Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #173333 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Synopsis
Set in Oslo, this is a compelling trip into the mind of a young writer, driven by starvation to extremes of euphoria and despair. Whilst never quite falling into the abyss of suicide, Hamsun's narrator is forever on the verge of losing it.

Customer Reviews

An impressive novel
Knut Hamsun's novel tells the story of a young writer living in Christiana (nowadays Oslo) in Norway at the end of the 19th century. As it was extremely difficult for him to make a living from the few newspaper articles he managed to sell for a few kroner, he constantly lived on the verge of famine. Very often his psyche was badly affected by numerous refusals, hopes built up and knocked down so that he often lost courage. His extreme poverty forced the writer to live in rooms "not furnished in a way appropriate to intellectual effort" which also had a negative impact on his literary muse.
Hamsun never mentions his hero's name; it is as if he were a perpetual foreigner in his surroundings and his hunger transforms him into a sociopath: he is famished not because he cannot find a job in Christiana but because he is stubbornly determined to live from his writing, although he is just a beginner. His loneliness is the consequence both of his constant striving for food and for inspiration and his inability to make friends because he has no patience for others. Another interesting aspect is the young writer's ambiguous feeling towards God whom he both fears and curses for his fate, but destiny neither provides him with inspiration nor allows him to die; he is constantly saved by temporary deliverance - an editor accepts one of his articles, he is paid five kroner and he is saved for a few days until the ordeal begins again. The hero is so estranged from his environment that he emerges almost lifeless. He has no plans for the future, expecting some happy chance, almost always resigned and melancholy. The young writer is nothing but a chain of moods changing constantly, often without consistency. He doubts the existence of God, yet he prays to Him. He loves yet at the same time belittles this love. He strives for literary revelation yet he is frivolous in his approach to literature.
The power of "Hunger" is that doubt found in Hamsun its narrator par excellence.

hope despair hunger and madness
A truly magical book. So very ahead of its time, the structure writing and stream of conciousness of the protaganist sit so well against the period backdrop, with the obvious increase in potential hardships and authoritarian behaviour.
strange though it sounds, hunger is really quite life afirming in some strange way, moreso than those that follow in the existentialist mode.
certainly one for the aspiring journalist to ponder.
much more readble than kafka.

Truth is selfless subjectivity
Published in 1890, "Hunger" represents a breakthrough from traditional romantic European writing. Influenced by Dostoievsky and Nietszche, and anticipating Kafka, Joyce, and Camus, Hamsun creates a novel with intense personal (partially autobiographical) narration (using first and third person), developing on the theme of alienation and artistic obsession. It represents Hamsun's masterpiece in his first literary production stage, in which social/political issues are of no concern, only the individual and his stream of consciousness.

It is a plot less novel, the setting is Christiana (now Oslo), and the main character is a starving, homeless young journalist, with a mercurial personality. His reactions have no middle term, he moves from extreme joy to acute depression, from arrogance to humility, on the verge of irrationality. It clearly reflects the author's early poverty, his pathological passion with aesthetical beauty, and an enormous driving force to perfect his concept that "language must resound with all the harmonies of music." "Hunger" anticipates Freud and Jung in their understanding of human nature, and creates a new literally hero, the alienated mind.

Of Norwegian nationality, Knut Hmsun won the Nobel Price for Literature in 1920. In real life he was ostracized by his countrymen and the literary community as a result of his radical individualism, and political/social views. Yes, Hamsun was a convicted Nazi, friend of Hitler and Goebbels, an advocate of the "pure" race (Jews should be expelled from Europe, Blacks should be returned to Africa), and he applauded German invasion of Norway. Needless to say, when WWII was over, he dearly paid the price: Imprisonment, confiscation, and poverty. When he died at the age of 92 (1952) he showed no remorse and held firmly to his beliefs.

The question arises: to what extent can we separate art from the artist, creation from the creator? Maybe another Nobel Laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer, himself a Jew, can answer this question for us when he states: "the whole school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun."