Sitting on a worn wooden bench under a canopy of sunlit trees and surrounded by wild flowers as well as the ruins of some venerable building, with a crystal clear Arctic river flowing by, life seems enchanting. A sense of childhood wonder is only further encouraged when Bodil Børset, director of the newly opened Hamsun Centre, opens an old book and begins to read:
"The rectory was beautifully situated on the banks of a tidal river, the Glomma, a broad rocky river which thundered and roared by day and night, night and day . . . it always sang its wild, rushing song, and winter or summer, it flowed with the same urgent speed. The forests at home were filled at times with a roaring confusion of birdsong. In the spring and summer, the black grouse cried up in the hills and in the winter the white grouse cackled down in the thickets, so it was almost impossible to hear a man speak on the farm."
The Hamsun Centre can be found at Presteid, a hamlet of Hamarøy, a village in Norway's Nordland district, some 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It commemorates Norway's most famous novelist, a Nobel prize-winner and, for many writers, the father of the modern novel. Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, HG Wells and Isaac Bashevis Singer were just a few great writers among Knut Hamsun's admirers.
Having reread Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894) and Dreamers (1904) for the first time since I was a student, and after reading Growth of the Soil (1917), the epic novel that won Hamsun the Nobel prize in 1920, for the first time, I can only affirm his brilliance. When I came to the end of Sverre Lyngstad's mid-1990s translation of Hunger, I read it again, relishing the dark comedy, mind games and perversity of a novel that, a few details of life in 19th-century Kristiania (now Oslo) aside, might have been written yesterday. Hamsun wrote Hunger when he was 38, and hungry in every way. It made his name and, slowly, his fortune.
The Hamsun Centre, which opened on the 150th anniversary of the writer's birth, is an intriguing and special building by the American architect Steven Holl. A skewed tower rising from the site of the old parsonage where Børset read to me, the black, timber-clad building has been designed as the architectural personification of Hamsun. It is a building that should encourage visitors to Nordland, to a fresh discovery of an exquisite landscape and a provocative writer. Yet nothing is as innocent as it seems. Although these are the days of the midnight sun, an unseasonal darkness broods over Hamarøy.
Børset has found herself embroiled in passionate international politics. It is not something she relishes, particularly at what, after 15 years of preparation, should be a happy moment for Norway and a prosperous one for publishers of Hamsun's many books. The problem is not one that is going to disappear in anything like a hurry: Hamsun supported Hitler. He was a member of Quisling's NS (Nasjonal Samling or National Unity party), and his second wife Marie was an enthusiastic Nazi supporter, entertaining German troops at their farm in occupied Norway. In a rash gesture, Hamsun sent his Nobel medal as a present to Joseph Goebbels. In return, the Reichminister had tens of thousands of copies of Hamsun's books printed in Germany; many of them were given to soldiers on duty in Norway.
In response, thousands of Norwegians returned their books to the farm at Norhølm in the far south of Norway where Hamsum lived from 1917 until his death in 1952. Others burned his books. Hamsun did argue the case against the brutality of Josef Terboven, the Nazi Reichskommissar for Norway, when he called on Hitler at Berchtesgaden in 1943, aged 83 and largely deaf. He also campaigned vociferously against death penalties imposed on loyal Norwegians. But he remained profoundly pro-German. He even wrote Hitler's obituary in the influential Norwegian daily the Aftenposten (Evening Post), calling the late German chancellor "a warrior for mankind". Many Norwegians have found it hard to forgive Hamsun. Old age had been no excuse for his support of Hitler and Quisling, the Norwegian prime minister who gave his name to traitors the world over.
Jewish organisations have been relentless in their attack on Norway, Hamsun and the very idea of a centre ostensibly celebrating the life and work of this controversial writer - especially in the year that Norway heads the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education. On 29 June, the Aftenposten published a letter from Børset in which she addressed accusations of the country's ignorance and lack of political and moral consciousness made by Ephraim Zuroff, the American-born Israeli director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem and Manfred Gerstenfeld, director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, also based in Israel. Børset argues that the debate over Hamsun's politics that has already taken place this year in Norway is proof that the opposite is true. While stating very clearly that Hamsun was a "collaborator with the disgusting Nazi regime with which we have zero tolerance", she invited the Wiesenthal Centre and Institute of Jewish Affairs to a special conference on the subject at the Hamsun Centre next year.
There was no let off from Zuroff. In a reply to the Aftenposten, he wrote: "Børset appears to believe, on the one hand, that Hamsun's literary brilliance warrants the celebration of his birth, regardless of his active support for a regime which implemented a programme of mass annihilation against innocent civilians. And, on the other, that there is no contradiction between leadership in Holocaust education and glorification of one of Nazism's most ardent non-German supporters. We unequivocally reject this position . . . excellence in any field should not serve as a fig leaf for irresponsible and reprehensible behaviour."
Børset wants the Hamsun Centre to be a place of reconciliation as well as literary debate, creativity and scholarship, open to everyone. Holl faced up to this debate when he first accepted the commission in 1994. Referring to the current exchange of letters, he says: "I think that all those things, good and bad, can be shown in a museum dedicated to the life of one person. You can include the stains in the exhibitions. Life isn't all clean. It has some messy corners."
Hamsun's messiest corner was his approval of Hitler's Germany. When asked to explain himself while under house arrest in 1945, he said: "I was high in favour with the German people . . . every single proud and great name in Norwegian culture had first gone through Teutonic Germany before becoming renowned throughout the world. I was not wrong for thinking that. But I was faulted for it." At the time of the first world war, when he was in his mid-50s, Hamsun had also supported Germany. His Germany was one of great writers, artists and musicians, of a country in love with blood-and-soil nature as he was. There is not a jot of antisemitism in Hamsun's prodigious writings. And, following the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, imposed on Germany in 1919, Hamsun was sympathetic to the plight of crushed German nationalism. Norway itself had only become independent in 1905. Like many Scandinavians then as now, Hamsun could relate to Germany far more than he could imperialist Britain, vainglorious France or communist Russia. And, presumably, no one in Norway is trying to do anything other than underline how this great writer's support for Hitler was anything but wrong. Hamsun is understood, for all his glaring faults.
The Hamsun Centre is very definitely not a hagiography written in concrete and timber. "This was never the intention," Børset says. And, because Holl and his clients set out from the beginning somehow to portray as well as explain Hamsun's complex and sometimes contradictory life, the building is as challenging as it is hauntingly beautiful. Inside the building, whose spine is an exposed, brass-encased lift shaft, floors slope, daylight shines from unexpected angles and sudden balconies project over precipitous drops and stunning views. One of the unexpected windows here is in the shape of an open book, offering pages illuminated with mesmerising, real life views of Nordland. All this is slightly unsettling - as, of course, was Hamsun himself, his life and books.
Holl's is a curious, decidedly tactile and convincing building. There have been few like it before. Few new buildings devoted to a writer, few that aim to evoke the character and lure of a person in architectural guise. It is a fine conceit, and for all its initial unfamiliarity is already a curiously natural part of the landscape.
Hamsun was smitten by Nordland when he came here as a toddler from his birthplace in central Norway. Nordland was not just beautiful, but a kind of "Newfoundland" for impoverished settlers from elsewhere in the country at a time of economic woe - for those Norwegians too poor to emigrate to the United States. It was known as "Poor Man's America".
When Hamsun first arrived, on midsummer's day in 1862, his name was Knud Pedersen. He took the name he came to adopt from the farm his family rented along the road from the centre. Sixteen people, family and others, crowded into the three downstairs rooms and the warren of tiny first floor bedrooms in the old farmhouse. (In summer months, this is open as a museum. Very little has changed here since the 1860s.) Too poor to look after their clutch of children, Hamsun's parents sent him off to live and work, and to be beaten, by his deeply religious and joyless uncle Hans, a tailor, librarian and postmaster with palsy who rented the parsonage in Presteid. With little schooling - 252 days in six years - Hamsun, now 14, finally broke away from his uncle's home. He began to live the itinerant life that would lead him, in years to come, to write Hunger before returning to Nordland to settle for a number of years and to shape the novels, set in Norland-like landscapes, that would lead to The Growth of the Soil and the Nobel prize.
Hamsun worked variously as a peddler in northern Norway, a bailiff's constable in Bo, an apprentice shoemaker in Bodø, a road construction worker in Toten, and a shop assistant in Tranøy. During two long trips to the United States that he made in the 1880s, he worked as a salesman in Elroy, Wisconsin, a farmhand in North Dakota, a tram conductor in Chicago, as secretary to the theologian Kristofer Janson in Minneapolis (who introduced him to Mark Twain), and as a journalist and lecturer. Women came to swoon at this handsome, iconoclastic Norwegian, yet he remained chaste as he followed his wandering and wayward star back home.
Returning to Europe, he pawned his raincoat, rented the cheapest room he could find in Copenhagen, and wrote Hunger. His long and impoverished apprenticeship paid off. Hunger was a marvel, unexpected and irreverent. "I will make my character laugh," Hamsun had written, "where sensible people think he ought to cry. And why? Because my hero is no type . . . but a complete, modern being." Hamsun's narrator is disturbingly uninhibited in what he thinks and what he says and does.
His later novels are mediated by a profound love of nature, by the landscape of Nordland, by the sight and sound of Presteid, Tranøy and the farmscape of Hamsund. It was at the Hamarøy farm, Skogheim, which he bought and lived in with his second wife, the actress Marie Andersen, that he raised five children and wrote the book that hooked the Nobel prize. Today, the green-painted timber house is Børset's office. Here is a photograph of Marie at the piano by a ceramic stove. Here is the piano, and that stove. Here are pictures, too, of Hamsun, a dandy, with favourite dogs. The Nazi episode poisoned this well of beauty.
When the idea of a Knut Hamsun Society was raised, at the time of the writer's centenary in 1959, fellow Nobel laureates were divided. Hesse, who had helped Bertholt Brecht and Thomas Mann escape Nazi Germany, said: "The great writer had paid enough for his astonishing political mistakes." There was some truth in this. After the second world war, Hamsun was subjected to humiliating clinical psychiatric tests in Oslo, and having been told that he was suffering from "lasting weakened mental capacities", was eventually fined 325,000 kroner after a civil action found him guilty of NS membership. Mann, though, made it clear that he would have nothing to do with a Knut Hamsun society.
Yet Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1978, and who had fled Germany in 1935, approved. Hamsun "was the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect, his subjectiveness, his fragmentation, his use of flashback and lyricism. The whole school of modern fiction in the 20th century stems from him." A part of it anyway. Holl has translated this subjectivenes, fragmentation, use of flashback and lyricism into a building that will bring Hamsun to fresh life and, hopefully, to a state of forgiveness and reconciliation among those who continue to be perturbed by this unexpected and effervescent author half a century after his death.
• The Knut Hamsun Centre (Hamsunsenteret) is in Hamarøy near Presteid, Norway. For more information go to knuthamsun.no/info/english
