Over a century old and reads like it was written this morning.
Hunger
A penniless writer wanders Kristiania, growing hungrier and less able to trust his own choices.
168g
Weighs the same as 2× Top Ramen
- Lightweight
- Past Bedtime
- Fiction
It would be entirely plausible to say that modern fiction more or less begins with Hamsun's Hunger, published in 1890. At the very least, the modern psychological novel had its first exemplar here in the tale of a young writer on the brink of starvation in the streets of Oslo, narrating his own unraveling with terrible clarity and dark comedy. It's over a century old and reads like it was written this morning. Not a comfort read — bring it when you'd rather be rattled than soothed.
Field notes
Hamsun drew on his own years of poverty in Kristiania, but Hunger was also a deliberate assault on the nineteenth-century novel. In an essay published the same year, he called for literature to explore the unconscious life of the mind: its irrational impulses, fleeting sensations, and inexplicable contradictions. His starving narrator lies when honesty would serve him, gives money away when he desperately needs food, and sabotages his own chances of survival. Where the realist novel sought to explain human behavior through character and circumstance, Hamsun made the mind itself unpredictable. The resulting portrait of a consciousness at war with itself anticipated much of twentieth-century modernism.