) by Knut Hamsun
Norwegian pastoral fiction, peasant sagas, and novels of rootedness and land
If Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil) moved you with Isak's patient transformation of wilderness into farm and Hamsun's celebration of rooted peasant existence against modern restlessness, these eight works share its pastoral depth, its attention to land and labor, and its sympathy for lives lived close to the natural world.
- 1Buy on Amazon
Sult (Hunger)
by Knut Hamsun
Hamsun's first masterpiece — the opposite pole of Growth of the Soil; the starving, manic writer-narrator's self-undermining wanderings through Christiania, all interior psychological agitation rather than patient rural labor.
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Buy on AmazonO Pioneers!
by Willa Cather
Cather's prairie novel of Swedish-American farming in Nebraska — Alexandra Bergson's transformation of the Divide into fertile farmland is the American counterpart of Isak's Norwegian clearing. Hamsun directly influenced the American prairie novel.
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Buy on AmazonMy Ántonia
by Willa Cather
The great novel of Bohemian immigrant life on the Nebraska prairie — Ántonia's rooted peasant vitality against the erosions of American mobility; the exact American equivalent of Hamsun's Inger.
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Buy on AmazonFar from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's most optimistic novel of Wessex agricultural life — Bathsheba Everdene managing her farm in Dorset; the English pastoral tradition that Hamsun admired and that his novel entered into dialogue with.
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Buy on AmazonThe Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
The Joad family's dispossession from their Oklahoma farm — the counterpart to Growth of the Soil's celebration of land: what Hamsun's Isak achieves, the Joads are stripped of, and the novel indicts the system that strips them.
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Buy on AmazonKristin Lavransdatter
by Sigrid Undset
The great Norwegian medieval saga — where Hamsun's medieval world is idealized peasant simplicity, Undset's is fully historical; both are rooted in the Norwegian landscape and in a pre-modern world of farm and forest.
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Buy on AmazonThe Emigrants
by Vilhelm Moberg
Swedish peasants from Småland who build in Minnesota what Isak builds in Norway — Moberg's Karl Oskar is Hamsun's Isak transposed to the New World, with the same patient labor and rootedness.
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Buy on AmazonPan
by Knut Hamsun
Hamsun's lyrical forest novel — Lieutenant Glahn's summer in northern Norway, where the forest is as alive as any character; the most beautiful of his novels and the closest to Nature's mystical presence that Growth of the Soil implies.
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