Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Hunger
    Hunger
    Hunger
    Ebook219 pages4 hours

    Hunger

    By Knut Hamsun

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Knut Hamsun believed that modern literature should express the complexity of the human mind, nowhere is that philosophy more evident than in this stunning modern masterpiece, "Hunger". It tells the story of an unnamed vagrant who stumbles around the streets of Norway's capital looking for food. Hamsun creates a stunning portrait of poverty and a biting social commentary on modern urban life. We follow the vagrant in the story around the town and discover the true depths of his hunger. Hamsun is at his best in this classic of modern literature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2013
    ISBN9781596746640
    Author

    Knut Hamsun

    Born in 1859, Knut Hamsun published a stunning series of novels in the 1890s: Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892) and Pan (1894). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil.

    Read more from Knut Hamsun

    Related to Hunger

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      On Writerly Jealousy

      Dec 5, 2018

      On Writerly Jealousy
      7 min read

    • Article

      Tragic And Ridiculous

      Aug 10, 2020

      Tragic And Ridiculous
      4 min read

    • Article

      Through The Orientalist Looking-glass: An Interview With Moroccan Artist Lalla Essaydi

      Jul 11, 2020

      "In my photography, I explore this [Orientalist] space, whether mental or physical, and interrogate its role in gender identity-making, while engaging with centuries of cultural heritage and artistic practices."

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 243

      Dec 15, 2018

      The Art of Fiction No. 243
      24 min read

    • Article

      Jan Morris

      Jun 15, 2018

      I have always rather envied the poet Ovid, who was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus, you may remember, to a remote place called Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea. There he died, ten years later, and his exile has gone into legend and int

      17 min read

    • Article

      10 Short Story Masters Who Aren’t Russian

      Mar 8, 2021

      Danish king of fairytales, whose original pre-Disneyfcation stories are surprisingly dark and profound. Arguably the greatest American short story chronicler of everyday epiphanies. The New Zealand-born Mansfeld broadened the horizons of the short st

      1 min read

    • Article

      A Poet for the Age of Brexit

      Sep 12, 2017

      A Poet for the Age of Brexit
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Shropshire Lad

      Nov 9, 2022

      A Shropshire Lad
      3 min read

    • Article

      How to Read a Squiggle

      Jul 18, 2017

      How to Read a Squiggle
      6 min read

    • Article

      Forgotten Authors

      Sep 21, 2022

      Forty years ago, Hermann Hesse was everywhere. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, translated into 60 languages, his timeless stories were popular all around the world. And then he disappeared. I read him avidly in my teens and then forgot al

      3 min read

    • Article

      Write What You Know? Identity Politics and Fiction

      Oct 11, 2017

      If it weren’t so illustrative of the loaded identitarian schism at the heart of leftist politics, it would make for the perfect right-wing conspiracy: not only have well-meaning liberals become too PC, they are now roundly dismissed as blinkered by t

      14 min read

    • Article

      Dissident Lit

      Sep 1, 2022

      My sophomore year in college, I took a class on the Russian novel. I remember our goodlooking young professor striding across campus in a long black coat, heads turning in his wake. It was said he looked like Lenin. His eyes burned like coals, his ch

      9 min read

    • Article

      Triumphs of Pseudoscientific Reasoning: On Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Journey to Armenia’

      Oct 8, 2018

      1. In 1922, the same year the USSR entered the world, the poet Osip Mandelstam moved to Moscow, hoping to establish himself as a leading voice of the Socialist utopia he’d supported since his teens. Instead, he found himself an outcast. In early Sovi

      10 min read

    • Article

      Writing In The Ruins

      May 16, 2023

      Writing In The Ruins
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Visionary Memoirs of Péter Nádas

      Jan 10, 2024

      'Shimmering Details' is a delicate fusion, supplementing the high-modernist realism of Proust and Musil with an expressionist’s commitment to the distortions generated by strong feeling. The post The Visionary Memoirs of Péter Nádas appeared first on

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Hunger

    4/5

    1,134 ratings46 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      A strange, lyrical book that presents hunger as a gateway to madness.
    • 5/5
      What an engaging feverish read! This novel does not read like it's 130 years old nor like it was translated. Very quick easy read, a page turner despite there being essentially no plot. The unnamed main character narrator borders on being annoying and exasperating, but in the end I felt mostly sympathy for him. Clearly mentally ill and constantly struggling with poverty and starvation, he makes one bad decision after another but it seems they derive largely from his last attempts to hold onto dignity and self-respect. A timely or maybe timeless tale.
    • 5/5
      Before Jay McInerney, J.D. Salinger and Albert Camus came Knut Hamsun. Hunger is a masterpeice study of human nature and the absurdity of life. This book is #1 on my all time favorites list.
    • 4/5
      This is an older novel, written in the 1930's or thereabouts. It was originally in Norwegian, and the author later won a Nobel Prize for Growth of the Soil, which I haven't started yet.All the reviews said this was a disturbing novel of isolation. It was, and is, fascinating.The protagonist, writing in the first person, describes his life as a writer who has suffered hunger and starvation long enough that his mental faculties are injured beyond repair (it would seem). He writes occasionally for a newspaper, makes enough to get by a few days if his story is purchased, or goes without food for days if it doesn't get picked up. The malnourishment causes a variety of problems, from extreme mood swings to paranoia to hallucinations. He takes to chewing on wood shavings, then stones, then a piece of his jacket pocket to try and defy the hunger. When he does eat, he is usually ill from the food. He gets to a point where he visualizes taking a bite out of his hand to eat, and does so. He comes out of his trance when he does, but it shows how far out of reality he became. A few times he either finds money or is given some by a benevolent person; he simply can't accept this, and gives it away.The insanity is beyond anything I imagined. Perhaps because it's told in first person style, where every thought and inkling is described and explored. The people he harasses, the fights he starts, his visions of his own talent (highly inflated) and his paranoia are frightening. He has tremendous pride, not wanting to take help from others, even when he hasn't eaten for days. One shopkeeper, realizing his situation, actually pretends to make a mistake and gives him too much change...rather than take this for food, he gives it to a more 'impoverished' soul than him. It's not that he's selfless, far from it. His pride consumes him. He can't bear to imagine anyone thinking badly of him, even when he is selling off his clothing and the buttons on his coat. He even has the opportunity to make use of a homeless shelter to get food and a bed, and he refuses rather than to look bad.Physically, the starvation manifests itself in losing his hair in clumps, a peeling skin rash and raw skin from his dirty clothes rubbing his skin, blackened nails, lost teeth, and a chronic dizziness and fever.I was amazed in that while he did write to earn money, he never seemed to try and seriously find a job. And he never seemed to consider stealing, which would have occurred to me before I would be chewing on stones. Again, it wasn't out of honor, it was about his perception of what others would think of him, and he wanted to be thought of as honorable, even though he wasn't. He was truly isolated. No family is mentioned, his only friends are actually acquaintances that avoid him because of his strange behavior and pathetic appearance, exactly what he was hoping to avoid. I couldn't help but wonder what kind of child he was (okay, I know it's fictional but I still think this way) and what made him so prideful and vain. It's said that everyone has a story they tell themselves about themselves. How they account for their choices and actions in their own head, and how they justify or condemn themself. In this I wondered, since I could clearly see the story he was telling himself, and how inaccurate it was from his reality, how far off is my perception of myself? Is the way I think as completely out of touch? Is my inner voice as flawed and stubborn as his?
    • 4/5
      I came to Knut Hamsun by way of George Egerton. Two writers few modern readers have heard of outside of academia and Norway. George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright) wrote two volumes of wonderful short stories, Keynotes and Discords, in the late 1890's and became one of the prominent figures in the feminist literary movement known as the "New Women." She had a romantic attachment with Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, whom she listed as a strong influence on her own writing. In fact, she translated his first novel, Hunger, into English. Mr. Hamsun went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920, while Ms. Egerton faded into obscurity until modern critics such as Elaine Showalter rediscovered her work. I found her through Ms. Showalter's book A Literature of Their Own. Hunger is based on the ten years Mr. Hamsun spent in Christiania, now modern Oslo, trying to become a writer, earning very little money for the few articles and stories he could sell, and going without food much of the time. The novel's subject is hunger and its effects on the psychological and physical state of those who endure it. As such, it's an excellent work. Because Mr. Hamsun believed that the subject of literature should be the intricacies of the human mind, Hunger focuses on the experience and thoughts of its un-named narrator almost to the exclusion of other characters. There are other people in the book--the editor at the magazine, a landlady, an old friend who tries to offer help, a woman he meets on the streets a few times--but these characters are of little interest to Hamsun and to the reader. What interests Hamsun is the narrator's state of mind, the delusions his hunger causes, and his own desire to keep up appearances as he insists on surviving only by writing instead of taking on a profession which he feels his beneath a man of his sensibilities.Photo of author from WikipediaHunger is interesting reading, and this insistence on writing as the sole source of income eventually worked for Hamsun himself, eventually. But midway through the book, one starts wishing the narrator would simply get a job. I suppose it may be of those moments when a modern perspective intrudes on the experience of reading classic literature, but I suspect many of Mr. Hamsun's contemporaries had the same reaction. Even Franz Kafka took a job with an insurance agency, for heaven's sake. No one ever accused him of selling out.
    • 5/5
      So realistic, I thought I was starving. Very compelling.
    • 3/5
      As per usual I skipped the introduction until I'd finished (they're always full of spoilers) though wish I'd taken the time to read it up front, as it summarises the entire book in half a page, making the point that there's no plot and the characters--other than the mildly insane protagonist--are inconsequential. I suppose I can see why it's supposedly influential (it breaks a few c19th literary moulds) but it wasn't my bag.
    • 5/5
      ‘Andreas Tangen’ is the fictitious name our nameless protagonist gives to the Officer on Duty the night he finds himself cold, wet, famished, keyless (not to say clueless, and consequently without even a room to go home to) and nearing delirium. His solution? To seek room and board in the city jail whence he can contemplate the rain falling on the outside.


      I only recently (July 17) read and reviewed Jack London’s Martin Eden. Knut Hamsun’s semiautobiographical Hunger could well serve as a companion piece to London’s equally semiautobiographical novel. And neither would be out of place sitting alongside Dostoyevsky’s Notes from (the) Underground.


      “‘I will read it,’ he (the editor of a city paper in Christiania) said, taking it. ‘Of course everything you write will cost you labor; the only trouble with your work perhaps is excitability. If you could only be a little more composed! There is too much fever all the time. Anyway, I’ll read it.’ Then he turned to his desk work” (p. 95).


      Our anonymous protagonist’s “excitability” is quite understandable given his uncertain living conditions and constant state of hunger. And Robert Bly has done an excellent job of translating (I assume) and injecting (I don't assume) that same excitability into Hamsun’s Norwegian prose. For anyone who’s ever been homeless and felt prolonged hunger pangs for the sake of his art (or through the sheer absence of work), Hamsun’s words and Bly’s translation of those words may ring truer than any of us would care to remember. The only thing worse? I can still recall Luis Alberto Urrea’s description (in The Devil’s Highway) of what occurs when people emerge in the Arizona desert after having walked up from Mexico (or from points even further south) … and are out of water. (What happens to the human animal as it passes through the several stages of extreme dehydration is something you may be tempted to read about, but never want to actually witness.)


      In any case, our protagonist’s problem is the title of this book — and it never disappears. With hunger, comes a slow insanity. It’s not easy to read about, but both Hamsun and Bly do a superb job of portraying it in all of its insidious glory. This is indeed a case of afflictio gratia artis (suffering for the sake of art).


      RRB
      09/10/14
      Brooklyn, NY
    • 5/5
      It was almost painful to read the narrator's descent into madness - I cringed at certain points, hoping he would just use the money he had been given, or beg for bread, or do something to alleviate his condition even though he considered it below him. Hamsun's prose is utterly fantastic, though - the page or two where he curses God is just incredible.
    • 3/5
      Definitely a stream-of-consciousness narrative. Hard to follow only because the protagonist is hard to follow. You want him to succeed, and you believe he can succeed, but he doesn't. Frustrating and disheartening.
    • 4/5
      Strange, compelling book. Young Norwegian writer starves in Kristiana.But, the weirdest thing about this edition is the appendix, by its Norwegian translator. This consists of an angry, academically detailed documentation of his outrage at a previous translation. I know nothing of any of this, I'm prepared to believe him. But why is it included here?
    • 4/5
      An extremely well written work- the author's direct, simple and straightforward writing style makes for an appealing read on the fascinating trials and tribulations of a young man fallen into poverty, and hunger. But for the disappointing ending, I would have ranked this even higher.
    • 5/5
      Wow. That was powerful. I have to write a lot of reviews this weekend - this will be one of them.

      I find it ironic that I read this while the RNC circus is going on in FL. I wish I could force everyone there to read this book and live it. just for a short while.
    • 4/5
      Someday I'll actually sit down and write a real book review and when I do, it might just be on this book. Hunger struck a chord in me. Maybe it's all the Gogol and Dostoevsky I've read and loved over the years. This book is indeed disturbing and describes hunger in such detail that it makes the reader feel the desperation, feel the hunger. There are scenes that a reader will likely never forget.
    • 5/5
      A slim volume, a novel about an artist who is literally starving, effecting a rare glimpse into an obsessive mind. Hamsun won a Nobel prize in the 30's, but his reputation has been tarnished for his Nazi sympathies during the second world war. This is a worthwhile book.
    • 3/5
      Charles Bukowski said that this was one of his favorite books, and old Charles didn't give praise lightly. The book was certainly ahead of its time, reading like something from the height of modernism, rather than the 1890s. I understand why Bukowski like it. He always held to the ideal of the poor, mad artist and this book is a psychological study of a poor, insane writer. The protagonist is so irrational and insane at times it's just irritating. Was he insane because he was poor and hungry, or was he poor and hungry because he was insane (and in my opinion an idiot)? I don't know. I respect the book, but it's not a favorite of mine.
    • 5/5
      I found this to be simultaneously an easy read and a difficult one. It's a slim book, and the language is straightforward, which made it easy. But the descriptions of being hungry and hopeless were often oppressively vivid. The narrator is a writer; he occasionally gets pieces published in the local newspaper, but the money never lasts long. Almost before the euphoria from getting paid fades, he is broke and starving again. He pawns everything he owns. He becomes homeless. He tries to get a regular job, but a minor error means he isn't considered. He tries to concentrate, to write, to bring himself out of his hunger-induced confusion long enough to sell another piece, but it's hard to focus.Hamsun does an incredible job describing the feeling of being hungry, and the results of starvation on one's mind. But more than that, he gets at the very essence of the dehumanizing feelings of being poor, of finding oneself an outcast from society. He makes the reader feel the despair and devaluation, while still keeping alive the glimmers of hope that the narrator maintains. It's a powerful look into what it is like to be on the bottom of the ladder.Recommended for: anyone who's ever felt like they just couldn't catch a break, people not on a dietQuote: Whatever could be the reason that things would not brighten up for me? Was I not just as much entitled to live as anyone else?
    • 4/5
      Hunger by Knut Hamsun is a loosely autobiographical novel about a young man down on his luck, starving to death and the slow decline as he sells off bits and pieces of his life to the Uncle. While he wanders about the town he runs into several characters. This unnamed narrator is quite proud and can barely allow anyone to help him. He would rather give away than receive. It reminded me a bit of Dostoyevsky and also a bit of Ulysses as the main character wanders about the town meeting up with various people. This is a turn of the century psychological driven novel and explores the irrationality of the mind. Of Christiana (Oslo) the protagonist states, “no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there. The contrast is the outer respectability, mental and physical decay. Symbols of the decay are the words starved, winding sheets, Autumn, die, room compared to a sinister coffin. The winding sheets (for wrapping the deceased body) repeats several times.
    • 2/5
      I'm sorry but I disagree with what seems to be the general consensus on this book. I read the 1920 edition with a translation by George Egerton and that may very well be the problem. A translated piece of fiction is subject to the skill and finesse of the translator, and perhaps the person to blame here is not the author but the translator.In any case, I found Hunger to be a bit meandering and frustrating. I don't really know what the Norwegian society of the time described in the novel was like but it certainly did not have much to recommend for it. The scenes where the author describes chewing on wood shavings to dampen his pangs of hunger and where he throws up a perfectly healthy (and necessary) meal because his body can't process the food are almost depressing.I found some of the protagonists actions difficult to understand, for example why doesn't he just beg? Or steal? Or engage in some sort of manual labor? Why is there not any friend our relative who will throw some scraps his way? Surely the concept of dying from hunger must have been a rare event in nineteenth century Norway? Or was it?Another hindrance in relating to the book was the fact that I have no idea what "half a soverign" or half a crown could buy in that time. The romance half way through the novel also did not quite make much sense to me, did I miss something there?The one thought the book forced was about the role of food and money and the bigger question of why we work. Do we work only to put food in our bellies? Certainly not. But the first requirement that must be met with the fruit of our labor is the filling of our bellies. The book however doesn't really make that (or any other) case with much conviction. The dénouement is also almost anticlimactic.I was left unimpressed. Not recommended.
    • 4/5
      A Norwegian classic I finally got around to reading. The book is about a struggling writer who runs out of money and goes hungry. It didn't take me long to start feeling desperately sorry for this man. The really raw way in which his desperate hunger and, as a result, often miserable and sometimes deranged state of mind is described, made this book a very uncomfortable, but also a very thought-provoking read. Reading about the main character's unwillingness to ask for or accept charity out of pride and a sense of personal dignity genuinely frustrated me. I found myself urging the character to steal, rather than preserving his lawfulness at the risk of dying of hunger.Unfortunately, even though this book was published in 1890, it remains relevant. It will stay relevant as long as there are people who have to go hungry. Through telling a story it makes a very powerful point. No moral is stated, nor is any lecture given. It is just a story. A story which serves as a poignant reminder that no matter how uncomfortable one might be made to feel by that person sitting on the street, asking for ones money, one is extremely privileged to be the one being asked.
    • 4/5
      I really don't know what I think about this Norwegian classic by Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun. Even my rating is a bit of a guess!I found this very easy to read and the effects of extreme poverty on the main character were fascinating to behold. But I found this unnamed character very odd in places. I could understand to some extent his pride leading him to doing some things that could be seen as foolish but some of his pranks were bizarre.
    • 4/5
      Translated from Norwegian by Sverre Lyngstad. This classic was written in 1890 and is a simple story about a struggling but talented writer who often finds himself homeless, and starving for days on end. The writing is astonishing, and it is a joy to read.Much of the book was poignant, but the brashness and creativity of the affable protagonist also produced many laugh-out-loud moments. And then quite honestly, the young man's pride and obsession with being honourable and honest infuriated me at times – it caused him such grief. In spite of the dark subject matter, this was a light, quick read, and it is a book I recommend highly.A note on the author: The 150th celebration of Knut Hamsun’s birth was widely celebrated in Norway in 2009. Many negative things have been said about his political leanings, but I was interested to learn that he had virtually no education and at 12, lived with an uncle who beat him regularly. He escaped from this man’s clutches as soon as he could and took to the road, doing menial jobs to survive, often experiencing virtual starvation during that time. So the book may be somewhat autobiographical. A wonderful read.
    • 3/5
      What a rollercoaster! Reading this book took a lot out of me. Not because it's hard to read, but because the main character's (unnamed) constant changes in mood. He'll be riding on clouds at first, then he's acting as if he's the scourge of the earth. You really get caught up in it, and that all points back to the author's ability. The ending was a little abiguous to me, though. I don't like leaving my characters to an uncertain future.
    • 5/5
      I approached this influential work with high expectations, and i was not disappointed. The novel is raw, stark, spare -- the effect is visceral. It is psychological realism at its best. We follow a short phase in the life of an impoverished but talented young writer in the streets of Christiana (Oslo) in the late 19th century, who is reduced by his condition to borderline madness. Indeed it seemed that his flashes of brilliance are occasioned by extreme starvation when delirium brings on inspiration and creativity. We witness his misadventures at finding work or something to eat, his humorous encounters with some characters, his sometimes infuriatingly schizophrenic behavior, his spinning of a small world around him rushing from heights of ecstatic revelry and hope to pityingly low depths of self-pity and mockery, and back, always in a mad dash. His is a complex character -- irritatingly self-possessed and proud but also generous to a fault, literally giving away the last shirt on his back. In an unforgettable passage, he challenges God for the injustice of withholding opportunities from a toiling, hardworking, and well-intentioned person as he. We feel his isolation, his torment, self-deception, his caprices, his small joys, his passions, his dignity. He is a man destined to write, and he lives because he writes. With such themes, the novel could easily have been dark and depressing, but it is not. There is plenty of comic relief and the mood is exhilarating, fast-paced, rebellious. The character reminded me of Dostoevky's Raskolnikov but without the drama. Definitely a must-read.
    • 3/5
      I probably didn't read this closely enough to say anything particularly intelligent about it. It has no plot, no character development, and very little in the way of logical organization of any kind. This is all clearly intentional: a literary polemic against the three volume novel that proceeds in a stately manner towards marriage or death. So if you've only ever read Victorian era novels, you'll probably be greatly shocked at this. If you've read anything else, you won't be.
      More interesting than the differences between this and, say, Great Expectations are the differences between this and all the stuff everyone compares it to: twentieth century absurdist or existentialist fiction. The translator of this edition says that the protagonist experiences Heidegger's 'authentic being towards death'. Uh... claptrap. What's fascinating about this book is that, unlike the quasi-Heideggerian anti-heroes of Camus etc, the hungry man is deeply, deeply moral. The translator suggests that this generosity is just a 'temperamental tic'. It seems to me to be much more than that, though. Here is a man who, although starving to death, is willing to give away any money he actually gets his hands on to others, simply out of compassion. He suffers for those who are beaten down even when he's the most beaten down of the lot. He's essentially a saintly aristocratic romantic artist, without the income that let most saints, aristocrats and romantic artists swan around the world doing their thing. If he's crazy, it's a good madness. If he's sane, he's a genuine moral hero, despite his occasional peccadilloes. I suspect the best comparison might be to ancient cynics who embraced poverty and lived disgusting lives as a mockery of social norms. Except this modern cynic is aware that social norms are all we've got: he just lives up to the ideals his society produced, while the society itself goes on whoring, materialistic and angry.
    • 4/5
      written in a straightforward way, in the first person, it ends up being liberating - whether you're going to eat or not brings reality into focus - cuts to the chase
    • 3/5
      One of the things I've discovered in recent years is that without other characters for your protagonist to interact with, your story can get old very quickly. I certainly found that to be the case with 'Hunger'. Although it's relatively short I struggled through most of it because it was not fun to be in the narrator's head. His troubled relationship with the woman he calls Ylayali is captivating, though it only lasts a few pages.
    • 5/5
      Hamsun got mixed up with that blighter in the extreme, Hitler, this has doubtless harmed his reputation. Reader. don't let this prevent you from looking at Hamsun. He is well worth the effort.
    • 5/5
      This novel is stark, emotionally evocative and on a primal level, terrifying. If you dare, enter the psyche of the narrator, a writer, who waivers between abject poverty and death. Suffer along with him as Hamsun's brilliant writing takes the reader to the brink of utter madness, sublime passion, and death by starvation. In the end, what is the hunger for in addition to food? You will have to suffer the throes of despair and humiliation of the protagonist to find out!
    • 4/5
      A stark portrait of hunger and its effects on the psyche, this book follows an unnamed narrator as he experiences periods of near starvation in 1890s Oslo (then known as Christiana). An author by trade, the young man struggles to write while falling in and out of starvation-induced madness. He is at turns homeless and penniless. The reader is treated to his inner life and the social consequences he suffers secondary to his impoverished status. The reader would be hard-pressed to find a more realistic portrayal of the psyche of one who knows hunger on a daily basis.

    Book preview

    Hunger - Knut Hamsun

    HUNGER

    BY KNUT HAMSUN

    TRANSLATED BY W. W. WORSTER

    A Digireads.com Book

    Digireads.com Publishing

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-3125-9

    Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-59674-664-0

    This edition copyright © 2011

    Please visit www.digireads.com

    CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTION

    PART I

    PART II

    PART III

    PART IV

    INTRODUCTION

    Since the death of Ibsen and Strindberg, Hamsun is undoubtedly the foremost creative writer of the Scandinavian countries. Those approaching most nearly to his position are probably Selma Lagerlöf in Sweden and Henrik Pontoppidan in Denmark. Both these, however, seem to have less than he of that width of outlook, validity of interpretation and authority of tone that made the greater masters what they were.

    His reputation is not confined to his own country or the two Scandinavian sister nations. It spread long ago over the rest of Europe, taking deepest roots in Russia, where several editions of his collected works have already appeared, and where he is spoken of as the equal of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The enthusiasm of this approval is a characteristic symptom that throws interesting light on Russia as well as on Hamsun.

    Hearing of it, one might expect him to prove a man of the masses, full of keen social consciousness. Instead, he must be classed as an individualistic romanticist and a highly subjective aristocrat, whose foremost passion in life is violent, defiant deviation from everything average and ordinary. He fears and flouts the dominance of the many, and his heroes, who are nothing but slightly varied images of himself, are invariably marked by an originality of speech and action that brings them close to, if not across, the borderline of the eccentric.

    In all the literature known to me, there is no writer who appears more ruthlessly and fearlessly himself, and the self thus presented to us is as paradoxical and rebellious as it is poetic and picturesque. Such a nature, one would think, must be the final blossoming of powerful hereditary tendencies, converging silently through numerous generations to its predestined climax. All we know is that Hamsun's forebears were sturdy Norwegian peasant folk, said only to be differentiated from their neighbours by certain artistic preoccupations that turned one or two of them into skilled craftsmen. More certain it is that what may or may not have been innate was favoured and fostered and exaggerated by physical environment and early social experiences.

    Hamsun was born on Aug. 4, 1860, in one of the sunny valleys of central Norway. From there his parents moved when he was only four to settle in the far northern district of Lofoden—that land of extremes, where the year, and not the day, is evenly divided between darkness and light; where winter is a long dreamless sleep, and summer a passionate dream without sleep; where land and sea meet and intermingle so gigantically that man is all but crushed between the two—or else raised to titanic measures by the spectacle of their struggle.

    The Northland, with its glaring lights and black shadows, its unearthly joys and abysmal despairs, is present and dominant in every line that Hamsun ever wrote. In that country his best tales and dramas are laid. By that country his heroes are stamped wherever they roam. Out of that country they draw their principal claims to probability. Only in that country do they seem quite at home. Today we know, however, that the pathological case represents nothing but an extension of perfectly normal tendencies. In the same way we know that the miraculous atmosphere of the Northland serves merely to develop and emphasize traits that lie slumbering in men and women everywhere. And on this basis the fantastic figures created by Hamsun relate themselves to ordinary humanity as the microscopic enlargement of a cross section to the living tissues. What we see is true in everything but proportion.

    The artist and the vagabond seem equally to have been in the blood of Hamsun from the very start. Apprenticed to a shoemaker, he used his scant savings to arrange for the private printing of a long poem and a short novel produced at the age of eighteen, when he was still signing himself Knud Pedersen Hamsund. This done, he abruptly quit his apprenticeship and entered on that period of restless roving through trades and continents which lasted until his first real artistic achievement with Hunger, In 1888-90. It has often been noted that practically every one of Hamsun's heroes is of the same age as he was then, and that their creator takes particular pain to accentuate this fact. It is almost as if, during those days of feverish literary struggle, he had risen to heights where he saw things so clearly that no subsequent experience could add anything but occasional details.

    Before he reached those heights, he had tried life as coal-heaver and school teacher, as road-mender and surveyor's attendant, as farm hand and streetcar conductor, as lecturer and free-lance journalist, as tourist and emigrant. Twice he visited this country during the middle eighties, working chiefly on the plains of North Dakota and in the streets of Chicago. Twice during that time he returned to his own country and passed through the experiences pictured in Hunger, before, at last, he found his own literary self and thus also a hearing from the world at large. While here, he failed utterly to establish any sympathetic contact between himself and the new world, and his first book after his return in 1888 was a volume of studies named The Spiritual Life of Modern America, which a prominent Norwegian critic once described as a masterpiece of distorted criticism. But I own a copy of this book, the fly-leaf of which bears the following inscription in the author's autograph:

    "A youthful work. It has ceased to represent my opinion of America.

    May 28, 1903. Knut Hamsun."

    In its original form, Hunger was merely a sketch, and as such it appeared in 1888 in a Danish literary periodical, New Earth. It attracted immediate widespread attention to the author, both on account of its unusual theme and striking form. It was a new kind of realism that had nothing to do with photographic reproduction of details. It was a professedly psychological study that had about as much in common with the old-fashioned conceptions of man's mental activities as the delirious utterances of a fever patient. It was life, but presented in the Impressionistic temper of a Gauguin or Cezanne. On the appearance of the completed novel in 1890, Hamsun was greeted as one of the chief heralds of the neo-romantlc movement then spreading rapidly through the Scandinavian north and finding typical expressions not only in the works of theretofore unknown writers, but in the changed moods of masters like Ibsen and Bjornson and Strindberg.

    It was followed two years later by Mysteries, which pretends to be a novel, but which may be better described as a delightfully irresponsible and defiantly subjective roaming through any highway or byway of life or letters that happened to take the author's fancy at the moment of writing. Some one has said of that book that in its abrupt swingings from laughter to tears, from irreverence to awe, from the ridiculous to the sublime, one finds the spirits of Dostoyevsky and Mark Twain blended.

    The novels Editor Lynge and New Earth, both published in 1893, were social studies of Christiania's Bohemia and chiefly characterized by their violent attacks on the men and women exercising the profession which Hamsun had just made his own. Then came Pan in 1894, and the real Hamsun, the Hamsun who ever since has moved logically and with increasing authority to The Growth of the Soil, stood finally revealed. It is a novel of the Northland, almost without a plot, and having its chief interest in a primitively spontaneous man's reactions to a nature so overwhelming that it makes mere purposeless existence seem a sufficient end in itself. One may well question whether Hamsun has ever surpassed the purely lyrical mood of that book, into which he poured the ecstatic dreams of the little boy from the south as, for the first time, he saw the forestclad northern mountains bathing their feet in the ocean and their crowns in the light of a never-setting sun. It is a wonderful paean to untamed nature and to the forces let loose by it within the soul of man.

    Like most of the great writers over there, Hamsun has not confined himself to one poetic mood or form, but has tried all of them. From the line of novels culminating in Pan, he turned suddenly to the drama, and in 1895 appeared his first play, At the Gates of the Kingdom. It was the opening drama of a trilogy and was followed by The Game of Life in 1896 and Sunset Glow in 1898. The first play is laid in Christiania, the second in the Northland, and the third in Christiania again. The hero of all three is Ivar Kareno, a student and thinker who is first presented to us at the age of 29, then at 39, and finally at 50. His wife and several other characters accompany the central figure through the trilogy, of which the lesson seems to be that every one is a rebel at 30 and a renegade at 50. But when Kareno, the irreconcilable rebel of At the Gates of the Kingdom, the heaven-storming truth-seeker of The Game of Life, and the acclaimed radical leader in the first acts of Sunset Glow, surrenders at last to the powers that be in order to gain a safe and sheltered harbor for his declining years, then another man of 29 stands ready to denounce him and to take up the rebel cry of youth to which he has become a traitor. Hamsun's ironical humor and whimsical manner of expression do more than the plot itself to knit the plays into an organic unit, and several of the characters are delightfully drawn, particularly the two women who play the greatest part in Kareno's life: his wife Eline, and Teresita, who is one more of his many feminine embodiments of the passionate and changeable Northland nature. Any attempt to give a political tendency to the trilogy must be held wasted. Characteristically, Kareno is a sort of Nietzschean rebel against the victorious majority, and Hamsun's seemingly cynical conclusions stress man's capacity for action rather than the purposes toward which that capacity may be directed.

    Of three subsequent plays, Vendt the Monk, (1903), Queen Tamara (1903) and At the Mercy of Life (1910), the first mentioned is by far the most remarkable. It is a verse drama in eight acts, centred about one of Hamsun's most typical vagabond heroes. The monk Vendt has much in common with Peer Gynt without being in any way an imitation or a duplicate. He is a dreamer in revolt against the world's alleged injustice, a rebel against the very powers that invisibly move the universe, and a passionate lover of life who in the end accepts it as a joyful battle and then dreams of the long peace to come. The vigor and charm of the verse proved a surprise to the critics when the play was published, as Hamsun until then had given no proof of any poetic gift in the narrower sense.

    From 1897 to 1912 Hamsun produced a series of volumes that simply marked a further development of the tendencies shown in his first novels: Siesta, short stories, 1897; Victoria a novel with a charming love story that embodies the tenderest note in his production, 1898; In Wonderland, travelling sketches from the Caucasus, 1903; Brushwood, short stories, 1903; The Wild Choir, a collection of poems, 1904; Dreamers, a novel, 1904; Struggling Life, short stories and travelling sketches, 1905; Beneath the Autumn Star a novel, 1906; Benoni, and Rosa, two novels forming to some extent sequels to Pan, 1908; A Wanderer Plays with Muted Strings, a novel, 1909; and The Last Joy, a shapeless work, half novel and half mere uncoordinated reflections, 1912.

    The later part of this output seemed to indicate a lack of development, a failure to open up new vistas, that caused many to fear that the principal contributions of Hamsun already lay behind him. Then appeared in 1913 a big novel, Children of the Time, which in many ways struck a new note, although led up to by Rosa and Benoni. The horizon is now wider, the picture broader. There is still a central figure, and still he possesses many of the old Hamsun traits, but he has crossed the meridian at last and become an observer rather than a fighter and doer. Nor is he the central figure to the same extent as Lieutenant Glahn in Pan or Kareno in the trilogy. The life pictured is the life of a certain spot of ground—Segelfoss manor, and later the town of Segelfoss—rather than that of one or two isolated individuals. One might almost say that Hamsun's vision has become social at last, were it not for his continued accentuation of the irreconcilable conflict between the individual and the group.

    Segelfoss Town in 1915 and The Growth of the Soil—the title ought to be The Earth's Increase—in 1918 continue along the path Hamsun entered by Children of the Time. The scene is laid in his beloved Northland, but the old primitive life is going—going even in the outlying districts, where the pioneers are already breaking ground for new permanent settlements. Business of a modern type has arrived, and much of the quiet humor displayed in these the latest and maturest of Hamsun's works springs from the spectacle of its influence on the natives, whose hands used always to be in their pockets, and whose credulity in face of the improbable was only surpassed by their unwillingness to believe anything reasonable. Still the life he pictures is largely primitive, with nature as man's chief antagonist, and to us of the crowded cities it brings a charm of novelty rarely found in books today. With it goes an understanding of human nature which is no less deep-reaching because it is apt to find expression in whimsical or flagrantly paradoxical forms.

    Hamsun has just celebrated his sixtieth birthday anniversary. He is as strong and active as ever, burying himself most of the time on his little estate in the heart of the country that has become to such a peculiar extent his own. There is every reason to expect from him works that may not only equal but surpass the best of his production so far. But even if such expectations should prove false, the body of his work already accomplished is such, both in quantity and quality, that he must perforce be placed in the very front rank of the world's living writers. To the English-speaking world he has so far been made known only through the casual publication at long intervals of a few of his books: Hunger, Fictoria and Shallow Soil (rendered in the list above as New Earth). There is now reason to believe that this negligence will be remedied, and that soon the best of Hamsun's work will be available in English. To the American and English publics it ought to prove a welcome tonic because of its very divergence from what they commonly feed on. And they may safely look to Hamsun as a thinker as well as a poet and laughing dreamer, provided they realize from the start that his thinking is suggestive rather than conclusive, and that he never meant it to be anything else.

    EDWIN BJÖRKMAN.

    PART I

    It was during the time I wandered about and starved in Christiania: Christiania, this singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there.

    I was lying awake in my attic and I heard a clock below strike six. It was already broad daylight, and people had begun to go up and down the stairs. By the door where the wall of the room was papered with old numbers of the Morgenbladet, I could distinguish clearly a notice from the Director of Lighthouses, and a little to the left of that an inflated advertisement of Fabian Olsens' new-baked bread.

    The instant I opened my eyes I began, from sheer force of habit, to think if I had anything to rejoice over that day. I had been somewhat hard-up lately, and one after the other of my belongings had been taken to my Uncle. I had grown nervous and irritable. A few times I had kept my bed for the day with vertigo. Now and then, when luck had favoured me, I had managed to get five shillings for a feuilleton from some newspaper or other.

    It grew lighter and lighter, and I took to reading the advertisements near the door. I could even make out the grinning lean letters of winding-sheets to be had at Miss Andersen's on the right of it. That occupied me for a long while. I heard the clock below strike eight as I got up and put on my clothes.

    I opened the window and looked out. From where I was standing I had a view of a clothes, line and an open field. Farther away lay the ruins of a burnt-out smithy, which some labourers were busy clearing away. I leant with my elbows resting on the window-frame and gazed into open space. It promised to be a clear day—autumn, that tender, cool time of the year, when all things change their colour, and die, had come to us. The ever-increasing noise in the streets lured me out. The bare room, the floor of which rocked up and down with every step I took across it, seemed like a gasping, sinister coffin. There was no proper fastening to the door, either, and no stove. I used to lie on my socks at night to dry them a little by the morning. The only thing I had to divert myself with was a little red rocking-chair, in which I used to sit in the evenings and doze and muse on all manner of things. When it blew hard, and the door below stood open, all kinds of eerie sounds moaned up through the floor and from out the walls, and the Morgenbladet near the door was rent in strips a span long.

    I stood up and searched through a bundle in the corner by the bed for a bite for breakfast, but finding nothing, went back to the window.

    God knows, thought I, if looking for employment will ever again avail me aught. The frequent re pulses, half-promises, and curt Noes, the cherished, deluded hopes, and fresh endeavours that always resulted in nothing had done my courage to death. As a last resource, I had applied for a place as debt collector, but I was too late, and, besides, I could not have found the fifty shillings demanded as security. There was always something or another in my way. I had even offered to enlist in the Fire Brigade. There we stood and waited in the vestibule, some half-hundred men, thrusting our chests out to give an idea of strength and bravery, whilst an inspector walked up and down and scanned the applicants, felt their arms, and put one question or another to them. Me, he passed by, merely shaking his head, saying I was rejected on account of my sight. I applied again without my glasses, stood there with knitted brows, and made my eyes as sharp as needles, but the man passed me by again with a smile; he had recognized me. And, worse than all, I could no longer apply for a situation in the garb of a respectable man.

    How regularly and steadily things had gone downhill with me for a long time, till, in the end, I was

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1