Hunger: Book One

A strange, lyrical book that presents hunger as a gateway to madness.

What an engaging feverish read! This novel does not read like it's 130 years old nor like it was translated. Very quick easy read, a page turner despite there being essentially no plot. The unnamed main character narrator borders on being annoying and exasperating, but in the end I felt mostly sympathy for him. Clearly mentally ill and constantly struggling with poverty and starvation, he makes one bad decision after another but it seems they derive largely from his last attempts to hold onto dignity and self-respect. A timely or maybe timeless tale.

Before Jay McInerney, J.D. Salinger and Albert Camus came Knut Hamsun. Hunger is a masterpeice study of human nature and the absurdity of life. This book is #1 on my all time favorites list.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun is a loosely autobiographical novel about a young man down on his luck, starving to death and the slow decline as he sells off bits and pieces of his life to the Uncle. While he wanders about the town he runs into several characters. This unnamed narrator is quite proud and can barely allow anyone to help him. He would rather give away than receive. It reminded me a bit of Dostoyevsky and also a bit of Ulysses as the main character wanders about the town meeting up with various people. This is a turn of the century psychological driven novel and explores the irrationality of the mind. Of Christiana (Oslo) the protagonist states, “no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there. The contrast is the outer respectability, mental and physical decay. Symbols of the decay are the words starved, winding sheets, Autumn, die, room compared to a sinister coffin. The winding sheets (for wrapping the deceased body) repeats several times.

What a rollercoaster! Reading this book took a lot out of me. Not because it's hard to read, but because the main character's (unnamed) constant changes in mood. He'll be riding on clouds at first, then he's acting as if he's the scourge of the earth. You really get caught up in it, and that all points back to the author's ability. The ending was a little abiguous to me, though. I don't like leaving my characters to an uncertain future.

This is Knut Hamsun's best novel. Victoria is also excellent, but Hunger talks about the emotional longing more than the physical.

A stark portrait of hunger and its effects on the psyche, this book follows an unnamed narrator as he experiences periods of near starvation in 1890s Oslo (then known as Christiana). An author by trade, the young man struggles to write while falling in and out of starvation-induced madness. He is at turns homeless and penniless. The reader is treated to his inner life and the social consequences he suffers secondary to his impoverished status. The reader would be hard-pressed to find a more realistic portrayal of the psyche of one who knows hunger on a daily basis.

He was just hungry for 120 pages.

Hunger is set in Kristiania, Norway (renamed Oslo in 1925) and is the rather dire tale of a struggling impoverished writer, who struggles to not only keep a roof over his head, but also to provide himself with enough food to eat as well as keeping himself properly clothed for winter.It is a book that makes you thankful to live in a time when society provides social security benefits so that people need not starve to death*.It's a relatively quick read at a mere 134 pages, but at times its contents are nonetheless rather harrowing such as when the protagonist cuts the buttons of his jacket in an attempt to pawn them to be able to buy a morsel of food.*Generally speaking, I'm aware this does not exist in all countries at the present time.

I probably didn't read this closely enough to say anything particularly intelligent about it. It has no plot, no character development, and very little in the way of logical organization of any kind. This is all clearly intentional: a literary polemic against the three volume novel that proceeds in a stately manner towards marriage or death. So if you've only ever read Victorian era novels, you'll probably be greatly shocked at this. If you've read anything else, you won't be.
More interesting than the differences between this and, say, Great Expectations are the differences between this and all the stuff everyone compares it to: twentieth century absurdist or existentialist fiction. The translator of this edition says that the protagonist experiences Heidegger's 'authentic being towards death'. Uh... claptrap. What's fascinating about this book is that, unlike the quasi-Heideggerian anti-heroes of Camus etc, the hungry man is deeply, deeply moral. The translator suggests that this generosity is just a 'temperamental tic'. It seems to me to be much more than that, though. Here is a man who, although starving to death, is willing to give away any money he actually gets his hands on to others, simply out of compassion. He suffers for those who are beaten down even when he's the most beaten down of the lot. He's essentially a saintly aristocratic romantic artist, without the income that let most saints, aristocrats and romantic artists swan around the world doing their thing. If he's crazy, it's a good madness. If he's sane, he's a genuine moral hero, despite his occasional peccadilloes. I suspect the best comparison might be to ancient cynics who embraced poverty and lived disgusting lives as a mockery of social norms. Except this modern cynic is aware that social norms are all we've got: he just lives up to the ideals his society produced, while the society itself goes on whoring, materialistic and angry.

Someday I'll actually sit down and write a real book review and when I do, it might just be on this book. Hunger struck a chord in me. Maybe it's all the Gogol and Dostoevsky I've read and loved over the years. This book is indeed disturbing and describes hunger in such detail that it makes the reader feel the desperation, feel the hunger. There are scenes that a reader will likely never forget.

A chilling novel. A stark, uncompromising look at the horrors of literary life in Oslo at the turn to the twentieth century Oslo. To be read by anyone contemplating a life in literary pursuits. It will deter some.

This book reminded me of Crime and Punishment. It is an easy read but hard to put down. It is a stream of consciousness narrative without much of a plot and an early example of post-modernism. While reading this book about someone who is truly hungry you can see how there is a fine line between reality and hallucination. I enjoyed it very much and I would recommend this book to those who like books about life in late 19th century in northern Europe.

Desperate, grim and powerful.

I read the Bly translation.

My edition had an intro by Paul Auster. It took me forever to get through the intro, the book was much more interesting. But between the intro and the afterword (by Bly) I ended up with a lot of questions:

1) Auster implies the Hamsun starved himself for art, and to have material to create his art. And when he was done, he left
2) Bly makes it clear that though this novel is based on his life, it is not an autobiography. Hamsun was starving on and off for 10 years, trying to make it as a writer. He did 2 stints working in the US, each of multiple years, during those 10 years. Bly suggests his unusual writing style (obvious in Norwegian, not in the translation) was caused by his time spent in the US. After Hunger was published, he was not hungry again.

So--did he starve on purpose as art? Or was he a 19th century "starving artist" trying to succeed at his chosen craft, taking other jobs as needed to live?

Anyway, this book does not read like a 19th century book at all. It feels much more mid 20th century, as there is not a plot exactly. He's not telling a story per se--he's telling about what it's like to be a struggling writer in Christiania, with no family help, friends as down as you, and what that is like.

I really don't know what I think about this Norwegian classic by Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun. Even my rating is a bit of a guess!I found this very easy to read and the effects of extreme poverty on the main character were fascinating to behold. But I found this unnamed character very odd in places. I could understand to some extent his pride leading him to doing some things that could be seen as foolish but some of his pranks were bizarre.

The ending was a disappointment.

I found this to be simultaneously an easy read and a difficult one. It's a slim book, and the language is straightforward, which made it easy. But the descriptions of being hungry and hopeless were often oppressively vivid. The narrator is a writer; he occasionally gets pieces published in the local newspaper, but the money never lasts long. Almost before the euphoria from getting paid fades, he is broke and starving again. He pawns everything he owns. He becomes homeless. He tries to get a regular job, but a minor error means he isn't considered. He tries to concentrate, to write, to bring himself out of his hunger-induced confusion long enough to sell another piece, but it's hard to focus.Hamsun does an incredible job describing the feeling of being hungry, and the results of starvation on one's mind. But more than that, he gets at the very essence of the dehumanizing feelings of being poor, of finding oneself an outcast from society. He makes the reader feel the despair and devaluation, while still keeping alive the glimmers of hope that the narrator maintains. It's a powerful look into what it is like to be on the bottom of the ladder.Recommended for: anyone who's ever felt like they just couldn't catch a break, people not on a dietQuote: Whatever could be the reason that things would not brighten up for me? Was I not just as much entitled to live as anyone else?

This novel is stark, emotionally evocative and on a primal level, terrifying. If you dare, enter the psyche of the narrator, a writer, who waivers between abject poverty and death. Suffer along with him as Hamsun's brilliant writing takes the reader to the brink of utter madness, sublime passion, and death by starvation. In the end, what is the hunger for in addition to food? You will have to suffer the throes of despair and humiliation of the protagonist to find out!

So realistic, I thought I was starving. Very compelling.

Hamsun deftly portrays the irrationality of the human mind assailed by hunger in a unique and often amusing manner. The narrator's psychological state is very well-developed and Hamsun's prose brings to life the intricacies of the human mind; Hamsun also portrays Oslo (then called Kristiana) in a realist manner.

Similar to Crime and Punishment (since Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of Hamsun's main influences), Hunger is an expert piece of psychological drama and an excellent introduction to Hamsun's work.

This particular edition also had an appendix by the translator (Sverre Lyngstad) on the troubles translating Hunger into English, which was particularly informative since Hamsun is a troublesome author to translate accurately owing to his expansive vocabulary and expressive style.

An extremely well written work- the author's direct, simple and straightforward writing style makes for an appealing read on the fascinating trials and tribulations of a young man fallen into poverty, and hunger. But for the disappointing ending, I would have ranked this even higher.

‘Andreas Tangen’ is the fictitious name our nameless protagonist gives to the Officer on Duty the night he finds himself cold, wet, famished, keyless (not to say clueless, and consequently without even a room to go home to) and nearing delirium. His solution? To seek room and board in the city jail whence he can contemplate the rain falling on the outside.


I only recently (July 17) read and reviewed Jack London’s Martin Eden. Knut Hamsun’s semiautobiographical Hunger could well serve as a companion piece to London’s equally semiautobiographical novel. And neither would be out of place sitting alongside Dostoyevsky’s Notes from (the) Underground.


“‘I will read it,’ he (the editor of a city paper in Christiania) said, taking it. ‘Of course everything you write will cost you labor; the only trouble with your work perhaps is excitability. If you could only be a little more composed! There is too much fever all the time. Anyway, I’ll read it.’ Then he turned to his desk work” (p. 95).


Our anonymous protagonist’s “excitability” is quite understandable given his uncertain living conditions and constant state of hunger. And Robert Bly has done an excellent job of translating (I assume) and injecting (I don't assume) that same excitability into Hamsun’s Norwegian prose. For anyone who’s ever been homeless and felt prolonged hunger pangs for the sake of his art (or through the sheer absence of work), Hamsun’s words and Bly’s translation of those words may ring truer than any of us would care to remember. The only thing worse? I can still recall Luis Alberto Urrea’s description (in The Devil’s Highway) of what occurs when people emerge in the Arizona desert after having walked up from Mexico (or from points even further south) … and are out of water. (What happens to the human animal as it passes through the several stages of extreme dehydration is something you may be tempted to read about, but never want to actually witness.)


In any case, our protagonist’s problem is the title of this book — and it never disappears. With hunger, comes a slow insanity. It’s not easy to read about, but both Hamsun and Bly do a superb job of portraying it in all of its insidious glory. This is indeed a case of afflictio gratia artis (suffering for the sake of art).


RRB
09/10/14
Brooklyn, NY

Wow. That was powerful. I have to write a lot of reviews this weekend - this will be one of them.

I find it ironic that I read this while the RNC circus is going on in FL. I wish I could force everyone there to read this book and live it. just for a short while.

In Hunger, Hamsun has crafted a strange protagonist. He is deranged by his own arrogance, bordering on madness. Pining himself for money and food, he responds to a beggar's pleas for a handout by going to pawn his jacket and returning to the beggar, who becomes suspect. At this, the protagonist is insulted, and berates the beggar as an ungrateful wretch. The near starvation that plagues him later in the book only aggravates and accentuates his strange moods and we, being so reliant on his voice as narrative, are forced to empathize with his pitiful state. The blend of moods and images in this novel is astounding. This novel is dark, certainly, but the narrator's oddball ways give the story a comic tone. In all of it's sadness and oddity, the narrative returns frequently to beautiful and often dreamlike images. The beauty of this book is the beauty of desperation, captured here more precisely than in any other literature I have yet read. Miller approaches it, but Hamsun, by literally going for the gut, embodies it. A masterful modernist novel of emotion, sensation, and viscera.

A Norwegian classic I finally got around to reading. The book is about a struggling writer who runs out of money and goes hungry. It didn't take me long to start feeling desperately sorry for this man. The really raw way in which his desperate hunger and, as a result, often miserable and sometimes deranged state of mind is described, made this book a very uncomfortable, but also a very thought-provoking read. Reading about the main character's unwillingness to ask for or accept charity out of pride and a sense of personal dignity genuinely frustrated me. I found myself urging the character to steal, rather than preserving his lawfulness at the risk of dying of hunger.Unfortunately, even though this book was published in 1890, it remains relevant. It will stay relevant as long as there are people who have to go hungry. Through telling a story it makes a very powerful point. No moral is stated, nor is any lecture given. It is just a story. A story which serves as a poignant reminder that no matter how uncomfortable one might be made to feel by that person sitting on the street, asking for ones money, one is extremely privileged to be the one being asked.

I started reading this book on Dec 23, 1951, and said of it: "Started reading Hunger, the book that made Knut Hamsun famous, back about 1887. He won the Nobel prize in 1920. Before his success he worked in America for a time as a streetcar conductor, but it is said he would read Euripides and forget to let the passengers off and so lost his job. On Dec 26, 1951, I said: "Finished Hunger--not impressed but it had its points."

As per usual I skipped the introduction until I'd finished (they're always full of spoilers) though wish I'd taken the time to read it up front, as it summarises the entire book in half a page, making the point that there's no plot and the characters--other than the mildly insane protagonist--are inconsequential. I suppose I can see why it's supposedly influential (it breaks a few c19th literary moulds) but it wasn't my bag.

I came to Knut Hamsun by way of George Egerton. Two writers few modern readers have heard of outside of academia and Norway. George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright) wrote two volumes of wonderful short stories, Keynotes and Discords, in the late 1890's and became one of the prominent figures in the feminist literary movement known as the "New Women." She had a romantic attachment with Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, whom she listed as a strong influence on her own writing. In fact, she translated his first novel, Hunger, into English. Mr. Hamsun went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920, while Ms. Egerton faded into obscurity until modern critics such as Elaine Showalter rediscovered her work. I found her through Ms. Showalter's book A Literature of Their Own. Hunger is based on the ten years Mr. Hamsun spent in Christiania, now modern Oslo, trying to become a writer, earning very little money for the few articles and stories he could sell, and going without food much of the time. The novel's subject is hunger and its effects on the psychological and physical state of those who endure it. As such, it's an excellent work. Because Mr. Hamsun believed that the subject of literature should be the intricacies of the human mind, Hunger focuses on the experience and thoughts of its un-named narrator almost to the exclusion of other characters. There are other people in the book--the editor at the magazine, a landlady, an old friend who tries to offer help, a woman he meets on the streets a few times--but these characters are of little interest to Hamsun and to the reader. What interests Hamsun is the narrator's state of mind, the delusions his hunger causes, and his own desire to keep up appearances as he insists on surviving only by writing instead of taking on a profession which he feels his beneath a man of his sensibilities.Photo of author from WikipediaHunger is interesting reading, and this insistence on writing as the sole source of income eventually worked for Hamsun himself, eventually. But midway through the book, one starts wishing the narrator would simply get a job. I suppose it may be of those moments when a modern perspective intrudes on the experience of reading classic literature, but I suspect many of Mr. Hamsun's contemporaries had the same reaction. Even Franz Kafka took a job with an insurance agency, for heaven's sake. No one ever accused him of selling out.

Hunger is an autobiographical novel depicting a starving writer roaming the streets of Kristiana (now Oslo), Norway. The narrator goes from poverty, to homelessness, to starvation and delirium. He teeters on the brink of insanity before circumstances put enough food in his mouth to keep him alive and restore at least some of his faculties.Though many of the novels of that time (1890) were written to publicize social ills and human sufferings, Hunger is not this type of story. Instead, it is a psychological study of a man's descent into abjection largely by his own doing. The narrator, fixated on writing his way out of misery, never considers alternatives. He doesn't look for a job, nor does he accept charity. His warped pride, which turns gradually to delusion, almost kills him. It's no easy task to write a first-person story about someone who is going insane. Hamsun manages to do so, however, in a very clear and convincing manner. The reader somehow always know's what's real and what's not, even when it's obvious that the person telling the story does not. This is not a pleasant book to read, but it is a very important and revealing one.