Hunger

by Knut Hamsun

Overview

Hunger by Knut Hamsun is a strange, semi-delirious, gorgeous narrative of a young man who wanders the Norwegian urban milieu and spends most of his time starving and contemplating eccentric ways of obtaining food for a few coins.

The occasional income he gets from his writing is barely adequate to keep him alive, and between the bouts of hunger he hallucinates and imagines -- and sometimes engages in -- sensuality in all its forms. Food and sex and vivid creative daydreams, in combination with a peculiar personal pride, keep him on the fringes, apart from others. And yet, his need for nourishment in every sense, physical and emotional, is overwhelming.

Even though it was completed in 1890, Hunger is considered a psychological masterpiece of the early 20th century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934169667
Publisher:	Norilana Books
Publication date:	03/22/2007
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Tore Rem,Terence Cave

Tore Rem is Professor of literatures in English at the University of Oslo and director of the interdisciplinary initiative UiO:Democracy. He is an academic and a non-fiction writer and has published widely on Scandinavian and British literature. His Knut Hamsun: Reisen til Hitler ('The Journey to Hitler') came out in Norwegian in 2014 and has been translated into several languages. He is general editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Henrik Ibsen, and has, together with Narve Fulsås, published the monograph Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama (2018) and edited Ibsen in Context (2021).

Terence Cave CBE FBA is Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. Known primarily for his contributions to French Renaissance studies (The Cornucopian Text, 1979; Pré-histoires I and II, 1999 and 2001), he has also written on Aristotelian poetics (Recognitions, 1988) and on the relations between literature and music (Mignon's Afterlives, 2011). In 2009, he won the Balzan Prize for literature since 1500; he subsequently directed the Balzan project 'Literature as an object of knowledge', which explored cognitive approaches to literature. His books Thinking with Literature (2016), Reading Beyond the Code (jointly edited with Deirdre Wilson; 2018), and Live Artefacts (2022) are among the outcomes of this project. He has also translated Mme de Lafayette's The Princesse de Clèves for Oxford World's Classics.

Table of Contents

IntroductionNote on the TranslationSelect BibliographyA Chronology of Knut HamsunHungerExplanatory Notes

Editorial Reviews

"This is a deserving classic that needs to be analyzed closely by a clear and full mind." — Pennsylvania Literary Journal

From the Publisher

After reading Hunger, one can easily understand why Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hunger should appeal to any reader who is interested in a masterpiece by one of this century's great novelists.

Detroit News James Goldwasser

Disturbing and difficult as this nightmarish novel is, it is a work of imaginative brilliance that resonates in our own day

Herald

Hamsun has the qualities that belong to the very great, a complete omniscience on human nature

Rebecca West

Hunger was published in 1890 and its power has not faded

London Review of Books

One of the most disturbing novels in existence

Time Out

Hunger is the crux of Hamsun's claims to mastery. This is the classic novel of humiliation, even beyond Dostoevsky

Observer

Hunger is undoubtedly one of the most important novels of the modern age. At last it has found a translator capable of doing justice to its immense power and complexity: Lyngstad's deserves to become the standard English version

Duncan McClean

An excellent new translation . . . this Hunger deserves to be the standard English version

Times Literary Supplement