Book review: Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890)





Considered a classic of Scandinavian literature. A semi-autobiographical stream-of-consciousness account of a starving writer who roams the streets of the Norwegian city of Kristiania (Oslo). Loosely based on the author's own impoverished life before his breakthrough in 1890. Transports you back to the 1800s, so I felt I was actually there. You get under the skin of the main character who has both a tragic and a humorous side to him, not necessarily how he sees himself, but how others perceive him.

An example of the tragi-comic humor can be found on page 6 when he stands in line for a job in the fire brigade and is passed on due to wearing glasses. He then tries again without glasses and the fireman recognizes him and smiles.

The story is about stubbornness and pride. Wanting to be independent and not rely on family and handouts, however difficult this may prove to be. This is an admirable quality and I did feel sympathy for his plight.
He tries to maintain an outer shell of respectability, self-destructively giving away what little money he has, but doesn’t know if he will have enough food from one day to the next. Writing articles and selling his belongings in order to eat and pay the rent. Having no support system except his writing, and it begins to take its toll on him physically and mentally.

Thematically it’s about the side effects of isolation and malnutrition, and the various degradations of the main character. The narrator has an overdeveloped sense of personal worth, sometimes feverish from lack of food, other times contemptuous of humanity. So undernourished that he starts doing illogical things. Since it’s told in the first-person, we don’t know if he is a reliable narrator, is he imagining events, could parts of the book be hallucinations? Is he going insane?

American writer Paul Auster argues in his 1970 critical essay: "it would be wrong to dismiss the hero of Hunger as a fool or a madman. In spite of the evidence, he knows what he is doing. He does not want to succeed. He wants to fail. Something new is happening here, some new thought about the nature of art is being proposed in Hunger"

The 1966 film adaptation (which I reviewed here) managed to include most of the key scenes and tap into the bleakness and humor of the novel. The parts that were left out include him sleeping in a jail and being scared in the dark, and also when he lives with a family who reluctantly let him stay despite him running out of money.

To me both film and book are unforgettable. I've decided to rate the book without considering the controversy in the later years of Hamsun's life, which I don't think is relevant in judging the worth of a book published 50-60 years before WW2.

Rating 4.5/5 



Have you read anything by Knut Hamsun? What did you think of Hunger the book/film?

8 comments:

  1. Excellent review. Looks like we pretty much came to the same conclusion. It's an unforgettable work. I'm curious about the controversy you speak of...I was unaware of any, but I didn't do any digging either.

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    1. @Fisti: Thanks, Hamsun was biased towards Germany because they liked his writing. The controversy was his sympathies for Nazi Germany, which hurt his legacy. The Norwegians burnt his books in protest. Some claimed he was too old to understand what was going on during WW2. He was almost deaf and his main source of information was the conservative newspaper Aftenposten, which had been sympathetic to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany from the beginning. In the 1940s, Hamsun was forced to undergo a psychiatric examination, which concluded that he had "permanently impaired mental faculties," A civil liability case was raised against him, and in 1948 he had to pay a ruinous sum to the Norwegian government of 325,000 kroner ($65,000) for his alleged membership in Nasjonal Samling and for the moral support he gave to the Germans, but was cleared of any direct Nazi affiliation.

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  2. What a lovely review! This sounds like a book I want to read. Stream of consciousness appeals to me, and it sounds like it does a brilliant job of evoking the time and place in which it's set.

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    1. @Irene McKenna: Thanks! He was one of the early pioneers of stream of consciousness (before James Joyce and Virginia Woolf ). Yes, Hamsun does a great job of evoking the time and place in which the story is set. Hope you like the book

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  3. I could be totally going off the wall here, but the way the story is told reminds me a little bit of The Machinist - where Christian Bale's character is so out of sorts, and he's the one leading us through the story, we don't know what's actually happening. Very much like the sound of this one :) Thanks for sharing, Chris.

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    1. @Jaina: Interesting comparison. The Machinist is a good movie, and yes, Bale's character might be hallucinating and this could blur the line between dream and reality.

      You're welcome. It's worth giving the book a try. I loved it, and compared to other classics, it's fairly short (under 200 pages). You could also go with the excellent film adaptation from 1966.

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  4. I love the film, but I haven't read the book. I should check it out.

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    1. @Josh: I love both the book and the film. The book is under 200 pages, so quite manageable.

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