Hunger

KNUT HAMSUNHunger Translated with an Introduction and Explanatory Notes by Sverre Lyngstad A searing excursion into the realm of the irrational First published in Norway in 1890, Hunger probes the depths of consciousness with frightening and gripping power. Contemptuous of novels of his time and what he saw as their stereotypical plots and empty characters, Knut Hamsun embarked on "an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body." Like the works of Dostoyevsky, Hunger marks an extraordinary break with Western literary and humanistic traditions. 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. A hero alienated from society, plagued by the vicissitudes of fate and raging against heaven, is old as literature itself; it is the protagonist's awareness of the absurdity of his situation - and of the human condition in general - that makes him a totally modern figure. As Sverre Lyngstad writes in the Introduction, "Twenty-five years before Kafka created Gregor Samsa, man as an insect, and more than fifty years before Camus popularized the absurd hero as a modern Sisyphus, Hamsun in Hunger did both." WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE