A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings

Related to and sometimes paired with Hamsun's Under the Autumn Stars, this beautifully lyric fiction picks up with the same characters as the other book, but is set in time six years later. The central character of the former novel, Knut Pedersen (Hamsun's real name), is more an observer in this work. His former friend Grindhusen has grown from stubborn independence to a shifty and vacillating man; and his companion Lars Falkenberg has dwindled into a small land-holder with a perpetually pregnant wife from whom he is deeply estranged. These two comedians play out a tragi-comedy that is painful through the very irony and humaneness with which Hamsun paints his figures.