- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc; Reprint edition (31 Dec 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0374525285
- ISBN-13: 978-0374525286
- Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 13.5 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,949,922 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
A novel set in Kristiana (modern-day Oslo) where a young writer is driven by starvation to fluctuating extremes of euphoria and despair.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Back Cover
Knut Hamsun's Hunger has come to be regarded as one of the major modernist novels, anticipating and influencing much fiction that was to follow, from Joyce and Kafka to Camus and Kelman.
Hunger is a compelling trip into the mind of a young writer who is driven by starvation to constantly fluctuating extremes of euphoria and despair. It is a study of the psychological hinterlands - the very edges of experience - where few writers have the courage to tread. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This compelling novel will strike a chord with anyone who, for whatever reason or turn of circumstance, has found themselves completely isolated in life, knowing no one at all, suffering extremes of loneliness, virtually bereft of human interaction and discourse - stranded helplessly among people like a ghost doomed to wander in a phantom zone. Written in 1890, Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger is a disturbing journey into the mind and soul of a young writer. With no plot or characters (other than the young writer narrator) to speak of, the novel, written in the form of an interior monologue, recounts each moment-by-moment thought or impulse running through the young writer's mind. The reader observes in the interior monologue, the steady deterioration of the young writer's mental state as his thoughts swing erratically between extremes of elation and despair.
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!
32 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Published in 1890, "Hunger" represents a breakthrough from traditional romantic European writing. Influenced by Dostoievsky and Nietszche, and anticipating Kafka, Joyce, and Camus, Hamsun creates a novel with intense personal (partially autobiographical) narration (using first and third person), developing on the theme of alienation and artistic obsession. It represents Hamsun's masterpiece in his first literary production stage, in which social/political issues are of no concern, only the individual and his stream of consciousness.
It is a plot less novel, the setting is Christiana (now Oslo), and the main character is a starving, homeless young journalist, with a mercurial personality. His reactions have no middle term, he moves from extreme joy to acute depression, from arrogance to humility, on the verge of irrationality. It clearly reflects the author's early poverty, his pathological passion with aesthetical beauty, and an enormous driving force to perfect his concept that "language must resound with all the harmonies of music." "Hunger" anticipates Freud and Jung in their understanding of human nature, and creates a new literally hero, the alienated mind.
Of Norwegian nationality, Knut Hmsun won the Nobel Price for Literature in 1920. In real life he was ostracized by his countrymen and the literary community as a result of his radical individualism, and political/social views. Yes, Hamsun was a convicted Nazi, friend of Hitler and Goebbels, an advocate of the "pure" race (Jews should be expelled from Europe, Blacks should be returned to Africa), and he applauded German invasion of Norway. Needless to say, when WWII was over, he dearly paid the price: Imprisonment, confiscation, and poverty. When he died at the age of 92 (1952) he showed no remorse and held firmly to his beliefs.
The question arises: to what extent can we separate art from the artist, creation from the creator? Maybe another Nobel Laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer, himself a Jew, can answer this question for us when he states: "the whole school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun."
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This novel is quite unlike most things you have read before, and for anyone familiar with Henry Miller, the existentialists, the Beats, etc., it will make a lot of sense as to who exactly influenced those writers. Hamsun was Norwegian, and this is a gritty, horrific, painstaking exploration of a twentysomething writer's personal hell as he endures 'hunger' - both literal and in spirit. The fact that it is also a very funny novel may sound surprising, but such is Hamsun's originality and skill. His detractors must have had a field day denouncing this as a 'one-gimmick' book or a pile of self-indulgent tosh, but I thought it brilliant and a must for anyone interested in existential literature. It's incredibly vivid, incisive and self-aware writing, and one of those books which is still frighteningly relevant today.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Poor translation - stopped reading after the first few pages
After reading the other reviews posted here I thought this would be an excellent read, but when it arrived I found it took a lot of effort to read (I'm presuming) because of the... Read more
Published 22 months ago by Biscuitz
bad translation
the novel is excellent, but this translation is rubbish. get the other version with the bench on the cover. Read more
Published 23 months ago by washington_irving
Sick of being Sick
"Hunger" is breakthrough prose as Knut travels with aimless self debasement of mind, directing his journey within his body whilst traversing with feet the thoroughfares of Oslo. Read more
Published on 9 April 2010 by Dr. Delvis Memphistopheles
Confused
Just finished this and boy has it made an impact! We all feel down and depressed some times but on reading this I realised just how awful life can really be to some. Read more
Published on 6 April 2010 by Dostoyevsky
My kind of book
This is the first book I've read by this author, but it certainly won't be the last. Knut Hamsun takes the reader into the mind of an intelligent young writer, starving in the... Read more
Published on 17 Mar 2010 by Blackbeard
Small book - big issues!
This book was a choice for our reading group. An easy read and well-written but difficult to 'enjoy'. Read more
Published on 11 Dec 2009 by PAM OWEN
"I will make my character laugh"
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well. Read more
Pardoned Kipling and his views
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well. Read more
Published on 11 Aug 2009 by technoguy
An impressive novel
Knut Hamsun's novel tells the story of a young writer living in Christiana (nowadays Oslo) in Norway at the end of the 19th century. Read more
Published on 26 July 2004 by HORAK
Henrik Who?
In 1890, Knut Hamsun, a man who included on his CV tram-conducting in New York and stock-taking in Lom, northern Norway, unleashed his first novel on an unsuspecting and complacent... Read more
Published on 17 Dec 2002 by Robert Johnson
hope despair hunger and madness
A truly magical book. So very ahead of its time, the structure writing and stream of conciousness of the protaganist sit so well against the period backdrop, with the obvious... Read more
Published on 14 May 2002 by simon gurney
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