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    Hunger
    Ebook245 pages4 hours

    Hunger

    By Knut Hamsun

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    About this ebook

    One of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate artistic expression. The book brilliantly probes the psychodynamics of alienation and obsession, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control to the edge of self-destruction. Hamsun influenced many of the major 20th-century writers who followed him, including Kafka, Joyce and Henry Miller. Required reading in world literature courses, the highly influential, landmark novel will also find a wide audience among lovers of books that probe the "unexplored crannies in the human soul" (George Egerton).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateJan 16, 2013
    ISBN9780486120171
    Author

    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.

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    Reviews for Hunger

    4/5

    957 ratings46 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A strange, lyrical book that presents hunger as a gateway to madness.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      This is an older novel, written in the 1930's or thereabouts. It was originally in Norwegian, and the author later won a Nobel Prize for Growth of the Soil, which I haven't started yet.All the reviews said this was a disturbing novel of isolation. It was, and is, fascinating.The protagonist, writing in the first person, describes his life as a writer who has suffered hunger and starvation long enough that his mental faculties are injured beyond repair (it would seem). He writes occasionally for a newspaper, makes enough to get by a few days if his story is purchased, or goes without food for days if it doesn't get picked up. The malnourishment causes a variety of problems, from extreme mood swings to paranoia to hallucinations. He takes to chewing on wood shavings, then stones, then a piece of his jacket pocket to try and defy the hunger. When he does eat, he is usually ill from the food. He gets to a point where he visualizes taking a bite out of his hand to eat, and does so. He comes out of his trance when he does, but it shows how far out of reality he became. A few times he either finds money or is given some by a benevolent person; he simply can't accept this, and gives it away.The insanity is beyond anything I imagined. Perhaps because it's told in first person style, where every thought and inkling is described and explored. The people he harasses, the fights he starts, his visions of his own talent (highly inflated) and his paranoia are frightening. He has tremendous pride, not wanting to take help from others, even when he hasn't eaten for days. One shopkeeper, realizing his situation, actually pretends to make a mistake and gives him too much change...rather than take this for food, he gives it to a more 'impoverished' soul than him. It's not that he's selfless, far from it. His pride consumes him. He can't bear to imagine anyone thinking badly of him, even when he is selling off his clothing and the buttons on his coat. He even has the opportunity to make use of a homeless shelter to get food and a bed, and he refuses rather than to look bad.Physically, the starvation manifests itself in losing his hair in clumps, a peeling skin rash and raw skin from his dirty clothes rubbing his skin, blackened nails, lost teeth, and a chronic dizziness and fever.I was amazed in that while he did write to earn money, he never seemed to try and seriously find a job. And he never seemed to consider stealing, which would have occurred to me before I would be chewing on stones. Again, it wasn't out of honor, it was about his perception of what others would think of him, and he wanted to be thought of as honorable, even though he wasn't. He was truly isolated. No family is mentioned, his only friends are actually acquaintances that avoid him because of his strange behavior and pathetic appearance, exactly what he was hoping to avoid. I couldn't help but wonder what kind of child he was (okay, I know it's fictional but I still think this way) and what made him so prideful and vain. It's said that everyone has a story they tell themselves about themselves. How they account for their choices and actions in their own head, and how they justify or condemn themself. In this I wondered, since I could clearly see the story he was telling himself, and how inaccurate it was from his reality, how far off is my perception of myself? Is the way I think as completely out of touch? Is my inner voice as flawed and stubborn as his?
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Strange, compelling book. Young Norwegian writer starves in Kristiana.But, the weirdest thing about this edition is the appendix, by its Norwegian translator. This consists of an angry, academically detailed documentation of his outrage at a previous translation. I know nothing of any of this, I'm prepared to believe him. But why is it included here?
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      I agree with Janice Elliott, Sunday Telegraph - `a great book'. Stream of consciousness, rant, madness etc etc.
    • 5/5
      ‘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
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      So realistic, I thought I was starving. Very compelling.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      Definitely a stream-of-consciousness narrative. Hard to follow only because the protagonist is hard to follow. You want him to succeed, and you believe he can succeed, but he doesn't. Frustrating and disheartening.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      A slim volume, a novel about an artist who is literally starving, effecting a rare glimpse into an obsessive mind. Hamsun won a Nobel prize in the 30's, but his reputation has been tarnished for his Nazi sympathies during the second world war. This is a worthwhile book.
    • 3/5
      Charles Bukowski said that this was one of his favorite books, and old Charles didn't give praise lightly. The book was certainly ahead of its time, reading like something from the height of modernism, rather than the 1890s. I understand why Bukowski like it. He always held to the ideal of the poor, mad artist and this book is a psychological study of a poor, insane writer. The protagonist is so irrational and insane at times it's just irritating. Was he insane because he was poor and hungry, or was he poor and hungry because he was insane (and in my opinion an idiot)? I don't know. I respect the book, but it's not a favorite of mine.
    • 5/5
      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?
    • 4/5
      I really don't know what I think about this Norwegian classic by Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun. Even my rating is a bit of a guess!I found this very easy to read and the effects of extreme poverty on the main character were fascinating to behold. But I found this unnamed character very odd in places. I could understand to some extent his pride leading him to doing some things that could be seen as foolish but some of his pranks were bizarre.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      I'm sorry but I disagree with what seems to be the general consensus on this book. I read the 1920 edition with a translation by George Egerton and that may very well be the problem. A translated piece of fiction is subject to the skill and finesse of the translator, and perhaps the person to blame here is not the author but the translator.In any case, I found Hunger to be a bit meandering and frustrating. I don't really know what the Norwegian society of the time described in the novel was like but it certainly did not have much to recommend for it. The scenes where the author describes chewing on wood shavings to dampen his pangs of hunger and where he throws up a perfectly healthy (and necessary) meal because his body can't process the food are almost depressing.I found some of the protagonists actions difficult to understand, for example why doesn't he just beg? Or steal? Or engage in some sort of manual labor? Why is there not any friend our relative who will throw some scraps his way? Surely the concept of dying from hunger must have been a rare event in nineteenth century Norway? Or was it?Another hindrance in relating to the book was the fact that I have no idea what "half a soverign" or half a crown could buy in that time. The romance half way through the novel also did not quite make much sense to me, did I miss something there?The one thought the book forced was about the role of food and money and the bigger question of why we work. Do we work only to put food in our bellies? Certainly not. But the first requirement that must be met with the fruit of our labor is the filling of our bellies. The book however doesn't really make that (or any other) case with much conviction. The dénouement is also almost anticlimactic.I was left unimpressed. Not recommended.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      The beauty of humiliation lies in these pages read a master at work .
    • 4/5
      Translated from Norwegian by Sverre Lyngstad. This classic was written in 1890 and is a simple story about a struggling but talented writer who often finds himself homeless, and starving for days on end. The writing is astonishing, and it is a joy to read.Much of the book was poignant, but the brashness and creativity of the affable protagonist also produced many laugh-out-loud moments. And then quite honestly, the young man's pride and obsession with being honourable and honest infuriated me at times – it caused him such grief. In spite of the dark subject matter, this was a light, quick read, and it is a book I recommend highly.A note on the author: The 150th celebration of Knut Hamsun’s birth was widely celebrated in Norway in 2009. Many negative things have been said about his political leanings, but I was interested to learn that he had virtually no education and at 12, lived with an uncle who beat him regularly. He escaped from this man’s clutches as soon as he could and took to the road, doing menial jobs to survive, often experiencing virtual starvation during that time. So the book may be somewhat autobiographical. A wonderful read.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      I approached this influential work with high expectations, and i was not disappointed. The novel is raw, stark, spare -- the effect is visceral. It is psychological realism at its best. We follow a short phase in the life of an impoverished but talented young writer in the streets of Christiana (Oslo) in the late 19th century, who is reduced by his condition to borderline madness. Indeed it seemed that his flashes of brilliance are occasioned by extreme starvation when delirium brings on inspiration and creativity. We witness his misadventures at finding work or something to eat, his humorous encounters with some characters, his sometimes infuriatingly schizophrenic behavior, his spinning of a small world around him rushing from heights of ecstatic revelry and hope to pityingly low depths of self-pity and mockery, and back, always in a mad dash. His is a complex character -- irritatingly self-possessed and proud but also generous to a fault, literally giving away the last shirt on his back. In an unforgettable passage, he challenges God for the injustice of withholding opportunities from a toiling, hardworking, and well-intentioned person as he. We feel his isolation, his torment, self-deception, his caprices, his small joys, his passions, his dignity. He is a man destined to write, and he lives because he writes. With such themes, the novel could easily have been dark and depressing, but it is not. There is plenty of comic relief and the mood is exhilarating, fast-paced, rebellious. The character reminded me of Dostoevky's Raskolnikov but without the drama. Definitely a must-read.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      written in a straightforward way, in the first person, it ends up being liberating - whether you're going to eat or not brings reality into focus - cuts to the chase
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      Hamsun got mixed up with that blighter in the extreme, Hitler, this has doubtless harmed his reputation. Reader. don't let this prevent you from looking at Hamsun. He is well worth the effort.