Review of Knut Hamsun's "Hunger"

Just a quick one; I'm reading Growth of the Soil at the minute and have loads to say about it, but I read Hunger first and just want to sketch down a few things about that before they're gone from my mind.

This book was a gift, and I had not heard of it and knew nothing about the author except for his name and a vague recollection that he had something to do with the codification of written Norwegian. I was taken aback when I received it and did not quite know what to do with this object that was in my hands.

It is a book about an unemployed middle class character who struggles to acquire food in Victorian Oslo.

After reading a few pages I was completely hooked. At first I did not enjoy it; I was fully rapt but it was more a grotesque appeal than pleasure that I was experiencing. In the anonymous narrator (almost the only character in the book) I saw a mirror of myself, showing me my own madness in uncomfortable detail. At first, I understood this work as an extremely sophisticated portrayal of the realities of a certain class of mental illness (though I would not try and categorise it). Later, I came to see how shockingly innovative it is. I am still struggling to accept that this novel was written as early as 1888: if it were a new novel published today I expect people would still be astonished by its artfulness.

I find myself still meditating on it, and doubtless I'll come to understand it better in time. Already, however, I have repeatedly caught myself acting out weaker versions of the hero's oddities of behaviour and have come to understand myself and others a little better than I had before I read this work. It is as if I have been granted a few additional algorithms for understanding life. My universe is slightly more complex, yet better understood than it was before. Truly this is a valuable book.

I read the recent Sverre Lyngstad translation, which was excellent.

One more thing I would like to jot down is the way in which, towards the end of the book, the author very gently shows how the narrator had got himself into this state. It is so subtley delivered that a thoughtful reading is required to bring it out, but it is objectively there. Sympathy for this mad character turned into empathy, and in doing so the insanity is no longer some alien other, but a different facet of us.