The Last Joy is the final part in Hamsun’s Wanderer Trilogy. With its richly varied contents, this work combines the lyricism of Hamsun’s Pan (1894) and the epic scope of his Nobel prize-winning Growth of the Soil (1917). The middle-aged narrator of this story is a Hamsun double, who leaves the wild, where he has lived in a turf hut, for a tourist resort and, later, the city, where he contacts Miss Torsen, a beautiful young school teacher he met at the resort. He follows her sexual escapades, including rape, with the intense, vicarious interest of a voyeur.