Book Review: Growth of the Soil

The 1935 Cover

The Norwegian Nobel Prize winning writer, Knut Hansum, was once described as "the father of the modern school of writing in every aspect" and his novel, Growth of the Soil (1917), as "the monumental work." According to my research, ahem, Wikipedia, Ernest Hemingway even said of Hansum that "he taught me how to write." There's some background, anyway. 

I started reading the novel on my Dad's recommendation. He said it was "Wahnsinnig" which means "mad" as well as "genius" in German. Wahnsinning, wahnsinning. 

There you are, living in touch with heaven and earth, one with them, one with all these wide, deep-rooted things. No need of a sword in your hands, you go through life bareheaded, barehanded, in the midst of a great kindliness. Look, Nature's there, for you and yours to have and enjoy. Man and Nature don't bombard each other, but agree; they don't compete, race one against the other, but go together. 

Growth of the Soil follows Isaak as he goes out into the Norwegian wilderness and begins to build a house for himself. Like Robinson Crusoe, Isaak constructs his household, step by painstaking step. With each slow movement, carefully drawn out plan, with each acquisition - an axe, a roof, a cow, a shed, a horse, a window, a wife - we see Isaak's world growing in the midst of a snowy wasteland. His wife, Inger, simply turns up one day uninvited from the village, a woman with a facial disfigurement - a cleft lip - who feels excluded from her community. She comes and helps to build the farm, necessitates the need for rooms, and a bed. Even a clock. Later, a sowing machine. Geissler, the town clerk who later becomes a mysterious, solitary roamer, names the farmstead: Sellanraa. 

There is something wholesome and reassuring about the arc of the novel. Like Robinson Crusoe, or a little more recently J.M.Coetzee's Life and Time of Michael K - it's a novel which shows you how you can survive everywhere, anywhere. It shows you how things can progress and improve. How a person can overcome all sorts of obstacles with slow, deliberate, logical steps. You have an axe, and trees, so you can build yourself a house. You have a cow, so you can make milk and cheese. What else do you need? The simplicity of life is reassuringly beautiful. 

The style too has that kind of simple beauty. It moves from dialect and inner monologues to poetic passages on the 'deep-rootedness' of natural things. I particularly liked the word 'kindliness' - I'm not sure what the original Norwegian might be - but, for instance, 'the kindliness of the trees' makes me think of a friendly spirit, of branches bowing towards me in greeting. But there is also a darker side of nature, one that is brought out in worrying, gothic fairy-tale like details:

The big mushroom does not flower, it does not move, but there is something overturning in the look of it; it is a monster, a thing like a lung standing there alive and naked - a lung without a body. 

And, of course, there are disturbing events in the novel. And the solitude of the Norwegian wilderness is broken on several occasions. But I won't go into it here, for fear of spoilers...

Isaak and Inger

One of the more memorable part of the novel for me is the constant travelling they must do "to the village". The long trips. The stamping around through the snow for miles and miles. The sons sent to school far away, "in the village". But as the novel progresses, the village moves ever closer. Isaak finds himself living, not in a wilderness, but in a neighbourhood. It's not just the plants which grow, or the outbuildings, or the stock, or even Isaak's family - it is the community and, by extension, the country. 

The sheer repetition - (the main event of the story is repeated again in Book 2 but with different characters) - of actions, events, phrases, stylistic quirks, reflects the repetitiveness of life itself. After all, isn't that what a community is? Something which constantly repeats itself - birth, marriage, death. So although the novel is long, and although the second 'book' is the first book rewritten, this repetition is a part of what is "Wahnsinnig" about the novel - its genius.

There are many parallels with The Secret Garden. The descriptions of nature as a moral power; of taking care of your 'garden' or farm as a kind of moral imperative. For instance, Isaak's son, Eleseus, is very clever - he can read and write! - but his downfall is that he is too clever. He can't do anything practical. He spends his father's money in trade and bad investment. He uses his head where he should be using his hands. The loner Geissler, too, is a man full of ideas. But he has no farm, because he cannot stay still. He cannot work like Isaak can, cannot build solid foundations for himself. It's all air and promises and words. This was Colin's problem in The Secret Garden - he was too much in his head, and he almost died as a result of imagining his own death.

The impression, too, is the same - I mean the happiness and satisfaction of reading about practical, tangible progress. The number of sheep increase; the number of circles around the garden Colin can walk increases. The corn grows; the roses grow. And reading it I felt a deep reassurance and contentment, knowing that, as long as the roses keep on growing, all would be well.  

Perhaps Hansum yearned for Isaak's way of life. The ideal life - embedded in the 'kindliness' of nature - happy with solid, practical work, far removed from the life of a writer. Building a house of words is like building a house with no foundations. Dependent on readers, on politics and social changes - but Isaak is dependent on no one. He has his land, his livestock, and nothing can take it away. 

The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest - who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here. There was no path before he came. 

A man comes, walking toward the north.