(I'm perturbed over the lack of reviews mentioning the translation/translator. It's as though everybody read it in its natural tongue. I read the Sverre Lyngstad translation and suspect I choose poorly.)
"A mysterious stranger lands in a small Norwegian village in which a mysterious death has just occurred..."
That is not this novel, at least not by the end. Think along the lines of Dosteyevsky's Notes from the Underground. Hamsun is more interested in showing off an unrepressed psyche analogous to his own than developing that initial situation. At least the protagonist professes he is a "living contradiction" and "inconsistent". With the exception of a few interesting dream allusions, his spasmodic rambles come across as all sound and fury, often contradicting himself from moment to moment. (The fact he goes after Martha Gude comes across as pathetic desperation.) The saving grace of the novel is the inferno of fury and rage that overcomes Nagel after he has burned his bridges. This conflagration will entice me to look further into Hamsun with different expectations.