Hunger: A Novel
by Knut Hamsun
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Book Summary Information
Author: Knut HamsunTranslator: Robert Bly
Introduction: Paul Auster
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-19
ISBN: 0374531102
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of Hunger: A Novel
Book Review: "I will make my character laugh"
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
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