Hunger (Hamsun novel)

Written after Hamsun's return from an ill-fated tour of America, Hunger is loosely based on the author's own impoverished life before his breakthrough in 1890. Set in late 19th-century Kristiania (now Oslo), the novel recounts the adventures of a starving young man whose sense of reality is giving way to a delusionary existence on the darker side of a modern metropolis. While he vainly tries to maintain an outer shell of respectability, his mental and physical decay are recounted in detail. His ordeal, enhanced by his inability or unwillingness to pursue a professional career, which he deems unfit for someone of his abilities, is pictured in a series of encounters which Hamsun himself described as "a series of analyses".

In many ways, the protagonist of the novel displays traits reminiscent of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment; the author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, being one of Hamsun's main influences.[3] The influence of naturalist authors such as Émile Zola is apparent in the novel, as is his rejection of the realist tradition.

Hunger encompasses two of Hamsun's literary and ideological leitmotifs:

• His insistence that the intricacies of the human mind ought to be the main object of modern literature: Hamsun's own literary program, to describe "the whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow", is thoroughly manifest in Hunger.
• His depreciation of modern, urban civilization: In the opening lines of the novel, he ambivalently describes Kristiania as "this wondrous city that no one leaves before it has made its marks upon him." The latter is counterbalanced in other Hamsun works, such as Mysteries (Mysterier, 1892) and Growth of the Soil (Markens Grøde, 1920), which earned him the Nobel prize in literature but also brought about claims of his being a proto-National Socialist Blut und Boden author.[4]

The novel's first-person protagonist, an unnamed vagrant with intellectual leanings, probably in his late twenties, wanders the streets of Norway's capital, Kristiania (Oslo), in pursuit of nourishment. Over four episodes he meets a number of more or less mysterious persons, the most notable being Ylajali, a young woman with whom he engages in a mild degree of physical intimacy.

He exhibits a self-created code of chivalry, giving money and clothes to needy children and vagrants, not eating food given to him, and turning himself in for stealing. Essentially self-destructive, he thus falls into traps of his own making, and with a lack of food, warmth and basic comfort, his body turns slowly to ruin. Overwhelmed by hunger, he scrounges for meals, at one point nearly eating his own (rather precious) pencil and his finger. His social, physical and mental states are in constant decline. However, he has no antagonistic feelings towards 'society' as such, rather he blames his fate on 'God' or a divine world order. He vows not to succumb to this order and remains 'a foreigner in life', haunted by 'nervousness, by irrational details'.

He experiences an artistic and financial triumph when he sells a text to a newspaper, but despite this he finds writing increasingly difficult. At one point in the story, he asks to spend a night in a prison cell, posing as a well-to-do journalist who has lost the keys to his apartment. In the morning he cannot bring himself to reveal his poverty or even partake in the free breakfast provided to the homeless. Finally, as the book comes to a close, when his existence is at an absolute ebb, he signs on to the crew of a ship leaving the city.

Hunger has been translated into English several times: in 1899 by Mary Chavelita Dunne (under the alias George Egerton), in 1967 by Robert Bly, and in 1996 by Sverre Lyngstad, whose translation is considered definitive. In the latter's foreword, Lyngstad wrongly claims that in the George Egerton translation the text has been bowdlerized in relation to the narrator's wandering sexual thoughts and actions; it was an American publisher in 1920 who actually censored the translation and it is this version that is widely available now. He also states that Robert Bly's translation misses the mixing of the present and past tenses of the original, suggestive of a febrile mind, which Bly replaced by a uniform past tense. This translation also confuses Oslo's geography—streets and places.

Hunger has been adapted into the following films:

• Hunger (1966), a Danish-Norwegian-Swedish film
• Hunger (2001), an American film
• Boy Eating the Bird's Food (2012), a Greek film, loosely based on Hunger

• Humpal, Martin. The Roots of Modernist Narrative: Knut Hamsun's Novels Hunger, Mysteries and Pan International Specialized Book Services. 1999 ISBN 82-560-1178-5

• Braatøy, Trygve (1973) [1929]. Livets Cirkel [The Circle of Life: Contributions toward an analysis of Knut Hamsun's work] (in Norwegian). Oslo, Norway: J.W. Cappelens forlag. ISBN 82-09-01137-5.

• Hunger at Internet Archive, LibriVox, Google Books and Project Gutenberg (audiobooks, scanned books, plain text)
• Hunger, translated by Robert Bly (1967)
• Hunger public domain audiobook at LibriVox