Growth of the Soil
by Knut Hamsun
Summary
Isak walks alone into empty, unclaimed land in rural Norway and simply begins clearing it, building a turf hut, planting the first crops and eventually a proper farmhouse through nothing but sustained physical labor, and Hamsun measures the whole first stretch of the novel in exactly that currency: seasons passed, animals acquired, ground turned. Inger, a woman with a harelip who has struggled to find acceptance elsewhere, joins him and becomes his wife, and their household grows along with the farm, Sellanraa, until the arrival of their third child, born with the same harelip Inger has spent her life being judged for, pushes her into a decision Hamsun does not soften: she kills the infant rather than watch it face what she has faced, and is eventually caught, tried and sentenced to eight years in prison, an absence the farm and the family absorb and continue through regardless. Inger returns changed, having had the harelip surgically corrected while imprisoned, and the marriage resumes, though never quite on its original footing. Around this central household, the modern world Isak's isolation was meant to escape keeps arriving anyway: a copper mine on land the former sheriff Geissler once bought from Isak brings machinery and outside money into the district, and a merchant sets up shop, each intrusion changing the valley a little further from the empty wilderness Isak first walked into. The novel ends with that process still underway rather than resolved, Isak's own farm now the settled center of a small community, one son gone to America chasing exactly the modern opportunity his father spent his life avoiding, and the labor of clearing and planting still, after everything, the steadiest thing in the book.
Hamsun writes the physical work of farming with a close, patient attention that treats each felled tree and cleared field as genuinely dramatic material, and the novel suits a reader drawn to a slow, seasonal story of land and labor rather than one built around incident; its real tension lies in watching how much of the old, self sufficient life survives contact with the new.
Historical Context & Significance
Knut Hamsun published Growth of the Soil in 1917, and the Swedish Academy awarded him the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature three years later for his monumental work, the citation naming the book directly and treating it as the summation of everything Hamsun's fiction had been arguing for: a rooted, agrarian life set against the disruptions of money, law and machinery.
That reputation curdled badly within his own lifetime. Hamsun went on to openly support the German occupation of Norway during the Second World War and to publicly praise Adolf Hitler, positions that made him a genuinely despised figure among Norwegians by the time of his death in 1952, and the country has argued ever since over how, or whether, to separate the writer who produced Growth of the Soil from the old man who later chose the wrong side of the war so completely and so publicly.