In extremis, the unnamed narrator has nothing to turn to but judgemental charity and the spasmodic kindness of friends, and today in the 21st century that is still how it is in many countries around the world. It was written in the late 19th century but when we read it today it is with a consciousness of how serious poverty was before the Russian Revolution propelled capitalist economies into developing welfare reforms. It’s only 134 pages but it took four days to read it, because it is so overwhelming.
Reading this portrait of a distressed young man at the end of his physical and psychological tether is an intensely emotional experience. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun.” He influenced numerous authors including Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and Ernest Hemingway, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1920 “for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil.”īut all of this is forgotten as you read the book. Wikipedia tells us Hamsun pioneered techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue and Isaac Bashevis Singer called Hamsun “the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect-his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism.
(1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Edited by Peter Boxall, ABC Books, 2006 Edition, ISBN: 9780733321214, p.206) The urban angst of Hunger prefigures the alienated cityscapes of Kafka, but with an insistence on tensions between everyday economics and colloquial reverie worthy of James Kelman. Influenced by Dostoevsky, Hamsun here develops a kind of Nietzschean individualism that rebelled against both naturalism and the progressive literary politics associated with Ibsen. Hamsun’s reputation has suffered from his Nazi sympathies, but his early, semi-autobiographical portrait of the writer as a hungry young man is a seminal modernist classic. Hunger (Sult) (1890) by Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) is, as Wikipedia and 1001 Books tells us, a very significant book in the history of the novel.