Chapter the Last

I have tried twice, and failed, to finish Faulkner's A Fable. Is that his fault or mine? Whichever, the book shows what can happen to a writer as he ages, collects laurels, and loses his youthful dynamism. Knut Hamsun gives another example with Chapter the Last, a novel which has been an agonizing read for me. Having sprinted through, and loved, his early novel Hunger, I found this one, the work of a man in his 60s, disappointing and flabby. There are some excellent passages that give hints of the writer he was, but they are long in coming.

The whole thing reads like a cross between Magic Mountain and Ten Little Indians: A group of people at a mountaintop sanitorium start dying or disappearing. In fact I wonder if Thomas Mann read this before or during the composition of his classic. Each character in Chapter the Last (the name a character gives to death) represents a part of the human spectrum of behavior, and as such never takes off as a fully formed being.

The translations of Hamsun that Knopf published in the 1920s have never been reissued and are the only way for an English reader to read the more obscure works. That makes them relatively expensive. I will be reselling this one and using the proceeds to try another, perhaps Benoni.