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Sven Birkerts Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil and Hunger in the new Bookforum:

A young man���Ĵ�ý�s book, an old man���Ĵ�ý�s book; the former an almost unremitting hallucination, the latter like something carved with patience into an obdurate oak. Hunger unfolds its unbroken inwardness in urban Christiana (now Oslo), ���Ĵ�ý�that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him,���Ĵ�ý� over several seasons, though it also delves to touch a timelessness known to most of us only from dreams and illness. Growth of the Soil populates a simple square of rural canvas and fulfills its narration of labor���Ĵ�ý�s travails and hard-won triumphs over many decades. The novel, sharply and sensuously rendered by Sverre Lyngstad, enacts a lifetime���Ĵ�ý�s forward plod, though Hamsun���Ĵ�ý�s strategic moments of omniscient retrospect (���Ĵ�ý�Great changes at Sellanrå���Ĵ�ý�) every so often telescope long years down until they seem but a cosmic eyeblink.