The Last Chapter is set in the Torahus sanatorium, where the sufferings of most of the patients are related to civilisation. The novel has a group of central characters, but no distinct main character. Among the characters is "The Suicide", who entered the sanatorium following the discovery of his wife’s infidelity and threatens constantly to take his own life. Another guest is the lovely Julie d'Espard. She enters into a relationship with the bogus Count Flemming and gets pregnant. When Flemming disappears one day she turns to Daniel Utby, who runs a small farm near Torahus and who represents the novel’s ideological norm. The Last Chapter is one of Hamsun’s darkest novels. It was written at a time when he was much preoccupied by death. The novel is often compared with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which was published the year after.
Author
Novels of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, pen name of Knut 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.
