Hunger (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Knut Hamsun and Monika Zagar

The story of a starving writer in Norway, Hunger is a pivotal masterpiece of European modernism. The protagonist is anonymous and the plot is meager. What holds the text together is the focus on the protagonists emotions. These emotions are reveled to the reader by the minute descriptions of the inner landscape of the mind, interspersed with the unnamed writers random encounters with strangers and acquaintances in the streets, or short meetings with various editors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411429857

Knut Hamsun

Born in 1859, Knut Hamsun published a stunning series of novels in the 1890s: Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892) and Pan (1894). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

HUNGER (1890) BY THE NORWEGIAN NOVELIST AND NOBEL LAUREATE Knut Hamsun is one of the early yet pivotal masterpieces of European modernism. This predecessor to the twentieth century’s stream-of-consciousness writing epitomized by the work of writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett is as captivating to the twenty-first-century reader as it was notorious to Scandinavian audiences of the 1890s. Hunger is a book in four parts—Hamsun insisted that he had not written a novel—that describes the struggles of an aspiring, and starving, writer in Christiania (now Oslo). Although the protagonist is anonymous and the plot is meager, what really holds the text together is the focus on the protagonist’s mind, moods, impulses, and emotions. The minimal plot is offset by the minute descriptions of the inner landscape of the mind, interspersed with the unnamed writer’s random encounters with strangers and acquaintances in the streets, or short meetings with various editors.

Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) is both revered as one of the pioneers of modernist writing—of which Hunger is a perfect example—and vilified as an enthusiastic and unwavering supporter of the Nazi occupation of Norway during 1940-45. While the debate about his political convictions has raged unabated since his 1946 trial, intensifying after the release of Jan Troell’s 1996 movie Hamsun, the consensus about his literary genius has never been shaken.

This self-taught writer, who spent his teens and twenties in a variety of places in Norway and tried his hand at a range of trades and professions, never doubted his talent, and he showed early literary ambitions. He was born as Knut Pedersen in 1859 in Lom in the Gubrandsdal valley of central Norway. In 1862, his family moved to the north of Norway, to a farm called Hamsund near Hamarøy in Nordland. At the age of nine, Hamsun was sent to work on a nearby uncle’s farm. His uncle was a strict disciplinarian and a devoutly religious man who influenced Hamsun profoundly. The dramatic northern landscape and its quality of light likewise made a life-long impression on him, and many of his later novels are set in that distinct landscape. He subsequently worked as a cobbler’s apprentice, a peddler, and a road worker. His breakthrough work, Hunger, came late, when he was almost thirty, after much poverty, many disappointments, with several minor texts published, and after two visits to the United States.

Hamsun’s two stays in the United States (1882-84 and 1886-88) left him disappointed over the promised land of Amerika, the destination of millions of European emigrants, not least of whom were Scandinavians. While some of his experiences were conducive to his personal and artistic growth—certainly his position with the Unitarian priest and writer Kristofer Janson in Minneapolis where he could avail himself of Janson’s library; or the opportunity to lecture in Minneapolis on contemporary literature—he formed opinions of the United States that would be reflected in his work for years. Although tinted with ambivalence and uncertainty, his basic experience and perception of America were of pervasive immorality and hypocrisy, greed, bluff, and deceit. While he appreciated Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and, in a slightly different category, the dynamic if hyperbolic writing of American journalism, Hamsun was highly critical of the American arts. He returned to Copenhagen, the artistic capital of Scandinavia, in 1888, as poor as he had left it. He began writing feverishly and produced a number of articles and a book on the United States (The Cultural Life of Modern America), gave lectures, and finished Hunger, although not until June 1890. It was his 1886 article on Mark Twain that provided the pen name Hamsun. Although he signed the article Hamsund, it was misspelled by a printer, and he decided to keep it as Hamsun for the rest of his life.

In the November 1888 issue of the radical and trendy Copenhagen literary journal Ny Jord (New Soil), Hamsun published anonymously what is essentially part two of Hunger. An instant sensation because of its style, drive, and content—or lack of traditional content—it had that hard-to-define yet unmistakable quality of something extraordinary and completely new. This sensational literary debut happened just as Hamsun had imagined it. He had worked hard for many years, determined to publish a work of art that was uniquely his. He had desired artistic fame but on his own terms rather than imitating his contemporary legends Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. It was not until June 1890 that the entire book as we know it was published, to a notorious reception among readers, a positive reception among fellow writers, and largely, if not completely, positive critical reviews.

Hunger’s first-person narrator both acts on his impulses and tracks them in detail for the reader, revealing a keen sense of observation as well as a critical and at times ironic reflection on the contradiction between his shabby existence and his megalomaniac artistic goals, which include writing an article on Correggio and a play set in the Middle Ages. However, the narrator’s grotesque and humiliating poverty is not the subject of sociological criticism but rather a willed state of frenzy; a game that pushes the limits of his body and mind; a vehicle leading into a creative state undisturbed by the mundane, everyday chores of a job. Except for some details of nineteenth-century urban life—like rather typical newspaper advertisements, horse carriages, pawnshops, and so forth—the events of the novel are independent of the times. It is this absence of any lengthy description of the external world that enables the twenty-first-century reader to identify with the reality of the inner experience. The protagonist, the would-be writer, is constantly reminded of his own hunger, in fact of his lack of everything but talent and will. His hunger for food, for love, and for recognition are offset by his drive to write, and the text hops over the short periods when he has enough money to feed himself.

Early in his career Hamsun criticized literature as a discussion of social or political topics; this critique is already articulated in his 1887 lectures in Minneapolis’ Dana Hall where he discussed modern writers such as the Frenchmen Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola, and the Swede August Strindberg, in addition to the Norwegian writers of the day. This criticism is repeated during his notorious 1891 lecture tour of Norway’s southwestern coast where he mercilessly dispatched the four grand Norwegian writers: Bjørnson, Kielland, Lie, and Ibsen. Hamsun, in these lectures, suggested that literature needs to address the complexity, and ultimately the mystery, of the human mind and human behavior. With Hunger, and with his essay From the Unconscious Life of the Mind (1890), which was a kind of literary manifesto, he staked out the ground for a new kind of literature: a literature of the inner mind with modern protagonists who are complex, contradictory, and ultimately impenetrable.

The main protagonist of Hunger is precisely such a modern man. We do not really know much about him, his family, or his education. On the first page of the book he wakes up in a nondescript lodging and registers the ads from the newspaper that is used to insulate the thin walls. On the last page of the book, while newly employed on a ship leaving Christiania, he promises he will be back. Within these external boundaries we witness a segment of his life. He describes the nuances of his starvation while busily writing an article or a treatise; he idles away time in the streets, cemeteries, and parks of the city, meeting long-forgotten acquaintances and odd passersby. Woven in is a love story: he feels attracted to a mysterious woman whom he calls Ylajali. He manages to meet her, and for a short while she returns his feelings. When he discovers that what for him is a dangerous reality is for her a quasi-bohemian amusement, the brief relationship abruptly ends. However, he continues to challenge his existence and to believe in his artistic mission. Even when in prison, creativity magically and unexplainably affirms itself: in the deepest darkness, a word without meaning appears to him—Kuboa—but it is a word nevertheless, which he interprets as a sign of his creativity.

Several of Hamsun’s later heroes resemble the anonymous protagonist from Hunger. Hamsun’s exploration of the odd outsider continues in his next novel, Mysteries (1892), by inventing Nagel, the main protagonist, who unexpectedly appears in a small Norwegian coastal town dressed in a bright yellow suit. Nagel is just as lonely as the protagonist of Hunger, and controversial within the local community. Hamsun’s twentieth-century novels, which are written in a more broadly epic style, also contain rootless and restless modern protagonists; even his most idyllic novel, The Growth of the Soil (1917), has room for Geissler, a modern, unreliable, slightly alcoholic, and creative individual. Abel, from Hamsun’s 1936 novel The Ring is Closed, is an even closer parallel to the protagonist of Hunger : Abel ends up shedding all of his material possessions to live alone in a hut, like an animal. The crucial difference between the two protagonists from the beginning and the end of Hamsun’s career, between the anti-hero of Hunger and Abel, is that Abel nurses no creative agenda, which can be read as a sign of Hamsun’s increasing disillusionment, old age, or the combination of the two. If there are traits in Hunger that could be tied into Hamsun’s later reactionary politics, they would be the extreme individualism of the protagonist; the aesthete’s repulsion at seeing lame, old, or fat individuals; and the aristocratic will to artistic success, a will to prevail.

As unique a writer as Hamsun was, he was also the product of his time. Hunger is a perfect expression of a shift toward the exploration of the internal mind, both as an exciting new arena investigated vigorously by the hard sciences and as a reaction to the sense of loss of the stable, coherent, and comforting world of the mid-nineteenth century. Hamsun compared his literary debut, and rightly so, to the insights and writings of a Russian writer whom he admired all his life, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. While Hamsun was no reader of philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche’s reflections on the aristocratic individual and his will conflated with Hamsun’s own understanding of his immense and surprising talent, with his worldview, and his disinterestedness in the masses. Closer to home, Hamsun greatly admired August Strindberg and felt an affinity for his modern approach to art as explained most clearly in Strindberg’s preface to his 1888 play Miss Julie.

But the reverse is also true: while Hamsun describes the universal experience of urban rootlessness and modern angst, he produced a unique work of art based on his own experiences, drawing on his own suffering and starvation, his own endurance and creative drive during the winters of 1880-81 and 1885-86 in Christiania. If we need to use a genre label for Hunger it would be a mixture of autobiography and novel.

In spite of all the commotion around Hunger in 1890, it was not selling that well and a German translation (1891) gave Hamsun financial hope as well as wider European exposure. Even before the publication of Hunger in book form, it was reviewed and then serialized in German in the influential new journal Freie Bühne. After Hamsun met Alfred Langen in Paris in 1893, his publishing house Langen Verlag became and remained Hamsun’s German representative. During the 1890s, Hamsun wrote at a tremendous pace and published novels, short stories, and plays, of which especially Pan (1894) and Victoria (1898) became popular and critical successes. But the turn of the century is marked by his restlessness. His first marriage to Bergljot Geopfert failed (1898-1905), and while his second, to the actress Marie Andersen in 1909, lasted the rest of his life, it was marked, increasingly and mutually so, by jealousy, bitterness, and separations.

After 1900, Hamsun continued writing and publishing although he changed his poetics from intense lyricism to a more paced, epic realism. His 1917 novel Growth of the Soil, about settling northern Norway and describing the pleasures and patience of hard work on the land, brought him the Nobel Prize in 1920. This novel was followed by the much harsher yet captivating The Women at the Pump (1920), which focused on the castrated Oliver Anderson’s illusions and hard reality. After being one of the first Norwegians to undergo psychoanalysis in the 1920s, Hamsun published his so-called August trilogy on the adventurous, restless, scheming, yet entrepreneurial and likeable August and his idealistic and trusting friend Edevart (Wayfarers, 1927; August, 1930; The Road Leads On, 1933). He concluded his interwar novels with the pessimistic and baffling The Ring is Closed about the sailor Abel, a modern Everyman, who cannot and does not really want to find a home anywhere in the world. These works all reinforced his reputation as one of the leading European writers of the time.

Complex and varied, Hamsun’s novels are most often set during the period of early industrialization in Norway, beginning around the 1850s, a time of intense and rapid social change from family-based farms and the simple life of fishermen to the first factories, timber mills, urban towns, and banks. Although Hamsun availed himself of contemporary inventions—he was one of the first people in Norway to have a six-seat Buick—he did not cheer modern developments and achievements, be they in science or education, material gains, or travel. On the contrary, he saw them as distractions, robbing individuals of a simple and contented life. There was nothing sadder for Hamsun than an educated woman—and in his fiction he usually portrayed her as childless—or a former peasant turned factory wageearner, rootless yet arrogant toward his superiors. Except during his radical youth, Hamsun always displayed conservative if not reactionary tendencies: in Norway it was the early rural local lord rather than the emerging middle-class that had his trust; in the United States it was the Southern white elite rather than East Coast intellectuals; in the Old World it was the fatalistic Orient rather than the enlightened France that captured his imagination. Hamsun shared with many of his contemporaries views on the inferiority of non-Europeans, and he was terrified of the radical ideas put forth by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia and feared their influence on Norwegian society. His fellow Norwegians Fritjof Nansen and Vidkun Quisling undertook humanitarian missions in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and testified to the suffering and starvation of the people following their civil war. To a certain degree, Hamsun’s endorsement of the Nazis’ seizure of power was predicated on his fear of communism. That being said, Hamsun supported Norway’s inclusion in the Third Reich to the bitter end not out of political naiveté, but out of conviction. From writing articles in support of the good work by German submarines to seeing his sons serving the German occupiers; from presenting his Nobel Prize medal as a gift to Goebbels, the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, to writing a deeply felt eulogy for Hitler in May 1945, Hamsun never wavered in his support for the Nazis. After the war he was deeply resented by the majority of Norwegians, especially those who had been imprisoned or who had lost loved ones. He was arrested soon after the war ended, interrogated, mentally evaluated, and tried; although he was not sentenced to any additional jail time, he was fined a large percentage of his personal wealth. His wife and his son Arild, however, were imprisoned for their activities in support of the Nazis. In 1949, Hamsun published his autobiographical novel On Overgrown Paths, which was in part reminiscences of events long past and in part a defense treatise.

Hamsun lived his final years at Nørholm, his estate on the southern coast of Norway. His wife Marie, whom he exiled from his life for her alleged betrayal during his postwar mental evaluation, was eventually allowed to join him, and she cared for him until his death in 1952.

Despite his political collaboration with the Nazis, Hamsun belongs to the European canon and deserves to be better known for his literary contributions than he is today. Major European writers of various persuasions, including Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, and Robert Musil, as well as Maxim Gorky, Boris Pasternak, and even Andre Gide, have praised Hamsun’s creative magic. In his home country of Norway, every aspiring writer has had to struggle with Hamsun’s legacy, and many have acknowledged his influence, among them the well-known contemporary writers Dag Solstad and Lars Saaby Christensen. In the United States, writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Robert Bly, and Paul Auster have acknowledged his attraction and power with words. Even today, Hamsun’s novel Hunger remains fresh and provocative, and it is an ideal book to begin to acquaint oneself with the work of this formidable writer.

Monika Žagar is an associate professor in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She holds a Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of California at Berkeley and she teaches and writes on a variety of subjects within the field of Scandinavian culture and literatures. Currently she is working on her own book on Knut Hamsun.

PART I

IT WAS DURING THE TIME I WANDERED ABOUT AND STARVED IN Christiania: Christiania, this singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there.

003

I was lying awake in my attic and I heard a clock below strike six. It was already broad daylight, and people had begun to go up and down the stairs. By the door where the wall of the room was papered with old numbers of the Morgenbladet, I could distinguish clearly a notice from the Director of Lighthouses, and a little to the left of that an inflated advertisement of Fabian Olsens’ new-baked bread.

The instant I opened my eyes I began, from sheer force of habit, to think if I had anything to rejoice over that day. I had been somewhat hard-up lately, and one after the other of my belongings had been taken to my Uncle. I had grown nervous and irritable. A few times I had kept my bed for the day with vertigo. Now and then, when luck had favoured me, I had managed to get five shillings for a feuilleton from some newspaper or other.

It grew lighter and lighter, and I took to reading the advertisements near the door. I could even make out the grinning lean letters of winding-sheets to be had at Miss Andersen’s on the right of it. That occupied me for a long while. I heard the clock below strike eight as I got up and put on my clothes.

I opened the window and looked out. From where I was standing I had a view of a clothesline and an open field. Farther away lay the ruins of a burnt-out smithy, which some labourers were busy clearing away. I leant with my elbows resting on the window frame and gazed into open space. It promised to be a clear day—autumn, that tender, cool time of the year, when all things change their colour, and die, had come to us. The ever-increasing noise in the streets lured me out. The bare room, the floor of which rocked up and down with every step I took across it, seemed like a gasping, sinister coffin. There was no proper fastening to the door, either, and no stove. I used to lie on my socks at night to dry them a little by the morning. The only thing I had to divert myself with was a little red rocking chair, in which I used to sit in the evenings and doze and muse on all manner of things. When it blew hard, and the door below stood open, all kinds of eerie sounds moaned up through the floor and from out the walls, and the Morgenbladet near the door was rent in strips a span long.

I stood up and searched through a bundle in the corner by the bed for a bite for breakfast, but finding nothing, went back to the window.

God knows, thought I, if looking for employment will

Reviews for Hunger (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

[alisony-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Set in 1890 when Hamsun wrote it, the writing bears little of the hallmarks of the writing of this era. There is little plot to speak of and few characters. Our protagonist narrator believes himself to wear the noble title of 'writer' as his occupation, but in reality he is at best a hugely unproductive author of unsolicited newspaper articles. As a result he lives mostly with perpetual hunger, often on the brink of starvation, at which point he regularly cannot keep food down even when he's able to buy some. His hunger drives him to bouts of mania and erratic behaviour, but he's clearly not of sound mind anyway. When he has a little money - which is very much the exception rather than the norm - he is quick to find reason to give part or all of it away. He turns down opportunities for food when he's desperately hungry, and avoids pursuing other avenues for employment where he could receive regular pay.This is a bleak, bleak novel, and certainly not one I could have continued with had it been longer. The depth of the narrator's poverty is difficult to read about at times. All he possesses in life are the clothes he's standing up on, and even some of those he has to pawn. But it is the mix of this extreme poverty with his crazy behaviour that make his story so desperately frustrating to read about, as he passes over small kindnesses that would make huge differences to his situation.It is not an enjoyable novel, but there is a certain experience to reading it. It's narrated as bouts of despair bouncing into periods of mania; this mental instability can be exhausting to read (although it's not difficult prose).3.5 stars - I'm glad I read it, but I certainly won't rush back for a re-read.

[henrimoreaux · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hamsun doesn't offer the contemporary reader an example of poverty. We can go to Zola for that. Naturalism thrive on those dehumanizing conditions. Hunger, instead, offers a poetic interpretation of poverty. This is starvation as resistance. But only so. I found the motivations necessarily complex, bound and retreating. Many can probably relate to that arc swing between defiance and humiliation. Such expository work is often difficult to enjoy, empathy prevents actual pleasure. That isn't the case with Hunger. I found it more a sonata than Solzhenitsyn: that is a compliment to both Hamsun as well as the Russian.

[technodiabla · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[rnmdfrd · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[kakadoo202 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

He was just hungry for 120 pages.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[karndog · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[sullywriter_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Desperate, grim and powerful.

[crule627 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[russellbittner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

‘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

[ursula_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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?

[hemlokgang · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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!

[jvioland_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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

[xuebi-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[stillatim · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[la2bkk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[ursulatillmann · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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

[krisr-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[clq_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[schmerguls · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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."

[rynooo_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[cbjames_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One of the things I've discovered in recent years is that without other characters for your protagonist to interact with, your story can get old very quickly. I certainly found that to be the case with 'Hunger'. Although it's relatively short I struggled through most of it because it was not fun to be in the narrator's head. His troubled relationship with the woman he calls Ylayali is captivating, though it only lasts a few pages.

[anya127 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The beauty of humiliation lies in these pages read a master at work .

[jimmychanga · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

pride, honor, shame, self deception, self delusion, mania, idiosyncratic logic, a very enjoyable, and at times hilarious, read. Even though at first the narrator seems like quite an oddball, i can see a little bit of myself in him, even at his most irrational.

[391_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It was almost painful to read the narrator's descent into madness - I cringed at certain points, hoping he would just use the money he had been given, or beg for bread, or do something to alleviate his condition even though he considered it below him. Hamsun's prose is utterly fantastic, though - the page or two where he curses God is just incredible.

[michaelmurphy_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This compelling novel will strike a chord with anyone who, for whatever reason or turn of circumstance, has found themselves completely isolated in life, knowing no-one at all, suffering extremes of loneliness, virtually bereft of human interaction and discourse - stranded helplessly among people like a ghost doomed to wander in a phantom zone. Written in 1890, Knut Hamsun's novel "Hunger", is a disturbing journey into the mind and soul of a young writer. With no plot or characters (other than the young writer narrator) to speak of, the novel, written in the form of an interior monologue, recounts each moment-by-moment thought or impulse running through the young writer's mind. The reader observes in the interior monologue, the steady deterioration of the young writer's mental state as his thoughts swing erratically between extremes of elation and despair.For the nameless young writer, clothes falling apart, existing precariously on the brink of starving to death, evicted from his room when rental payments lapsed, not knowing where his next mouthful of food will come from, pawning the vest off his back (but making rash, extravagant handouts as soon as he comes into any money), each day represents a vast desert of dead and empty time in which he wanders, lost, blown about the streets of the city like a paper in the wind, dogged by unremitting hunger - with brief periods of respite when his starvation is temporarily quelled with what little money he makes flogging the odd article to a local newspaper. In his drastically weakened state, on the verge of physical collapse, unable to eat without throwing up, only able to write in patches, the young writer begins to lose his reason, his irrational state of mind marked by wild impulses and violent mood swings as he slips into paranoia and despair. A relationship with a girl quickly fizzles out and in the end he leaves the city.While the novel gives an account of the young writer's sufferings and privations, his desperate struggle with hunger and hardship, occupying a plane of existence on the edge of starvation, themes of loneliness and alienation lie at the heart of it - the young writer completely isolated, virtually existing inside his own head, his introspection developing thought-patterns grotesquely magnifying trivial events out of all proportion, manifested in bizarre and preposterous behaviour. Highly recommended!