Mysteries [1892] – ★★★★
In Mysteries, Hamsun makes it clear that there are no easy answers when it comes to the spontaneity of the human nature or the restlessness of the human spirit.
“Is there any way of knowing? There are so many strange things between heaven and earth, beautiful, inexplicable things, presentiments that can’t be explained, terrors that make your blood freeze” [Knut Hamsun/Gerry Bothmer [1892/1971: 161].
Translated from the Norwegian by Gerry Bothmer, Mysteries begins with the following lines: “In the middle of the summer of 1891 the most extraordinary things began happening in a small Norwegian coastal town. A stranger by the name of Nagel appeared, a singular character who shook the town by his eccentric behaviour and then vanished as suddenly as he had come” [Knut Hamsun/Gerry Bothmer [1892/1971: 3]. Nagel is a total stranger to the little town, but he soon makes an unforgettable impression on its inhabitants, and people are taken aback by his unusual opinions and contradictory nature. But, who is he really? And, what is his agenda in this ordinary little town in Norway? We are taken on a journey into the mind of this eccentric character as he meets a typical-to-every-small-town parade of characters: a local beauty, a town’s misfit/clown and a proud deputy, among others. A journey is probably the word for our experience of this main character because Hamsun was truly the author ahead of his time in terms of creating characters that disrupt societal status quo, making this story particularly intriguing, even if uneasy to consider. Nagel is a man of extraordinary visions and eccentric ideas, but what is the real truth here, and what should we really expect?
Continue reading “Review: Mysteries by Knut Hamsun”
It is not long now until that spooky period of the year begins when we have to be careful if we do not want to become victims of witches, goblins and vampires. Halloween has always been my favourite festivity, maybe because I was born near this period and have always been fascinated by mysteries and the unknown. Thus, this year I have decided to participate in
I. ARIES – Name a book you’ve read that was full of fire, desire, and passion 
“Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumour of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city” (Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, 1992: 154).
I. Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of The Terror in the French Revolution [1941] by R.R. Palmer – ★★★★1/2
The Interestings [2013] – 
I. A translated novel you would recommend to everyone:
I. Which book, most recently, did you not finish? 
I. Witches’ Sabbath [1798]
I. 
I. Totally should’ve gotten a sequel 
II. T
I. 
Serena [2008] – ★★★★1/2
II. What do you consider to be the best book-to-film adaptation?
![Unpopular Opinion: Hergé’s “Prisoners of the Sun (Le Temple du Soleil)” [1949]](https://thoughtsonpapyrus.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/tintin-prisoners-of-the-sun.jpg?w=724&h=1&crop=1){kind=small}
“Knowledge itself is power…but none of…knowledge is of the least use until it is informed by understanding. Knowledge is simply a kind of fuel; it needs the motor of understanding to convert it into power” 
“Each face, each stone, of this venerable monument, is a page of the history, not only of the country, but of the science and the art” (Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame [1831: 110]).
“What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is lead in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, (which are but the mute articulation of his feelings,) not those other things are his history. His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of water-and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden-it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written” [
The People in the Trees [2013] – 
I noticed this tag yesterday at 
I. Designated Driver: What re-read book is reliable to get you out of a reading slump? 
I. Memory [1948]
Please Look After Mother [2008] – ★★★★ 
“He is already part of you. Though you fly to Greece, and never see him again, or forget his very name, George will work in your thoughts till you die. It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal” 
The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut [1983] by 
For this challenge I am going for a very modest goal of reading 12 books by Asian authors by the end of the year, and will be updating my progress on 
I. Sir John Soane’s Museum 
“He was not sure that he wanted to see the Countess Olenska again; but ever since he had looked at her from the path above the bay he had wanted, irrationally and indescribably, to see the place she was living in, and to follow the movements of her imagined figure…The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food and drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to…He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on…the rest of the world might seem less empty” [Edith Wharton, 1920: 191].
Thoughts on Papyrus 
