IN FROM THE COLD.(Knut Hamsun, Norwegian writer)

I lived for a time in Copenhagen, trying to learn Danish, and that's when I discovered the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, whose career was one of the strangest of the last century. Hamsun is not so well known in America--perhaps the curse of a minor language--but his influence is certainly felt; Isaac Bashevis Singer argued that "the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century 'came out of Gogol's greatcoat.' " In Scandinavia, though, Hamsun meant trouble. During those months in Copenhagen, I occasionally walked into one of the antiquarian bookstores that could be found all over the city's Latin Quarter. Several times when I asked about Hamsun's works, the man behind the counter (it was always a man) would shake his head and declare, "He was a traitor!" I'd try to remember the shop so as not to embarrass myself again.

I knew what that was about, of course. During the German occupation of Norway in the Second World War, Hamsun had been a collaborator; he had met Goebbels and Hitler, and was unrepentant to the end. It was baffling: how could the man who wrote "Hunger," "Mysteries," and "Pan"--those surpassingly original books--have had any sympathy for Nazis? Hamsun was not some bitter second-rater. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1920, and, unlike other Fascist sympathizers, such as Celine and Pound, he had a deep and lasting grip on his public, that of an enchanter. Singer admitted to being "hypnotized" by him; Hesse called him his favorite writer; Hemingway recommended his novels to Scott Fitzgerald; Gide compared him to Dostoyevsky, but believed that Hamsun was "perhaps even more subtle." The list of those who loved his sly, anarchic voice is long.

Half a century after Hamsun's death, his politics and, especially, his wartime behavior remain confounding. But, with the recent publication, in Norway, of a two-volume biography by Ingar Sletten Kolloen, of nearly a thousand pages, he no longer seems quite so elusive. And, if there is not yet a Hamsun revival, certainly a Hamsun reemergence is under way. Books that were never available in English, such as a bizarre journal about a half-imagined journey to the Caucasus ("In Wonderland"), some of the short stories, the "wanderer" novels of middle age, and even some early journalism, have recently appeared in translation, along with new editions of his most famous books. Two competing English versions of both "Hunger" and "Pan" are available, and last month Penguin issued a fresh translation of "Victoria." In Norway and Denmark, early editions of Hamsun are fetching ever-higher prices, though these are mostly the books he wrote long before the rise of Fascism.

The Scandinavian countries, in a period of less than a century, produced an extraordinary body of literature; an abbreviated list includes Hans Christian Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard, Jens Peter Jacobsen, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, and Sigrid Undset. None of them were so beguiling as Hamsun, though, whose works include twenty novels, six plays, two volumes of poetry, and three collections of stories. Most compelling are the early novels, and, in particular, "Hunger"--a sort of hallucinatory "New Grub Street," overheated, half-crazed, and funny.

A hint of the novel's existence came in 1888, when one of its four sections appeared in a short-lived Danish literary journal called Ny Jord ("New Ground"). The author was listed as "Anonymous," but the tiny Dano-Norwegian literary community quickly learned his name. Hamsun, not yet thirty, was suddenly a man to be reckoned with, and more so when, a year later, he published his first book, "From the Cultural Life of Modern America," a rude, amusing, and occasionally stupid attack on the New World, which the critic Georg Brandes (Nietzsche's early champion) praised highly. When "Hunger" came out, in 1890, Hamsun informed reviewers that he was trying something different; he was not, he insisted, interested in marriages and balls--the book was not really a novel at all. Rather, as he told a friend, "What interests me are my little soul's endless emotions, the special, strange life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a hungry body."

Hamsun's narrator, a writer, is a careful cataloguer of his own psychological states--no victim but, like Hamsun himself, a subversive, generational voice. Not a great deal happens, and yet from the first line--"It was in that time when I walked around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one can leave without being marked by it"--the novel's oddly joyful desperation never flags. Poor, ambitious freelance writers in Western cities may no longer be starving, but certainly they suffer the same humiliations as Hamsun's narrator: editors pay them very little, make them wait endlessly for a reply, and are indifferent to their enormous God-given talents. More than ...