"Hunger" by Knut Hamsun

 "It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania [now Oslo], that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him." This is the start of a strange novel about an anonymous penniless writer with nothing left to pawn, who can't pay his rent and cannot afford to eat. He gets so hungry that he even tries wood shavings and bites his own finger. His only source of income is from selling unsolicited articles to newspaper editors, but when he is hungry and homeless he finds it difficult to concentrate enough to write: "I had noticed distinctly that every time I went hungry for a long time it was as though my brain trickled quietly out of my head, leaving me empty." (part one). To add to this vicious circle he has an unquenched pride which makes it impossible for him to accept charity; fundamentally self-destructive (eg the finger-biting incident), he lies to protect himself from the humiliation of poverty, he insults those who try to help him and then further impoverishes himself by giving money and possessions away when he has them. As Paul Auster (1970) says in the Afterword: "Order has disappeared for him; everything has become random. His actions are inspired by nothing but whim and ungovernable urge, the weary frustration of anarchic discontent."

In one section, the protagonist invents a new word but cannot think of what it means, although he knows a lot of things it doesn't mean. Somehow this epitomises the meaning of his life. 

The protagonist echoes Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (with the inner monologue, teetering on the edge of insanity, of the narrator in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground). 

Published in 1890, Hunger heralds modernism. The style is early 'stream of consciousness' and the motif of a protagonist wandering around a city would later be echoed in mature 'stream of consciousness' novels Ulysses by James Joyce and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, though in both of these the timescale is collapsed into a single day. The no-frills narration reminded me of Kafka (eg The Trial). Perhaps the closest parallel I have read are the four novellas by Samuel Beckett: The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, & First Love.

One interesting style feature is that some paragraphs switch tense between past and present:

• "Flies and gnats stuck to the paper and disturbed me; I blew on them to make them go away, then blew harder and harder, but it was no use. The little pests lean backk and make themselves heavy, putting up such a struggle that their thin legs bend They just cannot be made to budge. Having found something to latch onto, they brace their heels against a comma or an unevenness in the paper and stand stock-still until they find it convenient to take off." (part one)
• "The sea stretched away like blue mother-of-pearl, and small birds flew silently from one place to another. A policeman is patrolling his beat some distance off, otherwise there is not a soul to be seen and the entire harbour is quiet." (part two)
• "The darkness had taken possession of my thoughts and didn't leave me alone for a moment. What if I myself were to be dissolved into darkness, made one with it? I sit up in my and flail my arms." (part two)

This confusion between then and now, and the meandering of the protagonist through the city, and the way his attention is always being distracted, seem to represent the way we think.

This sort of book isn't easy to read. As Paul Auster (1970) says in the Afterword, "it is a work in which nothing happens". There is no obvious plot and the skeletal structure seemed to be a spiral into which the protagonist plunges; there was little character development except for the protagonist; the end was abrupt; much of the 'action' seems meaningless and repetitive. Nevertheless, I think it will be one of those books which I will remember for a long time.

Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. A list of other laureates, many of whom have books reviewed in this blog, can be found here.

Selected quotes:

• "Over by the door, where my room was papered with old issues of Morgenbladet, I could see, very clearly, a notice from the Director of Lighthouses, and just left of it, a fat, swelling ad for freshly baked bread" (part one)
• "Autumn had arrived, that lovely cool time of year when everything changes colour and dies." (part one)
• "Where am I to go? I had to be somewhere, after all." (part one)
• "A brooding darkness was all around me. Everything was still, everything. But up aloft soughed the eternal song of wind and weather, that remote, tuneless hum which is never silent. I listened so long to this endless, faint soughing that it began to confuse me; it could only be the symphonies coming from the whirling worlds above me, the stars intoning a hymn ..." (part one)
• "My hunger pains were excruciating and didn't leave me for a moment. I swallowed my saliva again and again to take the edge off, and it seemed to help." (part two)
• "The intelligent poor individual was a much finer observer than the intelligent rich one. The poor individual looks around him at every step, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets ... He is alert and sensitive, he is experienced, his soul has been burned ..." (part three)
• "I didn't want to torture her but did so anyway." (part three)
• "And so too my own conscience bids me ..." (part four) is a sentence he never manages to finish.

 A challenging but incredibly worthwhile read.

July 2022; 217 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God