About the Author: Knut Hamsun
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920 "for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil". He insisted that the intricacies of the human mind ought to be the main object of modern literature, to describe the "whisper of the blood, and the pleading of the bone marrow". Hamsun pursued his literary program, debuting in 1890 with the psychological novel Hunger.
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Knut Hamsun, Sverre Lyngstad
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Paperback, Published in Feb 1998 by Penguin Classics
ISBN10: 0141180641 | ISBN13: 9780141180649
Page count: 197
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 breakthru in 1890 & set in fin-de-siècle 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 psychophysical decay is detailed. 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 described as "a series of analyses". The protagonist has traits reminiscent of Raskolnikov, whose author Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of Hamsun's main influences. The influence of naturalist authors like Emile Zola is apparent, as is his rejection of the realist tradition.
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