Hunger - BokDraken

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Publicerades 31 januari 2011 av LibriVox.

Hunger (Norwegian: Sult) is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and was published in its final form in 1890. The novel has been hailed as the literary opening of the 20th century and an outstanding example of modern, psychology-driven literature. It hails the irrationality of the human mind in an intriguing and sometimes humorous novel. 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 breakthrough in 1890. Set in late 19th century Kristiania, 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 mental and physical decay are recounted in detail. His ordeal, enhanced by his inability or unwillingness to pursue a professional career, …

Hunger (Norwegian: Sult) is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and was published in its final form in 1890. The novel has been hailed as the literary opening of the 20th century and an outstanding example of modern, psychology-driven literature. It hails the irrationality of the human mind in an intriguing and sometimes humorous novel. 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 breakthrough in 1890. Set in late 19th century Kristiania, 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 mental and physical decay are recounted in detail. 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 himself described as 'a series of analyses.' In many ways, the protagonist of the novel displays traits reminiscent of Raskolnikov, whose creator, Fyodor Dostoevsky, was one of Hamsun's main influences. The influence of naturalist authors such as Emile Zola is apparent in the novel, as is his rejection of the realist tradition.(Introduction by Wikipedia)

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Björn recenserade Hunger av Knut Hamsun

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"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. …

"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.