Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #515353 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-27
• Original language: Norwegian
• Binding: Paperback
• 222 pages

From the Back Cover
Knut Hamsun's Hunger has come to be regarded as one of the major modernist novels, anticipating and influencing much fiction that was to follow, from Joyce and Kafka to Camus and Kelman.

Hunger is a compelling trip into the mind of a young writer who is driven by starvation to constantly fluctuating extremes of euphoria and despair. It is a study of the psychological hinterlands - the very edges of experience - where few writers have the courage to tread.

Customer Reviews

A Hunger Artist.
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!

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."

Henrik Who?
In 1890, Knut Hamsun, a man who included on his CV tram-conducting in New York and stock-taking in Lom, northern Norway, unleashed his first novel on an unsuspecting and complacent literary world.

Simply, it altered the direction of modern fiction.

This short novel marks the end of the grand Victorian novel, which had reached its existential capacity with Dostoyevsky, and greeted the dawn of modernism. Without Hamsun's first four novels, it can be argued that we wouldn't have had Kafka, Joyce or Hesse as we came to know them.

The novel itself charts the ebb and flow of thought and impulse through a central protagonaist (Tangen). I think this is the first recorded form of stream-of-consciousness, albeit in a less sophisticated form than it became some forty years later.

In the summer of 1890, Hamsun toured Norway, giving lectures on literature and what it should be. The literary climate was such that Ibsen was courted as one of the greatest European writers (no argument there) but Hamsun felt his work was only so much veiled metaphor and said nothing about the individual and the irrational side of humanity.

At the lecture in Christiania, sat in the front row as Hamsun tore into Ibsen's foibles, was Henrik Ibsen.

Ibsen's next play was "The Master Builder". A play which marked the onset of his last stylistic period, which was based upon the individual and human nature, rather than the social dramas which had projected him to fame.

Ibsen never won the Nobel prize for literature. Hamsun did.

And whilst this is a good book, it's not nearly as good as "Mysteries", his 1892 masterpiece, or "On Overgrown Paths", his final work.

Actually, I just urge you to read Hamsun in any form you find.