Ring is Closed

The Ring is Closed combines a central character as iconoclastic as that of Hunger with an evocation of the limitations of small-town life to equal Mysteries. Abel is the only son of a miserly lighthouse-keeper, after falling in love he leaves his life in a village in southern Norway and travels around the United States. He returns home, haunted by secret crimes, and now his only ambition is to live, on the barest of necessities, without desire or ambition. Abel allows all opportunities for another life - an inheritance, employment, relationships - to slip away while Hamsun questions what is the true meaning of work and life.Review QuoteThanks to Souvenir, readers can now reclaim extraordinary works such as the eerie Mysteries and the epic Growth of the Soil... an unsettling master of modern fiction.Review QuoteA rare understanding of human nature comes through, expressed in a measured, elegiac and lyrical prose. The atmosphere is deliciously thick with sensuality and doom.Review QuoteHamsun is one of the great writers of this century - his nearest British equivalent being I suspect Thomas Hardy. Hamsun's novels have the simplicity of total self-possession, of the clearest possible understanding of the human world... a unique beauty of expression.Review QuoteThe most outstanding Norwegian writer since Ibsen.Biographical NoteBorn in 1859, Knut Hamsun's early works were forceful and polemic before he became more compassionate in his later work, drawing inspiration from the country people of his native Norway. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil. He has been recognised as one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century.THE FIRST UK EDITION OF HAMSUN'S LAST GREAT NOVEL; A NEW TRANSLATION BY ROBERT FERGUSON, HAMSUN'S BIOGRAPHER