This novel is set in Oslo, Norway. It is the year 1890, and the narrator, who never reveals his name, has come to this city in pursuit of a career as a writer.
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The story stretches over the course of just a few months, in which this young man struggles against starvation, homelessness, and emotional breakdown for the sake of his art.
Existing on the little money he earns with the selling of the occasional article to the local paper, and the pawning of nearly every item on his back, he begins to lose all control of himself and slips into a mad world.
The story of the struggling artist, Hunger draws parallels to the authors own life, and gives the reader an insight into the labor of writing.
The review of this Book prepared by Christopher R Forsley
This book is set in Oslo, Norway in the year 1890. The unnamed narrator is a young man who has come to the city to live and to write. The action takes place over a few months in the late fall, during which time the narrator struggles to write, to eat, to keep a roof over his head, and to make some kind of human connection with the strangers he meets on the street.
The novel opens with the narrator living in a tiny attic room at a bording house. He is forced to pawn one item after another in order to pay rent. He occasionally earns a little money by selling an article to the newspaper, but soon, with the rent overdue, he leaves the bordinghouse to live on the street. He is unable to find a job or sell much of his writing. He starves. He wanders the streets, writes and talks to himself. He begins to wonder if he is going insane. He cuts the buttons off of his coat to sell to the pawnbroker. He gnaws on bones. At last he meets a stranger on the street, a woman, and it seems for a while that he may have found a friend.
After months of starving, it is unclear how the narrator's story will end. He will either die, go insane, fall in love, or else he somehow creates a new option of escape from the city and its hunger. The novel is mostly a character study, with little in the way of a conventional plot.
The review of this Book prepared by Matthew Christensen
Contemptuous of contemporary novels and what he saw as stereotypical plots and empty characters, in 1890 Knut Hamsun wrote "Hunger", which is a searing excursion into the realm of the irrational. In a moment-by-moment internal monologue, Hamsun reveals the profound anguish of a struggling writer facing the possibility of death in a world indifferent to his existence.
The review of this Book prepared by Yevgeny Bazarov
