ראמאן

"I had to fast. I can’t do anything else. Because I couldn’t find a food which tasted good to me. If I had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else."

...says the titular character of Hamsun fan Franz Kafka's A Hunger Artist. Which reads a bit like one possible interpretation of Hamsun's Hunger - but only one of many.

Hunger is a powerful thing, as our nameless narrator finds out as he drifts through late-19th-century Oslo, starving. Or possibly starving himself. Because as poor as he is, there seems to be either something deliberate or something pathological behind it: he constantly sabotages himself. If he has money, he gives it away and starves. If someone offers him money, he puts his nose up and lies that he has everything he needs. He's constantly acting (or telling us he's acting) like a rich nobleman even when he's dirt poor. Why? Since it's all told from his perspective, and he's clearly not all that reliable, we're left to making up our own explanations. Is he too hung up on false ideas of honour, conscience and goodness, or just not true enough to them? Is he representative of a society needing new, harsher ideals (reading it with the foreknowledge that Hamsun went on to support the Nazi occupation of Norway is a tiny bit unsettling) or one needing more compassion (our narrator as Prince Myshkin in a city full of emotionally and physically starved people)? Is he mentally ill? Is he the only sane person in a world of people needing to wake up? Is he Job unto God, Man unto lack of God, bourgeousie unto poverty, poverty unto oppression, art unto prosaicness, what?

And then there's the city he walks through and the people in it. Which even through his fevered, dizzy, and obviously not completely sane eyes comes across as almost hyper-real. And in the middle our narrator, soaking it all in, deliberately taking all the shit upon himself, deliberately going without so that... what? To what purpose? For what greater (or smaller) good?

It's off-putting. It's engrossing. It's hilarious. It's crushingly depressing. And like hunger itself, it's singular; it's a question that's only permanently put to rest by death. You can't ignore it for long, you can't cure it; it devours, and the more you put into it, the more it howls after more.

Hunger is a powerful thing.