Resumo de Mysteries - Knut Hamsun

Henry Miller described Mysteries as ??closer to me than any other book I have read?. I?m no Henry Miller, but it is a very dear book to me too, quite like a close friend. It seems that there is no getting to the bottom of it, no matter how many times you engage with it, just like a human being. On a first reading it is seems a mere catalogue of disconnected events taking place in small town, with a stranger called Nagel at their centre, who has arrived on a steamer. He comes and goes and behaves in an erratic manner as he interacts with a handful of other characters in the town.

It is a novel very like Hunger in that respect, and Nagel has indeed been seen as the hero of that earlier novel later in life, after Christiania has finished with him. Nagel too seems to be acting in accordance with strong inner compulsions that even he does not understand. To that extent, Mysteries, like Hunger, is a novel about youth, about being driven by your unconscious, which is quite clear about what it wants.

Nagel arrives at the small Norwegian coastal town on a steamer in the summer of 1891. He immediately leaves and arrives a second time. He leaves letters lying around in public view which catalogue revenue from his estates, but later reveals that he wrote them himself. A woman friend visits for a while and calls him by another name. He has an ?affair? with a woman in the town, Dagny, during which he does everything he can to put her off him. He is constantly setting up characters for himself to play, enacting roles, and then pulling them down. He is perhaps experimenting with different personas for himself and finding them all equally empty. He befriends a midget whom he comes to regard as the quintessence of evil, and is hugely generous to a lonely and impoverished woman, Martha, by pretending that a broken chair she has is extremely valuable to him.
The midget is intensely Christian, or at least that is what he wants people to think, but he performs some ?unspeakable? act on Martha, to whom Nagel is attracted ? perhaps because she has no persona, no pretensions.

Towards the end of the novel, Nagel becomes intensely superstitious, obsessed with an iron ring he lost which will ?purify? him, and soon after commits suicide by running off a jetty. In an epilogue, Dagny and Martha, in conversation about events that happened years earlier, reveal that the midget was indeed evil, though nobody else believed it at the time, and that he had come ?to a bad end?, though we are not told what that was.

We can interpret this novel in whatever way we wish. It is a sort of mirror that we can hold up to ourselves. It is a novel about inner exploration, corruption identity; the surface shifts and changes constantly; there is no ?message? or plot.

Hamsun, for all his Wagnerian faults, was a true genius, and once we have read Mysteries a part of us remains in that small Norwegian coastal town with Nagel, as a part of us remains in Christiania with the hero of Hunger. It works on an unconscious level, and the unconscious finds something deeply nutritious in it, returning there again and again to drink. Something remarkable within us is attracted to these books because they speak to it in its own language of symbols and shifting connections. Standard novels with a beginning, middle and end are works of the superficial ego, which Nagel is trying to purge himself of.

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