I first read this at the age of about 15, pulling it from my parents' shelves probably on some miserable rainy weekend. I remember liking the gloomy forest on the cover and thinking the book was weird, and good, and I'm of the same opinion today, although I understand it better now having read a couple of Hamsun's other novels and also being much older and wearier of the world. Now I think that Mysteries is doubly ahead of its time. It's proto-Modernist in its theme of the individual — or maybe "ego" is a better word — vs society. Its weirdo protagonist, Nagel, unlike the narrator of Hamsun's first novel Hunger, doesn't just eschew the society of his fellow Norwegians; he actively tries to shake it up, to show it for the charade he believes it to be. This is his perverse way of trying to connect. But I think it's even more relevant today, because Nagel is the kind of mythomaniac shit-stirrer that social media has supercharged.

Nagel (likely a false name, we later learn) shows up in a small coastal town wearing an absurd yellow suit, with a phial of prussic acid in his vest and among his luggage a violin case which turns out only to contain dirty laundry. He takes an interest in a local laughing-stock known as "The Midget", protects him from the abuse of townspeople, buys him new clothes, offers him money "to acknowledge the paternity of a boy", and later on takes against him and suspects him of murder. He falls in love, -style, with the local beauty; he hosts a wild "stag party" in his hotel room where he denounces liberals, communists, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Gladstone without propounding any definite credo of his own; he pretends to be wealthy; he claims to be poor. He inveigles a lonely spinster into accepting a ludicrous amount of money for a worthless old chair, then proposes marriage to her. He professes to be unmusical, then shocks the town with an impromptu display of violin virtuosity. I read somewhere that The Midget could be seen as Nagel's alter-ego, his inner self, his conscience, and I think that makes sense.