The Last Joy

The middle-aged narrator of The Last Joy is a Hamsun double, who leaves the wild, where he has lived in a turf hut, for a tourist resort and, subsequently, the city, where he resumes contact with Miss Torsen, a beautiful young schoolteacher he met at the resort. He follows her sexual escapades, including rape, with the intense, vicarious interest of a voyeur. Considering himself too old for love, he encourages Miss Torsen's interest in Nikolai, a hulk of a man whom she marries, thereby escaping the supposedly sorry lot of a career woman.