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Hunger: A Novel

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Knut Hamsun's *Hunger* is a powerful study of a man too intelligent and too sensitive for his own good--or anyone else's for that matter. He's a younger version of Dostoyevsky's "underground man" driven by Poe's "imp of the perverse." Living hand-to-mouth, always down to his last kroner, reeling dizzy from hunger, Hamsun's narrator, a freelance journalist and would-be litterateur, is part crank, part brilliant eccentric whose hypersensitivity and untimely observations of the shortcomings of human nature seem to insure his failure among the society he loathes.

The victim as well as the author of his own misfortunes, the hero--properly speaking, the anti-hero--of *Hunger* can't even stumble into good fortune without somehow sabotaging himself. He pushes himself to indulge in the most offensive and inappropriate public behavior so compulsively you begin to wonder if he isn't insane, especially inasmuch as he often engages himself in conversation and goads himself to self-destruction as if he were really talking to and arguing with another person altogether. He even manages to spoil the beginnings of a most improbable love-affair with a woman who finds herself intrigued by such a strange and haunted man.

Is his poverty, his periodic homelessness, his ever-present hunger a consequence of his schizoid behavior or is his schizoid behavior a consequence of his hunger, grinding poverty, and brutal degradation at the hands of a society that doesn't recognize the geniuses among it? The question is left open to debate and that's one of the things that makes *Hunger* such an endlessly compelling novel.

By articulating such questions and outlining the contours of alienation, Hamsun paints a bleak landscape where genius struggles between mediocrity and madness and where each of us is not much more than a ham sandwich away from being swallowed up by utter destitution.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
Thus Auden ("In memory of WB Yeats").

Hamsun's hero in Hunger is restless,provocative,insolent,egotistical,given to swoops of joyful lyricism and the utmost humiliation and despair as he begs,borrows,starves,lies and cheats his way through his days in Kristiana in the late 19th century. His moods are always changing like the weather,laughing, shouting,talking to himself, crying, angry.His bouts of starvation empty and hollow him out,make him hallucinate,give him delusions of writing the next masterpiece,a refutation of Kant in 3 parts,which he doesn't do,but it gives his feverish mind a goal.The main poles of his existence are the Editor,his Landlord,the Baker and the Pawnshop.Not forgetting the policeman.

His lies become as truthful to him as the truth and he acts them out. God both exists for him to rail at, or doesn't exist. Andreas Tangen(we only learn his name half way through) most definitely does exist! He starves for the next crust of bread, while searching for work,he also starves for inspiration to write. He swings between pride and humility. His pride will not allow him to take money when he needs it, and makes him charitable when he can't afford it.He pawns the clothes off his back to give the money to another wretch.He perverts and distorts the Christian ethic, and, as in Doestoyevsky's Notes from the Underground,has hopes of gaining salvation through degradation and suffering.

His attention is seized by everything,riding on a chain of moods through the back streets of Kristiana,'flies and gnats stuck to the paper...I blew on them to make them go away,then blew harder and harder,but it was no use. The little pests lean back and make themselves heavy,putting up such a struggle that their thin legs bend.' He is given over to bouts of elation while writing. He sucks on stones when he is hungry. He wanders aimlessly in Hamsun's plotless novel,his poverty becomes a lodestone of wealthy perceptions.Every now and then the Editor takes pity and gives him money for an article,which lasts a few days,then the starvation all begins again.

Without the stub of a pencil he is lost.His clothes are thread-bare and shabby. He plays pranks on women to embarrass them.He has fun at other people's expense.He invents new words and new names. He is at one with animate and inanimate nature in her changing cycles.We do not get the sociology of hunger as in Orwell(`Down and Out in Paris and London') but we get the physiology and the effects on the unconscious. Tangen is an aristocrat of the spirit,grandiose and self-elevating. He moves and annoys us.This novel explores the dark nether regions of the human mind in its overture tothe 20th century.This masterpiece,the birth-pangs of a genius.Robert Bly's translation
is energetic and poetic,if not always technically accurate.

I picked up Hunger because I am a fan of Charles Bukowski's writing, and he mentions several times in his works that Knut Hamsun is his favorite author. After finishing Hunger, I understand why - its main character is very real, intensely psychological, living through what he must, learning what he has to learn to heal some broken part of himself. I now realize Bukowski took these themes for his work and made them his own. In the excellent afterword to this edition (must reading), Robert Bly says "...Hunger is a cathedral. It is a cathedral because the whole novel is a resonating chamber for an unknown part of the personality." The central focus of Hunger is precisely what is not there - the part of the main character's personality that makes him do the things he does, the unconscious. Where do the impulses of the unconscious come from, and what do they say about us and about the times in which we live?

Written in 1890, Hunger was a new kind of novel for the 20th century, later influencing Hemingway, Saramago, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Camus, and many others. Hunger is not symbolic. The main character is really hungry as he wanders the streets of Christiana (Oslo) with little in his pockets but a pencil nub and a few sheets of paper on which to write another article he hopefully can sell to the newspaper for a few kroner. He goes for days without eating, writes feverishly, wanders the streets at all times of day and night, contemplates eating his own pockets, tries to pawn the buttons off his own coat, sells some articles, is OK for a while, and then starves again. At times the protagonist seems to lapse into insanity, giving what little he has away and seemingly subverting his own efforts. At other times he appears to be a genius. In the words of Samuel Beckett, this is a type of writing that "admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else."

Hunger's unnamed main character is drawn from Hamsun's own 10 years of being down and out on the streets of Christiana. Hamsun's character was new and shocking because he trusts and obeys the impulses of his unconscious with no judgment, hysteria, or self pity, in direct contradiction to the mainstream literature of the day. Robert Bly states that "there is a sense throughout the entire novel that his starvation was somehow planned by his unconscious - that somehow his unconscious has chosen suffering as a way for some part of him to get well." He goes on to say that "His obedience to the unconscious, even at the cost of physical suffering, is the right thing; it is the road of genius and learning."

In Hunger, we haunt the city streets with Hamsun, live in his mind, and never really leave. Highly recommended.

Knut Hamsun not only managed to touch the mind of the mad but he also delves into their stomach. This story of paranoia, compassion, and starvation is not one to be missed.

We follow the main character on his daily walks as he contemplates and frightens himself with the looks he receives from strangers, trying desperately to hold on to what little he has and yet find some way to make ends meet just enough to fill his stomach. Hunger is a painful novel in that you find yourself hoping for the best and finding that while your protagonist does as well he endlessly tortures himself. Wanting to simultaneously belong but be left alone we are torn through the painful extremes by a character for which there exists no middle ground.

Knut Hamsun invites us in for the short but worthwhile ride of Hunger, leaving the reader hungry for more and questioning everything they knew about the story by the time it has reached culmination.

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?

[Note: Nearly a hundred of my fiction reviews by great literary artists and others not so well known are now available in my book, "Novels and other Fictions." Get it at Amazon.]

I first read "Hunger" when I was in my twenties and I was stunned. It seemed such a tour de force of...something. I didn't know what it was, but to me it was authentic in a way that all literature should be. Hamsun's nameless hero was certifiably mad--crazy by almost any standard, yet he was sane I thought in his deliberate alienation from bourgeois society, from the relatively unfeeling and "dead" conventional ways of life that most people pursue. Rereading the novel some decades later I see his alienation not so much a deliberate choice but as one forced on him by his nature. He alienates himself from society because he believes he is superior and because he cannot help himself. Despite his abject poverty his greatest drive is to avoid losing face or what he thinks of as his honor.

Thus he would rather starve that steal; he would rather go without food than ask for money from people he knows since in doing so he would lose face. When he gets change from a five kroner note that isn't his he feels so guilty that he tosses the money at a street cake seller to show that he doesn't need to stoop to stealing to survive. He is above that. Yet later he demands that the cake seller give him cakes for his money, saying that he had paid in advance! Near the end after getting an anonymous ten kroner note from a messenger, he cries out that "This humiliation was the worst of all! Accepting ten kroner in beggar's alms without being able to throw them back to the giver...." (p. 223) He is the man who cannot beg regardless of how hungry he gets.

In this way we see the radical swings in his moods and mentality. These swings of apprehension, understand and feeling are at the very heart of the novel. What Hamsun has done is examine very minutely his own heart and soul during such times (he himself experienced years of hunger when in his twenties just before "Hunger" was published in 1890). And what he discovered was the most amazing heights of emotion followed quickly by the most extreme lows and then back again. He saw these swings as natural to the human condition, these fantasies of mind as real or even more real that the cobblestones of the city or the sun overhead. States of mind come from within but are triggered by some outside event; yet one might find joy in the absurdity of life, a quick sense of power and exhilaration from some small, even imagined, triumph over someone met in the street. One might feel oneself a great hero by refusing a meal ticket since no matter how hungry one is above charity.

Even though Hamsun's hero rants and raves like a lunatic and even though he goes around in dirty rags and sleeps in the street, the people of Christiania (now Oslo) treat him rather kindly. No one whiplashes him. The cops don't throw him in jail. No teenage boys beat him up for kicks as happens to some of today's homeless. Instead they laugh at him--not to his face, but off to the side, after he has wandered off. They pity him as does the whore with the veil, who in her pity finds some excitement in wanting to love this pathetic creature who tears his hair out, who will not take a job but insists on proving to himself and the world that he can make a living from his writing.

What makes this work as literature is that, although Hamsun's hero is maintaining his pride through petty acts and rationalizations and lies to himself, the reader can see (thanks to Hamsun's artistry) that the people around him are amused at his foolish and insane pride, the kind of pride that can...well, as Hamsun's hero himself says on page 227, "...a man can die, you know, from too much pride."

Why pride? From an evolutionary standpoint if a man loses honor or has no pride in himself then he is treated accordingly by his tribe. In dominance rank he is among the lowest and gets just the scraps of society; he gets few or no reproductive chances. Certainly no woman would want to marry him and have his children. We see this poignantly when he is asked by an acquaintance about the woman he was walking with who is a prostitute. To puff himself up he declares that he is her fiancé.

Although Hamsun's hero won't steal, he will lie. He allows himself to lie because he feels deep down that he is not lying. Once he gets his act together as a writer, the recognition and honor due him will come and, yes, such a woman and many others will want him to be their intended. It is all a matter of "gleaning his teeming brain" (to recall Keats).

But the hunger of this novel has a symbolic value as well. The artist must suffer; he must feel and experience extremes in order to have the emotional and experiential authority to be a great artist. Kafka, no doubt thinking of this novel, wrote a short story entitled, "A Hunger Artist," the title implying what Hamsun consciously or unconsciously believed: that the artist must hunger greatly before he can succeed.

And indeed that is exactly what Hamsun himself did. With the publication of this novel began a great career that propelled him to recognition as one of the great literary figures of the modern era, whose work became widely imitated. In 1920 not long after the publication of his novel, "Growth of the Soil," he was awarded the Noble Prize in literature.

(Note: nearly a hundred of my fiction reviews by great literary artists and others not so well known are now available in my book, "Novels and other Fictions." Get it at Amazon.)

Novels and other Fictions: reviews by

There is not much more that I could say that hasn't already been said about this book. Hamsun firmly believed in "unselfish inwardness" when constructing a character. This is not to be confused with over-exposure, as his unselfish approach gives the reader more insight into the character's mind and methodologies, their weaknesses and strengths, hopes, dreams, and the ultimate futility of who they are. Stunning! But I do disagree with the often-stated fact that this story is plotless - what is plot anyway? The movement of from point A to point B. Therefore, by that very definition, this story has plot in abundance. Can our protagonist survive himself when his hunger has consumed him, when his idealized view of himself is set to destroy him? Can he find any shred of incentive to make a change in his life, pull himself out of the mire, and actually achieve his greater self? Yes, this is a classic Ego versus humility story. Deeply and psychologically disturbing.

The writing is inspiring, uncluttered, fluid, and familiar. The scenery is spare, focusing on how the narrator's surroundings affect him more so than how they appear to him, and there is a great deal of action, albeit unconventional action. There are no dramatic chases, lives lost, bar brawls, or any other such things. The action occurs almost exclusively within the psyche of the narrator, and even benign everyday engagements on the street with shop owners and strangers become almost a duel of wills, replete with swordplay, each thought and word parrying the other. Even the subconscious arguments with his own ego become a battle to the death. Lastly, the metaphoric imagery: Not being able to control the vomiting as you gnaw on the scraped bones of your life. Brilliant!

The first person narrative allows you to dig in deeply and immerse yourself in the madness first hand, almost as if you were one of the narrator's alter egos, and you might often find yourself screaming back at him. An inspiring, joyful read. Joyful you say, since the story is nothing but suffering? Yes, self-awareness need not be an ugly disdainful process, even though it might appear that way most of the time, for when it is achieved, there is only joy that remains.

Big thing I need to shove out of the way: Hamsun's politics were crap, but his book's pretty good. That was a big part of Singer's shtick. Get over old writers having terrible opinions.

I don't want to talk about what I've read in the other reviews. A big part of that desire comes from my disagreement with what the other reviews say. I'm not saying I'm "right." I'm only saying I disagree.

"Hunger" was an exciting book. It does not feel like complaining--as someone wrote. It does not feel like a manifesto about an outsider/genius. The character is flawed, and he is flawed in many ways. The afterward to this edition mentions the "naturalist" influences on Hamsun. Those naturalistic ideas about people appear frequently. Most of the people in "Hunger" are both disgusting and interesting, are actually more interesting than many of the Zola characters I'm familiar with.

Hamsun's techniques that propel the story along are simple, straightforward and very layered and interesting. The narrator walks frequently. It sounds silly, but it makes the reader feel like the story is always going somewhere. The narrator's vitriol is a condition of his refusal to find real work. The animosity he feels and describes is understandable and relateable. It may result from my presently attending college and my not having a job, but the story feels simple, remarkable, "true."

Much of the story has a dreamlike quality about it. Hamsun's "subjectivity" creates this feeling. When describing a nail hole in a wall, he writes that it did not seem like an innocent hole. When he describes objects, people, scenes, he focuses on impressions...

Every part of the book depicts hunger, emotion, frustration, accurately. The whole book reads like a chase scene in an action movie.

Thumbs up and that bit.

This is the autobiographical writing how he suffered from starving. Hamsun was a master of self-portraying. He constantly introspected himself and depicted how hunger caused him to reach to insanity and desperation with a deep psychological touch. The hero of book is anonymous. He struggled to be a writer and was constantly starving. He tried to get a job to support himself, but it could not work. He had a chance to have a work at a grocery store as a book keeper, but his mental insatiability affected him to write his application with a wrong year. He was constantly worried about the rent. He tried to write articles to earn some money to keep him on going, but it could not work either. He could not afford to pay rent, so one day he spent at a jail. In the darkness of the cell, he invented the new word. He wanted to have some money to eat and tried to ask the editor chief to borrow some money, but the chief`s kindness made his mind change. He was ashamed of almost asking the money and felt exasperated how low he allowed himself being sunk. He ran the street as fast as he could carry his legs to punish himself. Starving made him commit a lot more mad things....
The first time I read Hunger, I was astonished by Hamsun's ability to perceive himself with deep physiological insight. Hunger gave a deep impact in my heart. I was indescribably moved by how he desperately wanted to be a writer. For me, Hunger is unshakably a masterpiece.

This translation is absolute garbage. Hamsun's rich language and unforgettable style have been washed away to make for an easier read. Nuances are erased and sentences made bland, time is distorted -- readers ignorant of the original are being robbed. This, like the Sverre Lyngstad translation, is a disgrace. I could translate better than this myself. Here's an example of his butchering, not chosen for being particularly bad; it is just a paragraph on the first page.

"I was lying awake in my attic room; a clock struck six somewhere below; it was fairly light already and people were beginning to move up and down the stairs. Over near the door, where my wall was papered with old issues of the Morning Times, I could make out a message from the Chief of Lighthouses, and just to the left of that an advertisement for fresh bread, showing a big, fat loaf: Fabian Olsen's bakery."

Here is the original (modernized spelling, and "at" written as "å"):

Jeg ligger våken på min kvist og hører en klokke nedenunder meg slå seks slag; det var allerede ganske lyst og folk begynte å ferdes opp og ned i trappene. Nede ved døren hvor mitt rom var tapetsert med gamle numre av Morgenbladet kunne jeg så tydelig se en bekjentgjørelse fra Fyrdirektøren, og litt tilvenstre derfra et fett, bugnende avertissement fra baker Fabian Olsen om nybakt brød.

I realize that to those of you -- a majority no doubt -- who do not know any Norwegian, it will be difficult to trust any alternative translation I provide. Nonetheless I will make the attempt, sticking very closely to the original. The purpose is not to provide a pleasant read, but to illustrate the gap between what Hamsun wrote and the translation you're being served.

I lie awake in my attic room and hear a clock down below me strike six; it was already quite bright and people were beginning* to wander up and down the stairs. Down by the door where my room was papered with old issues of "Morgenbladet", I could very clearly see** a notice from the Lighthouse Director, and slightly left therefrom a grand***, bulging advertisement from baker Fabian Olsen about new-baked bread.

*direct translation: began
**"kunne jeg så tydelig se" literally means "I could so clearly see", but the translation doesn't do what the Norwegian does. There's almost something paranoid about it, something highly aware. You immediately start conjuring images of the protagonist gazing suspiciously at the advertisement. Reading the words with the right voice goes along way, but it doesn't happen automatically like it does in Norwegian.
***literally: fat, greasy -- suffice to say that grand is not ideal

All in all, the number of faults in this quite randomly selected paragraph are many. First of all, "was lying awake" is just plain wrong use of time. It happens in present tense. He *heard* the clock strike six, it was not merely something that happened. The clock certainly did not strike six *somewhere* -- he took that out of nowhere. The first semi-colon is arbitrary and out of place. The door is down below, something the translation doesn't bother telling you. A "bekjentgjørelse" is certainly not just a message, but more like an announcement that makes its readers familiar with something. Notice is the closest I could think of. "Ferdes" only means "move" in the same way fare, travel, wander, walk and stroll means move. As for the picture of a big fat loaf on the advertisement, the translator made that up himself.

I repeat that this was an almost randomly selected passage. God knows what a more careful read might reveal.