It would have been easier to make the journey by boat, but still he came by carriage. He awoke from his thoughts with a violent start, so exaggerated that it didn’t seem genuine it was as if the gesture had been made for effect, even though he was alone in the room.”Īround noon the following day Johan Nagel came driving down the road to the hotel in a carriage drawn by two horses. None of them had any identification tags. It consisted of only two small trunks, a fur coat (although it was the middle of summer), a satchel, and a violin case. The porter took his baggage away on a cart. With that, the ship carried him out into the fjord. Take my baggage to the hotel and reserve a room for me.”

Startled, he shouted over the railing to the porter below: “It’s all right. While he was taking care of his bill, he suddenly became aware that the ship was pulling out. He seemed extremely agitated, and when the ship’s bell rang the third time, he hadn’t even paid the steward his bill. At the same time he surrendered his ticket to one of the ship’s officers, but made no move to go ashore, and began pacing up and down the deck. The porter from the Central Hotel went aboard and the man in the yellow suit handed him his baggage. It was the evening of the twelfth of June flags were flying all over town in honor of Miss Kielland’s engagement, which had been announced that day. One of them was a man wearing a loud yellow suit and an outsized corduroy cap. It all started at six one evening when a steamer landed at the dock and three passengers appeared on deck. At one point he had a visitor: a mysterious young lady who came for God knows what reason and dared stay only a few hours. A stranger by the name of Nagel appeared, a singular character who shook the town by his eccentric behavior and then vanished as suddenly as he had come. In the middle of the summer of 1891 the most extraordinary things began happening in a small Norwegian coastal town. But they cast themselves out, on the gigantic centrifuge of their own pride.” James Wood “ Hamsun’s heroes of the 1890s are seen, in most criticism, as ‘outcasts’.

Mysteries by Knut Hamsun