Recommendations
Books Like Pan
Best books to read after Pan by Knut Hamsun
Pan is one of the most hypnotic novels in the Scandinavian tradition — Glahn's summer in the forest and his doomed love for Edvarda, organized around the mystery of why two people who love each other cannot stop destroying each other. If the novel's intensity and its portrait of consciousness in the grip of passion moved you, these books share its concern with the irrational dimensions of desire, its interest in the relationship between nature and inner life, and its willingness to follow a character into states of feeling that resist ordinary explanation.
- 1Buy
Hunger
by Knut Hamsun
The essential companion — Hamsun's first major novel and the work that established his psychological method; where Pan is organized around passion and the natural landscape, Hunger is organized around starvation and the urban landscape; both are studies in consciousness under pressure that refuse the consolations of conventional narrative resolution
- 2Buy
Mysteries
by Knut Hamsun
The essential middle volume between Hunger and Pan — Johan Nagel's inscrutable behavior in a small Norwegian coastal town; more playful than Hunger and less beautiful than Pan but essential for readers who want the complete picture of Hamsun's early psychological fiction
- 3Buy
The Wild Duck
by Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen's play about a family whose comfortable self-deceptions are destroyed by the arrival of a truth-teller — the essential Scandinavian parallel to Hamsun's psychology; Hamsun's fiction is partly a response to Ibsen, insisting on the irrational against Ibsen's social rationalism; both define the range of what late nineteenth-century Norwegian writing made of human psychology
- 4Buy
The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
Kafka's novella — the essential European parallel to Pan's portrait of a consciousness that has become incomprehensible to the people around it; where Hamsun's Glahn is incomprehensible because his passion exceeds social understanding, Kafka's Gregor Samsa is incomprehensible because he has literally become a giant insect; both are organized around the experience of the person who no longer fits
- 5Buy
The Stranger
by Albert Camus
The essential existentialist parallel — Meursault's detachment from the emotions that social life expects of him; the comparison with Glahn's excess of emotion shows the two poles of the modernist consciousness: Glahn has too much feeling to be legible to ordinary society, Meursault has too little; both are organized around the question of what happens to a person who cannot conform to the emotional requirements of social life
- 6Buy
Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
The essential German parallel — Harry Haller's sense of living between the human and the wolf, unable to be at home in either world; where Hamsun's Glahn retreats to the forest as the only place he can be himself, Hesse's Haller retreats into music and opium; both are organized around the consciousness that cannot survive in ordinary social life
- 7Buy
The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The essential predecessor in the tradition of the passionate young man destroyed by his own feeling — Werther's impossible love for Lotte and his suicide; Pan is in dialogue with the Werther tradition, and the comparison with Glahn shows how Hamsun took the Romantic tradition of passionate self-destruction and stripped it of its Romantic idealism to make it psychological and modern
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Out of Africa
by Isak Dinesen
The Scandinavian companion in the tradition of the memoir about belonging to a landscape that does not belong to you — Dinesen's seventeen years in Kenya; where Hamsun's Glahn belongs to the Norwegian forest in a way that makes ordinary social life impossible, Dinesen belongs to Africa in a way that makes her return to Denmark impossible; both are organized around the experience of a person who has found their home in a place they cannot keep
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