Hunger

Rating:
Summary: Hunger
Review: The narrator begins the story with almost nothing to his name. He is behind in rent, has pawned most of his possessions, has virtually not furniture and clothing. He is mad at the world, at his fortune, at a snaggle-toothed old lady in a butcher's shop who passes him by. He considers that the world has rejected him, cast him down, declared him to be no good. And yet, when walking later on that same day as the encounter with the old woman, he spies an old man, who begs for money for milk, and he pawns a piece of the clothing he is wearing to help him out.

He does have a few possibilities, however. On occasion, he is able to earn some money writing articles for newspapers, small things, of little value, but they feed him. He has the idea of an essay, 'Crimes of Futurity', which he considers will earn him a nice sum. But then, as the day grows, he discards this idea, 'I could no longer be satisfied with writing an article about anything so simple and straight-ahead as the 'crimes of Futurity'', and decides to work on a treatise, a 'Philosophical Cognition', which would, 'give me an opportunity of crushing pitiably some of Kant's sophistries'. But, he has lost his pencil, and cannot write this opus.

The narrator is a man who is happy that he is unhappy. He considers that the Creator is against him, but then finds himself humming and in good spirits. He teases a poor young girl for no reason whatsoever, and is glad while recollecting the sensations he felt. He is certainly a strange character, as the following shows: 'I half rise and look down at my feet, and I experience at this moment a fantastic and singular feeling that I have never felt before--a delicate, wonderful shock through my nerves, as if sparks of cold light quivered through them--it was as if catching sight of my shoes I had met with a kind old acquaintance, or got back a part of myself that had been riven loose.' Often, he wants to give random people something, and is upset that he cannot. He is, for the most part, a positive narrator, enjoying the sights and sounds, the flora and fauna. However, with what seems to be for no reason whatsoever, he will fly into a mental rage at something or someone, spewing out venomous thoughts - or even words and deeds, if he is worked up enough. But tis feeling passes quickly, and then, it is almost as though the narrator is uncertain as to why the person attacked would feel offended or put out. An interesting character, indeed.

As the story progresses, and his lack of money continues, a burning hunger - both physical and mental - grows. He becomes weak through lack of food, and this has the affect of causing his oddities to expand, become more random, intricate, strange. One night, when so hungry he can hardly stand, he checks himself in as homeless at the local police station, then spends the night worrying about a hole in the wall, 'a downright intricate and mysterious hole, which I must guard against!'. He descends into a hungry madness, sucking on woodchips for sustenance, and speaking to God: 'Yes, you should say, I have invoked God my Father! and you must set your words to the most piteous tune you have ever heard in your life. So--o! Once again! Come, that was better! But you must sigh like a horse down with the colic. So--o! that's right.'

The narrator's madness is certainly interesting to observe. He experience dizzying highs - such as when sitting on a bench, or deciding to cut off his buttons to sell at the pawnshop - and terrible lows, whenever he thinks about food. He dashes between exuberance and despondency, up and down like a yo-yo, his reactions all the more bizarre, absurd and exaggerated as his hunger grows. Within all this, there is sympathy for the character. He is by no means a bad man, just a victim of unfortunate circumstances. The novel begins with the narrator focusing upon describing places and sights, but as it progresses, everything becomes internalised. He talks to himself, arguing, haranguing, pleading, cajoling. His thoughts are punctuated with exclamation marks quite often, giving them an added urgency or absurdity, depending on the sentence: 'The green blanket!'. It is interesting that, even though the character is thinking wrong thoughts and performing bad deeds, he is still an exuberant, jolly fellow, and that is what makes him such a joy to read.

The ending is expected, but does not suffer because of this. We witness the massive fall into madness, then brief spurts of lucidity followed by further plunges. Inexplicably, a young girl falls in love with him, which allows the narrator a madness of a different sort, but only for a short time. He does not overcome his 'hunger' as such, but this is unnecessary. The hunger within him is something that is not fully sated by food, it is more of a spiritual, mental hunger that can only be assuaged by thoughts, by feelings, by writing.

Rating:
Summary: Breakthrough Achievement . .. Must Be Experienced!
Review: "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 plotless 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 ground, 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 -- literally -- a new point-of-view: the alienated mind. This one of those types of books that simply must be experienced to be understood. Think of "The Catcher in The Rye" -- no not much "plot" to recommend it yet -- what a novel! So pick up a copy of "Hunger" and be amazed! Two other books, largely influenced by "Hunger," are "Ask the Dust" by John Fante and "The Losers Club" by Richard Perez -- both "lighter" in tone, but highly recommended, not to mention fun.

Rating:
Summary: Buyer Beware
Review: A butchering, if I may say so, of an outstanding work. Do yourself a favor and pick up the Sverre Lyngstad translation published by Penguin!!!

Rating:
Summary: check out the lyngstad translation....
Review: Avoiding all the obvious comments about Hamsun's fascist (for fascist read Nazi) sympathies and his importance in an historical literary context etc. i would still suggest that Hunger is very much worth a look.

The inevitable nature of Tangen's demise, the encroaching insanity, the self-fulfilling spiral of hunger and poverty and the loss of acceptable society behaviour is so tangible at times that i wanted to look away from the book, stop reading on, not see the painful conclusions that i knew were coming. But turning away is somewhat difficult because you want to understand and sympathise with this character, at once mad and yet so, so very fallible and human.

Steppenwolf is a similar exercise, but i found this eminently more reader-friendly. Tiring and somewhat draining but an absorbing and worthwhile read nevertheless.

Rating:
Summary: Amusing Even For Such a Stark Tale!
Review: Here we have a classic Norwegian tale of a literally starving writer in 1890's Oslo (Christiana) who somehow often keeps his humor while at times going for as long as three days without a bite to eat! Nice descriptions of street scenes, and eccentrics also figure in this 1st person plot that will keep you reading to the end!

Rating:
Summary: Nobel prize winner
Review: I decided to give this a 5 star rating because it is obviously a timeless piece of well written literature, an innovative work that probably did influence many others that followed. Considering that it was first published in 1890 the descriptions of poverty in the city and sexual directness must have been shocking. The protagonist is a young aspiring writer who suffers from starvation and other depravations in order to enhance his art; the setting is Christiania (later became Oslo). He is somewhat similar to the character Raskolnikov in "Crime and Punishment" in that the story is narrated as a streaming flow of an insane and erratic consciousness

Excellent as the book is though, it is not one I would read a second time. The main character did not elicit my sympathy, his suffering seemed needless to me something that could have been ended at any time were he not so stubborn and anti social. Perhaps more of a "boy's" book, a more literary "Catcher in the Rye" with a more grown up character.



Rating:
Summary: Beware of bad translations
Review: If you're sitting there thinking of buying this wonderful novel, please do - but make sure you check out Sverre Lyngstad's translation before buying Robert Bly's. Bly's version is probably responsible for most of the interest Hamsun's work has generated among English-speaking readers, but, Lyngstad argues, it's also flawed to the extent of about five errors per page. For those interested in the arcane art of translation, these include: misreadings of idiomatic expressions; literal renderings of metaphors; misreadings of tone; misreadings of homophones; grammatical misconceptions; mistaken or arbitrary word meanings; not to mention a completely botched rendering of the urban geography of Oslo. Now I'm no speaker of Norwegian, but I know this: the more subtle and sophisticated a text is - and Hamsun's is both, to a considerable extent - the more tonal, metaphoric and idiomatic errors in translation will matter. Lyngstad argues that his new version corrects these errors and renders the text in an English much closer to Hamsun's nuanced Norwegian original. It's accompanied (in some editions) by a vehement introductory essay exploring the issue of translation in more detail - worth reading in its own right - and a convincing appendix of examples of where his and Bly's versions differ. Lyngstad's version is available through Penguin or Canongate. You can get the Penguin one here at Amazon - ISBN 0141180641. Paul Auster's engaging essay, "The Art of Hunger", sometimes reprinted in the Bly version, is available in Auster's book of the same name and, presumably, in his "Collected Prose" (available now in the UK and Australia, but not in the USA until March 2005). Auster also offers a nice meditation on translation in his novel "The Book of Illusions."

Rating:
Summary: Truth is selfless subjectivity
Review: 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'a 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 Hamsun won de 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. Neddless 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 helf 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 modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun."

Rating:
Summary: Articulation of the inarticulate
Review: Relating to "Hunger" on anything but a gut level would be to read a strange, perhaps sometimes repetitive novel indeed.
But it would be my assumption that most fans of this novel have experienced, at least to some degree, the agony of the narrator and the special brand of isolation he experiences.
If any of us have had periods in our lives where we actually knew *no one at all*--in a quite literal sense, by some quirk of fate or circumstance, we know precisely what the main character is experiencing. His seeming determination to drive himself insane is a facade: he is actually a lonely man seeing the world through the filmy, pessimistic lens of a COMPLETELY lonely man. When one is bereft of any contact beyond the slightest acquaintances, the most minute events become magnified to an absurd proportion and if anyone could get inside our heads for a matter of more than five minutes they would realize that something was grotesquely, horribly wrong. Obsessive thought patterns often result from this kind of loneliness which is not only oppressive but all encompassing: it usually starts with social anxiety and blows up into a cartoonish nightmare of the most paltry sensations become gargantuan. His joy over even the slightest contact with another human being is pathetic indeed, but revelatory of his complete isolation. I would not agree that this is manic depression or anything of the sort, but Hamsun's masterful articulation of the oscillating moods which occur when a human being becomes neurosis itself and fears everything. Hamsun has accomplished in this novel what centuries of literature have been unable to do: to articulate the inarticulate. For anyone who has actually felt like a ghost, a phantasm, this is the book for you. (Or not for you, if you would prefer to simply move on and forget the horrendous experience.) A masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Buy this book!
Review: There are a lot of writers that get propelled to classic status and the modern reader is left to ponder why. I have often struggled through so-called classics championed by the academia. I would finish with a dirty feeling that the scholars and critics pulled a fast one on me.

Now, by struggle, I refer not to a challenging read but rather to a work that is dull and seems to offer little reward. Some classics aren't bad but they don't live up to the hype. This made me a bit hesitant when I decided to tackle Norwegian author Knut Hamsun. Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski both raved over Hamsun quite often. This Nobel Prize winning author are received adulation from many other authors and poets I admire.

My expectations were sky high and I wondered if he would live up to all these accolades. I decided to start with his first novel called "Hunger". This book was originally published in 1890. It has a starkness of content that will put off many readers. The nameless narrator endures much frustration and humiliation as he tries to survive. He seeks success as an author but finds failure and rejection throughout. He must scrape for change just to get bread to eat.

There is an autobiographical strain in this novel. Hamsun went through great poverty and struggle in the ten years that precede publication of this book. Some of the experiences in the novel run parallel to Hamsun's own sufferings.

The narrator finds himself pawning clothes or anything of the slightest value. He puts off paying his rent when he can. He even feigns losing his keys to catch a night's sleep in the local jail cell. Several nights are spent sleeping in the woods outside of town.

The book focuses largely on the unconscious instincts and conscious movements of the narrator. He avoids actual work in hopes of literary success. He exists in the society of Christiana but is on the lower fringes. He is a very marginalized figure. He is anti-social--virtually a foreigner in his own land. He is very aware of his intellect and ability but seems almost helpless to do anything about it. He endures his hunger and need with great nonchalance.

But one odd quality of the book is that is not a depressing book. Rarely does the narrator resort to self-pity or whining. He has a shocking acceptance of his marginalization even as he attempts to achieve success. He is grateful when he receives chump change for articles he has written. There is little in the way of hostility toward society or culture.

Hamsun also wrote with a very swift style of prose. He is very direct in his writing. It is said that a trip to America and exposure to American slang helped influence that style. He writes in short sentences and paragraphs. This economy of style is similar to the writings produced by Hemmingway.

"Hunger" proved to be a very rewarding read. Hamsun will not please every reader. Some will be dismayed by the content and the harshness of circumstance. Hamsun will displease liberals because he does not attack society or blame society for his woes. He will also displease conservatives who do not want a 'bum' turned into a hero. Hamsun was very apolitical in his approach to writing.

Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski were right. I was enthralled by most of the book. I found that this now often overlooked masterpiece was worth the effort to track down and read. Anyone seriously interested in literature and its history should read this book. I purchased this book through Amazon.com right after another great purchase, THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez, about an unlucky writer addicted to the personals. Both are gritty, recommended books. Enjoy!