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.
Over de auteur
Born in 1859, Knut Hamsun published a stunning series of novels in the 1890s: Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892) and Pan (1894). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil.