The Ring is Closed

by Knut Hamsun, Robert Ferguson (Translator)

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.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Novels, Scandinavian Literature, Nobel Prize, Audiobook

321 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Novels of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (born Knud Pedersen), include Hunger (1890) and The Growth of the Soil (1917). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920.

He insisted on the intricacies of the human mind as the main object of modern literature to describe the "whisper of the blood, and the pleading of the bone marrow." Hamsun pursued his literary program, debuting in 1890 with the psychological novel Hunger.