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    Hunger: A Novel
    Hunger: A Novel
    Hunger: A Novel
    Audiobook6 hours

    Hunger: A Novel

    Written by Knut Hamsun

    Narrated by Kevin Foley

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Knut Hamsun's Hunger, first published in 1890 and hailed as the literary beginning of the twentieth century, is a masterpiece of psychologically driven fiction. The story of a struggling artist living on the edge of starvation, the novel portrays the unnamed first-person narrator's descent into paranoia, despair, and madness as hunger overtakes him. As the protagonist loses his grip on reality, Hamsun brilliantly portrays the disturbing and irrational recesses of the human mind through increasingly disjointed and urgent prose. Loosely based on the author's own experiences prior to becoming a successful writer, Hunger announced the arrival of a new kind of novel and heavily influenced such later writers as Kafka and Camus. This edition is the translation by George Egerton.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 31, 2011
    ISBN9781452671710
    Hunger: A Novel
    Author

    Knut Hamsun

    Born in 1859, Knut Hamsun published a stunning series of novels in the 1890s: Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892) and Pan (1894). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil.

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    Reviews for Hunger

    4/5

    1,209 ratings53 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A strange, lyrical book that presents hunger as a gateway to madness.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I really don't know what I think about this Norwegian classic by Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun. Even my rating is a bit of a guess!I found this very easy to read and the effects of extreme poverty on the main character were fascinating to behold. But I found this unnamed character very odd in places. I could understand to some extent his pride leading him to doing some things that could be seen as foolish but some of his pranks were bizarre.
    • 5/5
      I agree with Janice Elliott, Sunday Telegraph - `a great book'. Stream of consciousness, rant, madness etc etc.
    • 4/5
      A stark portrait of hunger and its effects on the psyche, this book follows an unnamed narrator as he experiences periods of near starvation in 1890s Oslo (then known as Christiana). An author by trade, the young man struggles to write while falling in and out of starvation-induced madness. He is at turns homeless and penniless. The reader is treated to his inner life and the social consequences he suffers secondary to his impoverished status. The reader would be hard-pressed to find a more realistic portrayal of the psyche of one who knows hunger on a daily basis.
    • 4/5
      Hunger is an autobiographical novel depicting a starving writer roaming the streets of Kristiana (now Oslo), Norway. The narrator goes from poverty, to homelessness, to starvation and delirium. He teeters on the brink of insanity before circumstances put enough food in his mouth to keep him alive and restore at least some of his faculties.Though many of the novels of that time (1890) were written to publicize social ills and human sufferings, Hunger is not this type of story. Instead, it is a psychological study of a man's descent into abjection largely by his own doing. The narrator, fixated on writing his way out of misery, never considers alternatives. He doesn't look for a job, nor does he accept charity. His warped pride, which turns gradually to delusion, almost kills him. It's no easy task to write a first-person story about someone who is going insane. Hamsun manages to do so, however, in a very clear and convincing manner. The reader somehow always know's what's real and what's not, even when it's obvious that the person telling the story does not. This is not a pleasant book to read, but it is a very important and revealing one.
    • 4/5
      The ending was a disappointment.
    • 5/5
      In Hunger, Hamsun has crafted a strange protagonist. He is deranged by his own arrogance, bordering on madness. Pining himself for money and food, he responds to a beggar's pleas for a handout by going to pawn his jacket and returning to the beggar, who becomes suspect. At this, the protagonist is insulted, and berates the beggar as an ungrateful wretch. The near starvation that plagues him later in the book only aggravates and accentuates his strange moods and we, being so reliant on his voice as narrative, are forced to empathize with his pitiful state. The blend of moods and images in this novel is astounding. This novel is dark, certainly, but the narrator's oddball ways give the story a comic tone. In all of it's sadness and oddity, the narrative returns frequently to beautiful and often dreamlike images. The beauty of this book is the beauty of desperation, captured here more precisely than in any other literature I have yet read. Miller approaches it, but Hamsun, by literally going for the gut, embodies it. A masterful modernist novel of emotion, sensation, and viscera.
    • 5/5
      This book reminded me of Crime and Punishment. It is an easy read but hard to put down. It is a stream of consciousness narrative without much of a plot and an early example of post-modernism. While reading this book about someone who is truly hungry you can see how there is a fine line between reality and hallucination. I enjoyed it very much and I would recommend this book to those who like books about life in late 19th century in northern Europe.
    • 5/5
      What a fine book! One of the good things about having had a crappy education is discovering classics like this as a grown-up. Also, it's great that my daughter is taking a literature course this summer, so she has accumulated a big pile of great books and recommended this one for me (thanks a million Lily!). Anyway, about the book - I loved the writing and the understated humor of the deeper than usual introspection of a starving, proud nutcase who is a greatly talented writer.
    • 5/5
      WHERE HAS THIS BOOK BEEN ALL MY LIFE? Hunger was an amazing novel and the language was beautiful. Great use of stream of consciousness. On par with most of my favorite authors. Knut Hamsun is a gem of an author if you know how to find him I guess.

      A while back this year I was trying to find literary fiction authors from the Scandinavia area. I've read a hand full of writers from that area because of my heritage, but mostly fairy tale, mythology, children, and viking tales. Figured it was time to grow up and read things from Scandinavia about the everyday man (from any time period really). Took me awhile to find something until I decided to look at Nobel Prize winners. Saw his name, they compared him with Joyce and Woolf, and figured I should check him out.

      I highly recommend this novel. It's short and easier than most stream of consciousness. However for a book less than 200 pages, it has a few things going on and talks about a lot of topics. The tone of the book is a little depressing, but keep in mid it has themes of poverty and starvation. What I like most is the fact Hamsun seemed to grasp the human mind.
    • 5/5
      This is a story of a man who lives in the Norwegian town of Christiana. He can barely make a living, although he tries to do so by writing and selling his pieces one at a time to an editor of a paper. He barely has enough to eat...and often has nothing to eat. He barely has a place to stay because he cannot aford lodging...and often he has no place to stay.

      The story is written like a soliloquy in which the main character tells from moment to moment how he feels and what is happening to him. His moods go up and down, often suddenly in either direction.

      I found reading this novel fascinating and have not read anything else quite like it. The writing was so excellent that this story could have gone on for much longer and still have kept me transfixed.

      Now here is where the conundrum comes in. In the midst of reading this book, I read about the author. I learned that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. I also read that not only was he later a Nazi sympathizer, but that he had written the obituaries for both of the Nazis Goebbels and Hitler. What do I do with this knowledge now? My maternal grandparents died in the death chambers of Auschwitz. How do I reconcile reading this amazing piece of literature by a man I would have despised had I ever known him alive?

      The other strange thing is that I never would have read this book had it not been for a great niece of my husband who chose this book at random for members of her book club to read. I had great difficulty obtaining a hard copy of this book. The copy I got was copyright 1920 and published in June, 1924. It was an interlibrary loan from the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland. I no longer live in that city. I grew up in that city, and usually every weekend my mother used to take me as a child to by bus to that Library in downtown Baltimore. It was her parents who had been put to death by the Nazis.

      I don't know what to think. I will just say the story was mesmerizing, and the facts I later learned about its author horrifying.
    • 4/5
      Set in 1890 when Hamsun wrote it, the writing bears little of the hallmarks of the writing of this era. There is little plot to speak of and few characters. Our protagonist narrator believes himself to wear the noble title of 'writer' as his occupation, but in reality he is at best a hugely unproductive author of unsolicited newspaper articles. As a result he lives mostly with perpetual hunger, often on the brink of starvation, at which point he regularly cannot keep food down even when he's able to buy some. His hunger drives him to bouts of mania and erratic behaviour, but he's clearly not of sound mind anyway. When he has a little money - which is very much the exception rather than the norm - he is quick to find reason to give part or all of it away. He turns down opportunities for food when he's desperately hungry, and avoids pursuing other avenues for employment where he could receive regular pay.

      This is a bleak, bleak novel, and certainly not one I could have continued with had it been longer. The depth of the narrator's poverty is difficult to read about at times. All he possesses in life are the clothes he's standing up on, and even some of those he has to pawn. But it is the mix of this extreme poverty with his crazy behaviour that make his story so desperately frustrating to read about, as he passes over small kindnesses that would make huge differences to his situation.

      It is not an enjoyable novel, but there is a certain experience to reading it. It's narrated as bouts of despair bouncing into periods of mania; this mental instability can be exhausting to read (although it's not difficult prose).

      3.5 stars - I'm glad I read it, but I certainly won't rush back for a re-read.
    • 4/5
      Hunger is set in Kristiania, Norway (renamed Oslo in 1925) and is the rather dire tale of a struggling impoverished writer, who struggles to not only keep a roof over his head, but also to provide himself with enough food to eat as well as keeping himself properly clothed for winter.

      It is a book that makes you thankful to live in a time when society provides social security benefits so that people need not starve to death*.

      It's a relatively quick read at a mere 134 pages, but at times its contents are nonetheless rather harrowing such as when the protagonist cuts the buttons of his jacket in an attempt to pawn them to be able to buy a morsel of food.

      *Generally speaking, I'm aware this does not exist in all countries at the present time.
    • 4/5
      Hamsun doesn't offer the contemporary reader an example of poverty. We can go to Zola for that. Naturalism thrive on those dehumanizing conditions. Hunger, instead, offers a poetic interpretation of poverty. This is starvation as resistance. But only so. I found the motivations necessarily complex, bound and retreating. Many can probably relate to that arc swing between defiance and humiliation. Such expository work is often difficult to enjoy, empathy prevents actual pleasure. That isn't the case with Hunger. I found it more a sonata than Solzhenitsyn: that is a compliment to both Hamsun as well as the Russian.
    • 5/5
      What an engaging feverish read! This novel does not read like it's 130 years old nor like it was translated. Very quick easy read, a page turner despite there being essentially no plot. The unnamed main character narrator borders on being annoying and exasperating, but in the end I felt mostly sympathy for him. Clearly mentally ill and constantly struggling with poverty and starvation, he makes one bad decision after another but it seems they derive largely from his last attempts to hold onto dignity and self-respect. A timely or maybe timeless tale.
    • 3/5
      What a rollercoaster! Reading this book took a lot out of me. Not because it's hard to read, but because the main character's (unnamed) constant changes in mood. He'll be riding on clouds at first, then he's acting as if he's the scourge of the earth. You really get caught up in it, and that all points back to the author's ability. The ending was a little abiguous to me, though. I don't like leaving my characters to an uncertain future.
    • 4/5
      Hunger by Knut Hamsun is a loosely autobiographical novel about a young man down on his luck, starving to death and the slow decline as he sells off bits and pieces of his life to the Uncle. While he wanders about the town he runs into several characters. This unnamed narrator is quite proud and can barely allow anyone to help him. He would rather give away than receive. It reminded me a bit of Dostoyevsky and also a bit of Ulysses as the main character wanders about the town meeting up with various people. This is a turn of the century psychological driven novel and explores the irrationality of the mind. Of Christiana (Oslo) the protagonist states, “no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there. The contrast is the outer respectability, mental and physical decay. Symbols of the decay are the words starved, winding sheets, Autumn, die, room compared to a sinister coffin. The winding sheets (for wrapping the deceased body) repeats several times.
    • 2/5
      He was just hungry for 120 pages.
    • 4/5
      I read the Bly translation.

      My edition had an intro by Paul Auster. It took me forever to get through the intro, the book was much more interesting. But between the intro and the afterword (by Bly) I ended up with a lot of questions:

      1) Auster implies the Hamsun starved himself for art, and to have material to create his art. And when he was done, he left
      2) Bly makes it clear that though this novel is based on his life, it is not an autobiography. Hamsun was starving on and off for 10 years, trying to make it as a writer. He did 2 stints working in the US, each of multiple years, during those 10 years. Bly suggests his unusual writing style (obvious in Norwegian, not in the translation) was caused by his time spent in the US. After Hunger was published, he was not hungry again.

      So--did he starve on purpose as art? Or was he a 19th century "starving artist" trying to succeed at his chosen craft, taking other jobs as needed to live?

      Anyway, this book does not read like a 19th century book at all. It feels much more mid 20th century, as there is not a plot exactly. He's not telling a story per se--he's telling about what it's like to be a struggling writer in Christiania, with no family help, friends as down as you, and what that is like.
    • 5/5
      Before Jay McInerney, J.D. Salinger and Albert Camus came Knut Hamsun. Hunger is a masterpeice study of human nature and the absurdity of life. This book is #1 on my all time favorites list.
    • 4/5
      A chilling novel. A stark, uncompromising look at the horrors of literary life in Oslo at the turn to the twentieth century Oslo. To be read by anyone contemplating a life in literary pursuits. It will deter some.
    • 5/5
      Desperate, grim and powerful.
    • 4/5
      Someday I'll actually sit down and write a real book review and when I do, it might just be on this book. Hunger struck a chord in me. Maybe it's all the Gogol and Dostoevsky I've read and loved over the years. This book is indeed disturbing and describes hunger in such detail that it makes the reader feel the desperation, feel the hunger. There are scenes that a reader will likely never forget.
    • 5/5
      ‘Andreas Tangen’ is the fictitious name our nameless protagonist gives to the Officer on Duty the night he finds himself cold, wet, famished, keyless (not to say clueless, and consequently without even a room to go home to) and nearing delirium. His solution? To seek room and board in the city jail whence he can contemplate the rain falling on the outside.


      I only recently (July 17) read and reviewed Jack London’s Martin Eden. Knut Hamsun’s semiautobiographical Hunger could well serve as a companion piece to London’s equally semiautobiographical novel. And neither would be out of place sitting alongside Dostoyevsky’s Notes from (the) Underground.


      “‘I will read it,’ he (the editor of a city paper in Christiania) said, taking it. ‘Of course everything you write will cost you labor; the only trouble with your work perhaps is excitability. If you could only be a little more composed! There is too much fever all the time. Anyway, I’ll read it.’ Then he turned to his desk work” (p. 95).


      Our anonymous protagonist’s “excitability” is quite understandable given his uncertain living conditions and constant state of hunger. And Robert Bly has done an excellent job of translating (I assume) and injecting (I don't assume) that same excitability into Hamsun’s Norwegian prose. For anyone who’s ever been homeless and felt prolonged hunger pangs for the sake of his art (or through the sheer absence of work), Hamsun’s words and Bly’s translation of those words may ring truer than any of us would care to remember. The only thing worse? I can still recall Luis Alberto Urrea’s description (in The Devil’s Highway) of what occurs when people emerge in the Arizona desert after having walked up from Mexico (or from points even further south) … and are out of water. (What happens to the human animal as it passes through the several stages of extreme dehydration is something you may be tempted to read about, but never want to actually witness.)


      In any case, our protagonist’s problem is the title of this book — and it never disappears. With hunger, comes a slow insanity. It’s not easy to read about, but both Hamsun and Bly do a superb job of portraying it in all of its insidious glory. This is indeed a case of afflictio gratia artis (suffering for the sake of art).


      RRB
      09/10/14
      Brooklyn, NY
    • 5/5
      I found this to be simultaneously an easy read and a difficult one. It's a slim book, and the language is straightforward, which made it easy. But the descriptions of being hungry and hopeless were often oppressively vivid. The narrator is a writer; he occasionally gets pieces published in the local newspaper, but the money never lasts long. Almost before the euphoria from getting paid fades, he is broke and starving again. He pawns everything he owns. He becomes homeless. He tries to get a regular job, but a minor error means he isn't considered. He tries to concentrate, to write, to bring himself out of his hunger-induced confusion long enough to sell another piece, but it's hard to focus.

      Hamsun does an incredible job describing the feeling of being hungry, and the results of starvation on one's mind. But more than that, he gets at the very essence of the dehumanizing feelings of being poor, of finding oneself an outcast from society. He makes the reader feel the despair and devaluation, while still keeping alive the glimmers of hope that the narrator maintains. It's a powerful look into what it is like to be on the bottom of the ladder.

      Recommended for: anyone who's ever felt like they just couldn't catch a break, people not on a diet

      Quote: Whatever could be the reason that things would not brighten up for me? Was I not just as much entitled to live as anyone else?
    • 5/5
      This novel is stark, emotionally evocative and on a primal level, terrifying. If you dare, enter the psyche of the narrator, a writer, who waivers between abject poverty and death. Suffer along with him as Hamsun's brilliant writing takes the reader to the brink of utter madness, sublime passion, and death by starvation. In the end, what is the hunger for in addition to food? You will have to suffer the throes of despair and humiliation of the protagonist to find out!
    • 5/5
      So realistic, I thought I was starving. Very compelling.
    • 4/5
      Hamsun deftly portrays the irrationality of the human mind assailed by hunger in a unique and often amusing manner. The narrator's psychological state is very well-developed and Hamsun's prose brings to life the intricacies of the human mind; Hamsun also portrays Oslo (then called Kristiana) in a realist manner.

      Similar to Crime and Punishment (since Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of Hamsun's main influences), Hunger is an expert piece of psychological drama and an excellent introduction to Hamsun's work.

      This particular edition also had an appendix by the translator (Sverre Lyngstad) on the troubles translating Hunger into English, which was particularly informative since Hamsun is a troublesome author to translate accurately owing to his expansive vocabulary and expressive style.
    • 3/5
      I probably didn't read this closely enough to say anything particularly intelligent about it. It has no plot, no character development, and very little in the way of logical organization of any kind. This is all clearly intentional: a literary polemic against the three volume novel that proceeds in a stately manner towards marriage or death. So if you've only ever read Victorian era novels, you'll probably be greatly shocked at this. If you've read anything else, you won't be.
      More interesting than the differences between this and, say, Great Expectations are the differences between this and all the stuff everyone compares it to: twentieth century absurdist or existentialist fiction. The translator of this edition says that the protagonist experiences Heidegger's 'authentic being towards death'. Uh... claptrap. What's fascinating about this book is that, unlike the quasi-Heideggerian anti-heroes of Camus etc, the hungry man is deeply, deeply moral. The translator suggests that this generosity is just a 'temperamental tic'. It seems to me to be much more than that, though. Here is a man who, although starving to death, is willing to give away any money he actually gets his hands on to others, simply out of compassion. He suffers for those who are beaten down even when he's the most beaten down of the lot. He's essentially a saintly aristocratic romantic artist, without the income that let most saints, aristocrats and romantic artists swan around the world doing their thing. If he's crazy, it's a good madness. If he's sane, he's a genuine moral hero, despite his occasional peccadilloes. I suspect the best comparison might be to ancient cynics who embraced poverty and lived disgusting lives as a mockery of social norms. Except this modern cynic is aware that social norms are all we've got: he just lives up to the ideals his society produced, while the society itself goes on whoring, materialistic and angry.
    • 4/5
      An extremely well written work- the author's direct, simple and straightforward writing style makes for an appealing read on the fascinating trials and tribulations of a young man fallen into poverty, and hunger. But for the disappointing ending, I would have ranked this even higher.