Glad I read HUNGER but...
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The unnamed narrator in HUNGER is isolated, impulsive, self-destructive, excessively self-critical, and nearly homeless. While his plight is surely pitiful and unnerving, this novel certainly offers special rewards to readers who believe that mighty books present compulsive narrators, viewing the world from their hidey-holes in garbage cans or the equivalent. No wonder the introduction to my edition was written by Paul Auster!
Fortunately, Hamsun guides his narrator into society. Here, we thank the women, who flirt with the narrator and accept him as a boarder despite his penury and borderline mental illness. Their influence and timely charity help him break his syndrome of perfectionism, self-mortification, arrogance, and remorse, placing him on the docks in Christiania where "... all the workaday life around me, the loading chants, the noise of the winches, the constant rattling of the iron chains, was incompatible with the moody, self absorbed..." As the Silhouettes sang in 1957, "GET A JOB shanna nah nahh shanna nanna nahh (bah-doop)...
For the record, I'd say other writers have presented the marginal and desperate lives of aspiring young writers with much greater complexity and reward than Hamsun. Charles Bukowski for example, allows his Henry Chinaski to risk just as much as this unnamed narrator. But in Factotum: A Novel, Chinaski is funny while living a life with just as much sad integrity.
The afterword in my edition (Robert Bly) says the story of HUNGER is highly autobiographical. Surely, he knows. But this novel also strikes me as a brilliantly intuitive assemblage of weirdness, especially when you consider Hamsun wrote HUNGER in 1890. But this cluster of self-destructiveness has also become very familiar in our world, in part due to Psychology 101 classes. So, I ask: Is this a case where the clinician has actually surpassed the novelist?
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An absolute 'must read'!!
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Intense! Moving! Unforgettable! - a few resonant 'power words' which could help me to describe Mr. Knut Hamsun's Hunger to some extent, but they do little to fully encapsulate my innermost feelings about this novel. Quite simply Hunger, is one of the most powerful books I've ever read, in any genre; whether fictional or factual, and given that I've read countless biographical accounts relating to some of history's most harrowing events, this is quite a statement to make, but it is one that I wholly stand by.
Stunning in its delivery, Hunger is one of the few books that has the ability to truly touch your soul. What makes the novel so intense is not the storyline; for the most part the story is devoid of plot. Rather the sense of sympathy and desperation one feels for the main character (a struggling writer on a psychological roller-coaster ride, stricken by poverty, who always seems as though he is about to draw his final breath), is, for me, the novel's crowning glory. This mechanism of `survival doubt' is superlatively engineered into the story by Mr. Hansum. There are times, usually at the start of a new `chapter' when the writer's survival seems assured (he himself proclaims many times that his latest work will be the one that end his dificulties). Inevitably however, the character's situation diminishes, and the reader's confidence can do nothing but diminish along with it, until, through some fortune turn of events, the main player draws himself back, if usually only temporarily, from the `abyss'.
As intense as Hunger is (and it really is intense at times, with the writer's moods elevating and lowering as often as the paragraphs change), I also found the novel to be quite humourous in parts. The writer's `unnecessary' and continual bickerings with people he meets, is only surpassed in humour by the intense arguments the writer often has with himself, which more often than not, involves some form of self harm. In essence this personal self loathing is of course a sign of utter madness and desperation, the mark of a madman, but one cannot help but raise a smile when the main character is found in the middle of the street bawling at himself, with onlookers staring aghast.
The writer's obstinate stupidity also makes for a number of humourous scenes, such as when he declares his homelessness at a police station, falsifies his name and circumstances, and consequently misses out on a desperately needed meal. Humour can also be found in the unrealistic value that the main character quite often places on his own personal artifacts. Of course in desperate times especially, one would be inclined to place an inflated value on their personal effects, and Hamsun is primarily illustrating this fact. However it still brings a note of humour to the proceedings, especially when the character attempts to pawn various belongings.
I'm well aware there is controversy surrounding the author of this work, (Mr. Hamsun evolved with quite repungent notions of Nazi idealism), but that is irrelevant to this novel and should not, in my opinion, be brought into consideration. Hunger stands on its own as one of the finest psychological works ever written. It is a book that I will invariably think about often. It is a book that has well and truly touched my soul
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Im Hungry!
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Outstanding book, This book sounds depressing from the back cover and maybe is in parts but humour is spread throughout this book too. I loved this book and the main character who has some issues! lol This book inspired Bukowski and I can see why! Oh and make sure you have food beside you when you read this book, The detailed descriptions of how hungry the main character gets made me soooo hungry and I had to eat while reading...enjoy
Other books you may like if you liked this:Ham on Rye/Ask the Dust
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KNUT HAMSUN Hunger Picador 1976
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Astonishingly this novel was written in 1890, but might easily be a contender for the earliest piece of literary modernism. In a place that sits between Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard on the one hand, and the existentialism of the inter-war years, it is very much a curiosity.
The nameless narrator around whose thoughts the novel revolves stumbles aimlessly through the streets of Christiania, half starved, vomiting every time he eats something, shouting spuriously at policemen and prostitutes, trying to find the inspiration for his next literary effort that might earn him the elusive ten krone that he craves.
Chewing buttons and eating wood shavings, this could have become a comic parody, if it hadn't been the first of its kind. But it is also bleak;
'If I had been behaving like a reasonable man, I would have gone home and lain down quietly a long time ago, just given up.'
Miserable fun.
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Stunning
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This is without a doubt my absolute favourite book of all time, and I can't really pinpoint why.
There is no real plot to this book- it is a novel about a struggling writer, and his day to day business. What makes this book special though is the way it is written. It is disturbing in places, as his hunger-invoked insanity is described, but the character is so pitiful you just want to help him.
It's a short book, and one I've read countless times and couldn't be without. I've lent this out and had to buy another copy because I couldn't wait to get it back!
I think it evokes a lot of emotion in the reader, in that you desperately want things to be alright for him, and for there to be a happy ending.
It's a stunning book, and beautifully written, a true piece of art!
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