Much like his first novel, the great Hunger, this novel follows the concise rise and fall of emotions in the protagonist, creating a well rounded depiction of a man in the grips of mania and excitement. Mysteries places the human psyche under Hamsun’s microscope. He was an incredible author whose name holds up to his comparisons to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but the politics of his later life are rather quite offputting. I went into more detail of this in my review for Growth of the Soil, but this association cost him his fame and caused to widespread burning of his books in Norway and the relative popular neglect for his works in the United States following the war. He died having been denounced by his homeland and is lesser known nowadays due to his sympathetic association to the Nazi party during WWII.

When I read him about a decade ago I really enjoyed his work but now, writing this in 2019, I am less willing to overlook the misogyny in his work and his troubled history late in life. Hamsun is a difficult one to grapple with. Plunging into the existential mysteries of the human heart and soul, Hamsun pens some of his most memorable characters while keeping the reader forever pondering the truth behind the abundant mysteries. Written in 1892, just 2 years following Hunger, this novel once again demonstrates Hamsun’s signature frantic yet serene prose while showcasing Hamsun as a Modernist far ahead of his time and a master of the ‘psychological novel’. It is no surprise that Henry Miller claimed that Mysteries was ’closer to me than any book I have read,’ this novel is so probing and insightful that you feel it begin to pick your own mind as the pages churn by. Hamsun’s aptly named second novel, Mysteries, is a dazzling, dark look into human nature and man’s psyche.

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