Hunger

It’s telling that the narrator in Hunger is unnamed, as that choice strongly symbolizes the psychic destruction this character faces throughout the book. Lacking a name, the character lacks a degree of substance, becoming something less than a full character. The lack of a name also suggests the character’s social displacement, being outside of the routines of a life in which it is important to have a name and to be known to others. The latter displacement may be self-imposed to a degree, but it is amplified by the narrator’s actual hunger and the actions it compels him to take.

Food also plays a dual role both, literally, as the sustenance that the narrator needs and, figuratively, as a sustenance for the soul or for the self. show more The lack of food (in the literal sense) causes the narrator to lose his energy, his hair, his health. The figurative loss of food causes the loss of relationships, dignity, and self-worth and that a different. As the narrator laments at a moment when he considers begging for money or food, “you’re too poor to afford a conscience” (82). This is one of those moments when it becomes clear that it costs money to be human and to keep the respect and dignity that goes with it.

The narrator comes to recognize that being poor and hungry and doing what it would take to meet basic needs requires a compromise on the sense of dignity and self-respect that he connects with himself as a writer. Getting past his immediate needs requires submission to those needs, to appear needy, wanting, and willing to open to charity. Doing so would require a sacrifice of dignity, independence, and perhaps a sense of self-worth. And he fights this apparent debasement, which only allows his actual hunger to ravage him further, devouring him, literally and figuratively.

There is a scene in Book 2 where the narrator, in the depths of his hunger and poverty takes delight in folding a piece of paper to look like a money holder. It is empty, of course, a reflection of his poverty, but his delight comes in throwing the paper / his poverty onto the ground, displacing it from him, and in tempting someone to pick it up and take it onto themselves. This is one of a few acts of retaliation about accepting poverty and hunger as a mark of his sense of self. There are also the narrators’ inexplicable acts of magnanimity, giving away money that he needs, giving away possessions, making promises to help others before helping himself, refusing charity when given. In the abstract, all of these acts of self-sabotage seem exasperating, but they also appear to be preserving of the self at the expense of the body.

There is plenty of think about here. This one will stay with me a while. show less

With its rambling, stream-of-consciousness style and plotless structure, Knut Hamsun's influential Hunger is a difficult book to grapple with. But when you consider the story begins with a line that describes Christiania (modern-day Oslo) as a "strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him" and ends with the protagonist leaving the city on a ship, defeated and demoralised, you can begin to identify a framework that allows you to assess the novel.

An aspiring writer, poverty-stricken, hungers after bread to fill his belly, a few coins to put a roof over his head for a night, and for inspiration to feed the pieces he writes, which he hopes will allow him to pursue a financially-secure life as a writer. Undergoing an show more increasingly severe asceticism and anti-social madness in order to preserve his creative and moral purity, our protagonist manages to scrabble together enough coins and consecutive lines of prose to feel like he is heading in the right direction. A series of events in which he sees people behave crudely – including a lead-on and then rejection from a desirable woman (who, in an inadvertent act of cruelty, then deigns to give him charity in a way he cannot refuse) – cause him to lose whatever shred of fibre remained that was keeping him together, and he takes a crappy job aboard a ship leaving the city. The strange city has left its mark on him.

It is a powerful concept and it works well enough, even if you really have to think and scrutinize before the novel's lights become apparent. The relentless sequence of mundane conversations and day-to-day activities began to wear on me, and I yearned for a bit of plot, or even some abstract insight or philosophising to frame some of the novel's themes and intentions. The book burrows deep, but rather than a clear-sighted lance that strikes deep with purpose, it is like a blind worm that has dug itself in circles and is only wallowing in the depths because it does not know the way back to the surface. Tragic and fascinating, but quite a bit of hard work. show less

Hunger by Norwegian author Knut Hamsun is a novel originally published in 1890. It is a story driven by the author’s interior commentary, at times angry, at times frustrated, full of despair, exasperation and, of course, hunger. We follow the author as he wanders around the city, living in extreme poverty. At times homeless, we remain firmly planted in the author’s head and learn what happens to the mind when living on the edge, fighting for survival.

He writes of the merciless gnawing in his chest which to me, meant that he knows what it is really like to starve which made for an uncomfortable read. I was disappointed when he would turn down food or money through his pride, and heartbroken, after going without for awhile, he gets a show more proper meal but can’t keep it down. This living on the edge of survival seemed to awaken dark forces and strange thoughts which was disturbing. The main character is in constant conflict with himself as his thoughts bounce from the rational to the irrational.

Basically a work of psychological self-study written in a stream-of-consciousness style in sharp and colorful prose. Hunger was a strong and creative read. show less

You have to wonder if there weren't some dusty jars of Essene pottery circulating among the North Baltic olde curiosity shoppes in the mid-nineteenth century. Maybe the surfacing collection of some long dead Viking marauder who wandered past Sicily into the Suez. In which event, it's but a small step to suppose that those clay containers harbored verses of an ultimate lost Gnostic gospel - that of Saint Lucifer - and that they came light, simultaneously, to Hamsun, Dostoyevsky and others.

This would explain the aching spiritual commonality of Ivan Karamazov and the narrator of Hamsun's Hunger. Both characters are manifestations of Lucifer. No, not the horn, tails, and red suited guy with a spear descended from some Persian grotesque. I'm show more thinking rather of the light bearer from Paradise Lost. The angel who fell. The angel who loved God but loved his own pride more. The angel whose greatest pain in Hell is not the fire but the loss of God.

It seems at times as though Hunger's narrator is both Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor. He resembles the Grand Inquisitor as he must have been before his cynical epiphany of "miracle, mystery, and authority", a yearning novitiate, disappointed with God's apparent absence from human affairs, and about to take matters into his own hands.

And he resembles Ivan, about to split into his double. Time after time, Hunger's protagonist abruptly switches gears and twists a moment of connection or tenderness into a "trick", a sadistic thrust to test....take your pick -the love, sincerity, humanity, wit?...of the people he encounters. It seems like it would take only an uptick of a degree or two in his persistent fever to produce a visible malevolent Doppelganger.

It is a profound irony that humility is usually packaged with great strength, and pride with great weakness. Hunger's narrator never overcomes his weakness. At best he wrestles it to a stalemate. A kind of Purgatory. And in that famed nursery of dead children, he never gets to know the true name or nature of God or even of his beloved. He merely has his pride, his sense of loss, and an aching construct of his fevered imagination "Ylayali". But she knows him, even without a name, and like Christ with his embrace at the close of the "Inquisitor" scene, whispers "something... like 'I love you anyway'". show less

"I had to fast. I can’t do anything else. Because I couldn’t find a food which tasted good to me. If I had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else."

...says the titular character of Hamsun fan Franz Kafka's A Hunger Artist. Which reads a bit like one possible interpretation of Hamsun's Hunger - but only one of many.

Hunger is a powerful thing, as our nameless narrator finds out as he drifts through late-19th-century Oslo, starving. Or possibly starving himself. Because as poor as he is, there seems to be either something deliberate or something pathological behind it: he constantly sabotages himself. If he has money, he gives it away show more and starves. If someone offers him money, he puts his nose up and lies that he has everything he needs. He's constantly acting (or telling us he's acting) like a rich nobleman even when he's dirt poor. Why? Since it's all told from his perspective, and he's clearly not all that reliable, we're left to making up our own explanations. Is he too hung up on false ideas of honour, conscience and goodness, or just not true enough to them? Is he representative of a society needing new, harsher ideals (reading it with the foreknowledge that Hamsun went on to support the Nazi occupation of Norway is a tiny bit unsettling) or one needing more compassion (our narrator as Prince Myshkin in a city full of emotionally and physically starved people)? Is he mentally ill? Is he the only sane person in a world of people needing to wake up? Is he Job unto God, Man unto lack of God, bourgeousie unto poverty, poverty unto oppression, art unto prosaicness, what?

And then there's the city he walks through and the people in it. Which even through his fevered, dizzy, and obviously not completely sane eyes comes across as almost hyper-real. And in the middle our narrator, soaking it all in, deliberately taking all the shit upon himself, deliberately going without so that... what? To what purpose? For what greater (or smaller) good?

It's off-putting. It's engrossing. It's hilarious. It's crushingly depressing. And like hunger itself, it's singular; it's a question that's only permanently put to rest by death. You can't ignore it for long, you can't cure it; it devours, and the more you put into it, the more it howls after more.

Hunger is a powerful thing. show less

[Hunger] is about a starving writer who is, you guessed it!, hungry. I loved it. The main character is a young man trying to make it as a writer, but he is so poor and unable to find work that pays, that he is literally starving. Instead of writing, he spends much of his time looking for shelter and sustenance, or walking around trying to take his mind off of his hunger. In between, he works on his writing and sometimes comes up small sums of money, either for his work or by accident. He's obviously educated and I wonder why he had no support system at all. It's also clear that some of the people he interacts with have no idea just how close he is to starving to death.

Not much happens in this book. The main character interacts with a show more few people, but largely the book takes place inside his head and stomach. In some ways, when I reflect back on it, I have a hard time putting my finger on why I liked it so much. I think it's because it was honest, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and because the main character is both maddening and admirable. show less

Hunger is a beautifully frustrating psychological study of self-sabotage in the face of misfortune. Despite this, one familiar with the issues of poverty and mental illness will hopefully have some empathy for the protagonist. I recommend this novel to people interested in those topics, as well as to fans of Franz Kafka.

I had never heard of Knut Hamsun before reading this novel. Apparently he eventually became a controversial figure due to his profound Nazi sympathies. Personally I did not detect that political influence in this novel, which was released decades before the Nazi takeover of Germany.

Note that there is a sexual assault scene in the third part of the novel. Also, I do not speak Norwegian and thus cannot vouch for the show more quality of the translation by George Egerton. show less