Growth of the Soil

This is the complete book, Volumes I and II, under one cover.

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Growth of the Soil, Hamsun’s masterpiece, is the story of an Herculean peasant, with a beard like rusty iron and scarred face and hands, who has wandered, knapsack on his back, in the wilderness of the brooding, fairy-like Nordland. Having found a suitable spot he throws down his belongings and commences to tame the wilds that surround him. How he hews himself a crude dwelling; obtains goats in exchange for timber that he, ox-like, drags to the far away village; gets a roaming lass for a wife; tills the soil, raises a large family, and achieves victory over stubborn nature in the face of almost insuperable obstacles and defeats—is the theme of the book. Only by superhuman labors do these two, man and wife, succeed in improving their sparse lot. The crops fail, the family is steadily increased, the government demands big money for the land that Isak, the man, has brought under his sway, and then Inger, the wife, is taken to prison for having killed a new-born child, a child which at birth displays a harelip like that which disfigures her own face and makes her talk have a whistling sound. But in spite of it all Isak, like the old Hebrew prophets, remains faithful to his god, the god of the Nordland, where the grass shoots up yard-high in a few days, where the summer is one long day, and where the winter nights flash mysterious signals through the boundless spaces.

The philosophy saturating like a complex dye the warp and woof of the story, is fidelity to Mother Earth. There is a copper mountain on Isak’s place, which mine-owners wish to buy. Well, Isak sells that part only which is of no value to his cattle; there he stops, and no amount of persuasion or money can move him. Wise Isak! Though the major parts of the crops fail, he has always something to fall back on. Mother Earth does not betray her staunch son. Neighbors who have sold parts of their land for fair sums of money go from bad to worse. They fall into lazy habits, buy unnecessary trinkets and sham articles, and forget to produce and to work. Misfortune knocks at their door and turns them out into the cold. But Isak and his family grow sturdy and, slowly but surely, well-to-do. The houses are made bigger, more ground is broken up; agricultural machinery and irrigation do much, but arduous human toil does the most toward the attainment of absolute independence. This visible success attracts many homesteaders to the neighborhood; then come school and telegraph, and with them society’s addition to the liberating gifts of nature.

The author has revealed what Nietzsche calls the meaning of the earth. It is autonomy realized a thing Tolstoy dreamt about. Hamsun has convincingly sketched the salvation latent in work on the soil. It is a rich, healthy, and happy life he has drawn, the life of man in his right place. Man has again become man, the tamer of the wilds, the ruler of beasts—a creative god, whose genius and power mold a progressive, independent destiny.

Growth of the Soil, published in 1917, immediately aroused the interest and unstinted sympathy of thousands of peasants, native as well as foreign. The intellectuals were even more enthusiastic in their approval. Anyone can read this book, in so simple a language is it written. The style is at once simple and rich; simple because of a most direct and natural idiom, and rich because of dialectical peculiarities that are interwoven with the subtleties of the artist. It is likewise conversational, this style, and belongs to no other writer than Hamsun. He virtually thrusts the reader headlong into the swirling stream of events and forces him to reason, feel, talk, and see through his living characters. The book is seething with life. Its art is nervous, fragmentary, logically lucid, inevitable, tense in its suspense—like life.