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!

The inevitable nature of Tangen's demise, the encroaching insanity, the self-fulfilling spiral of hunger and poverty and the loss of acceptable society behaviour is so tangible at times that i wanted to look away from the book, stop reading on, not see the painful conclusions that i knew were coming. But turning away is somewhat difficult because you want to understand and sympathise with this character, at once mad and yet so, so very fallible and human.

Steppenwolf is a similar exercise, but i found this eminently more reader-friendly. Tiring and somewhat draining but an absorbing and worthwhile read nevertheless.

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.