In this way the novel is not so much about one man’s misfortune, as about how a ruthless world can effect inner states and shape identity. We come to better understand how the body can change the mind. We feel the pain inside his anger, glimpse the famine within his madness. Rather than a narrator who “steps off the page,” the reader seemingly steps into the narrator. This intimate treatment of the corporeal is precisely what allows Hamsun to bring inner consciousness into such sharp relief throughout the novel, the body serves as a point of access into operations of the mind.

One possible answer is that Hunger explores not only thoughts, but also their origins and expressions-how the psychological is informed by the physical, and how in turn abstract thoughts can be physically felt. How does Hamsun navigate these scenes in such a way that renders them unforgettable? Why does this book haunt me and so many other readers? Yet for a work of such incredible originality, Hunger is steeped in material that in different hands might fall flatly into cliché or melodrama: A starving artist! Unrequited love! A man who spends his days wandering the streets of Kristiania (Oslo), moaning and weeping, shaking his fist at God. According to Isaac Bashevis Singer, “the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century ‘came out of Gogol’s greatcoat.’” Notably, Hamsun’s innovative use of internal monologue and stream-of-consciousness directly influenced major writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and Charles Bukowski. Telling a semi-autobiographical story of a starving writer’s decent into madness, the novel is celebrated for its deft explorations of the mind.

Norwegian author Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) is widely regarded as one of the pioneering works of Modernist fiction.

Hunger knut hamsun review