Hunger

Hunger is a first-person narrative of a young man struggling to establish himself in a strange city, living in shabby lodgings and engaging in spasmodic and manic interactions with various people. The story lies on the threshold of modernism, anticipating many of the dislocations that narrative will be subject to in the decades to come. This new translation seeks to restore the startling freshness and epidermal unease of Hamsun's breakthrough story of 1890, remaining faithful to the style and voice of the text.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 09 November 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press

When I was wandering around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one leaves before it has set its mark on them, I encountered a series of strange and fascinating experiences that left an indelible mark on my soul. Hunger is the first-person story of a young man desperately trying to establish himself in the city as a writer, living in shabby lodgings where he can seldom afford to pay the rent, eating almost nothing, and engaging spasmodically and manically with landladies, eccentric elderly men, policemen, shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, and others on the way. He wanders around the streets, sits on benches trying to write, spends a night locked in a pitch-dark police cell, thinks, slides into remarkably inventive reveries, speculates on his mental health, his ethical comportment, his relation to the divinity, the topics he might write about. The traces of a consistent narrative logic are uncertain and blurred; the voice of the narrator keeps shifting between pragmatic appraisal of his situation, wild fantasies, manic outbursts, anger, and despair. This is a story that lies on the threshold of modernism, anticipating many of the dislocations that narrative will be subject to in the decades to come. This new translation seeks to restore the startling freshness and epidermal unease of Hamsun's breakthrough story of 1890. It remains faithful to the style and voice of the text, the shifts of tense, the indirect free style, and the constant changes of register as the inner monologue moves between poetic sensitivity, wild fantasies, manic outbursts, and hyperbolic emotion. Tore Rem's introduction provides an updated and fresh account of the genesis of Hunger, its book history, and its reception.

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Weight: 162g
Dimension: 128 x 197 x 12 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192862846