Hunger: A Novel
by Knut Hamsun
Book Summary Information
Author: Knut HamsunTranslator: Robert Bly
Introduction: Paul Auster
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-19
ISBN: 0374531102
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780374531102
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Book Reviews of Hunger: A Novel
Book Review: Man desperately seeking a happy meal...
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
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