Its style has little in common with Hunger, and it is only after dozens of pages that certain common preoccupations become apparent.

A mysterious stranger arrives to stay at a hotel in a small town. He is reticent about his purposes, but it appears he has some business interests and also needs a holiday. This information emerges indirectly, Nagel himself only gives vague answers. He befriends a sort of village idiot called The Midget, and treats him with great respect. He goes for walks around the town and gets invited to society gatherings.

Nagel – while revealing little about himself – displays a keen interest in recent events in the town. He has a powerful psychological intuition, and picks up on tiny details to penetrate right to a person’s soul. There has been a suicide recently, apparently a rejected suitor of a certain Miss Kielland. The narrative resembles a detective story, with Nagel pushing polite conversation to the edge of rudeness in order to extract information. He even takes notes of names in his notebook.

Although there are sections which narrate Nagel’s inner thoughts, the reader doesn’t gain any clear notion of his plans or his background. In fact Nagel is plagued with thoughts, they spew out of his head and he does not prioritise them. He questions every small action and rakes through obscure memories. He is intensely aware of tiny blushes and hesitations and the glances people give him. He conducts arguments with imaginary opponents. He has moods of extreme exhilaration. Things he sees – a white dove frenzied by the sun – often seem to resonate like symbols. He has moments of rapture which swoop to become contempt for the solid burghers in 3-storey houses filling their leisure with alcohol and politics. He could well agree with Barbusse’s hero: “I see too deep and too much.”

Nagel seems to operate to the motto Whatever it is, I’m against it. He rails against hypocrisy, phoniness, Gladstone, and the notion of “great men”. He is against the secularisation of society, not out of any religious conviction apparently, but because there is nothing to gain by robbing life of its symbolism.

For the first hundred pages or so it looks like Nagel’s curiosity is leading to some revelation about the town. But as the story proceeds, it becomes less certain where events are going. Lots of ‘key characters’ are introduced, but there will be no grand plot to tie them together. Instead the story veers further to the subjective – more tales and daydreams from Nagel. More useless ruthless honesty dredged up from inside, more digging beneath motives. It makes for a sort of concrete illustration of Sartre’s notions of consciousness being in its nature always in “bad faith”. Nagel has no sense of shame, no ‘mask’ to present to others. He seems to be resentful that others have beliefs and convictions to defend. He plays purposeless mind games with people, pretending to be devious, and thus in fact being devious, but to no benefit to himself.

He becomes obsessed with Miss Kielland’s beauty and torments her, even though he fully accepts she is happily engaged. At the same time he whimsically pretends to fall in love with another woman, whilst also making passes at the maid.

It might be the wrong approach to ask what the aim of this novel is. It depicts a certain type of mind. One viable conclusion is that Nagel’s cast of mind is a mistake. That such a multi-layered but impotent consciousness is a deformity of nature – a mental disability. A strange disability, in that the afflicted person can (for long periods) replicate the behaviour of a healthy person, and even solve problem which the healthy person cannot. But a disability nonetheless, in that the afflicted is less able to thrive in the world. Nagel understands that everyone needs a little self-delusion to function. Much good it does him.

One consistent aspect of Nagel is he often defiantly defends superstition and romantic notions against the onslaught of reason. But it is a despairing, contrary and capricious defence – encapsulated in his bizarre tale of how at a speech on economics, when Gladstone (the personification of progress and reason) makes the calculation 17 x 23 equals 391, Nagel stands up and shouts that it is 397 – though he knows this is wrong. He wants to believe it because it is absurd. He want to sacrifice his reason. “I’m a living contradiction, and I don’t understand it myself,” he says.

And yet the novel is full of recurring (sublime | quirky | visionary | paranormal) moments. They intrude with no rhyme or reason to them, no presumption that such moments are a key to a “higher” understanding. These moments have no foundation in any religious belief, notion of soul, or ART, or transcendence.

It might also be wrong to think that Nagel’s lacerating insights reveal the town’s inhabitants to be hypocrites and hollow. Nagel thinks so, at times anyway. But ultimately Nagel himself causes unnecessary pain and disruption. I take the ending to be a bit misleading. I don’t have any sense that “Nagel was right after all”.

Over a hundred years since it was written. There are incidental things which a modern reader might notice: The way the wealthier classes have lots of time for socialising and there is nothing unusual about Nagel spending a few summer months relaxing. Also the casual manner of treating hotel staff and other social subordinates. Several times Nagel makes a pass at the maid in the hotel; she reacts with an earthy certainty. Blushes and layered consciousness are not for the peasant classes.

This novel is alive in a way few others are. Marvellously rambling and digressive.

Souvenir Press have brought out most of Hamsun’s work using Munch’s art for the covers.