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Title: Hunger (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by Knut Hamsun, Sverre Lyngstad ISBN: 0141180641 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Rating: 5
Summary: A trip to hell....
Comment: This is the first and only novel that I have read by Hamsun thus far, but it wont be my last. I had owned this book for quite some time before one day recently I finally pulled it off my bookshelf and gave it a go. They say great books find you, I would have to say that about this one. It opened up before me at just the right moment as I was going through, but to a lesser extent mind you, the hunger described in this novel. I dont think I have ever read someone so accurately describe the frustration associated with want better than this. Everytime he gets close it just gets pulled away from him to the extent that he begins to believe God is conspiring him against for some greater but unknown reason. He shakes his fist at the sky and renounces the lord. It drives him to madness. People wont even look at him and girls run from him. This is the kind of literature along with that of Miller and to a lesser degree Bukowski, both of which are greatly influenced by Hamsun, I kept running across his name in both their works, that has to be lived in order to be written. There is just no other way of knowing this horror of poverty and rejection. This book is not for everyone but if you want to to read the words of personal experience told in dense but simple prose, Hamsun is never long winded like Proust and you can see where Bukowski gets alot of his writing technique from, read this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Wonderful book
Comment: I read Hunger years ago when I was a starving artist, when like the protagonist, I hadn't made the practical concessions that would allow me to simultaneously keep body and soul alive and make art. The book caught my eye because it had been a long time since I had had enough money to regularly eat enough and there I was in the library stacks, dizzy, having visions, and looking like an Auschwitz survivor. I read the book because I was living it, and I was looking for survival tips.
Knut Hamsun's Hunger is not a book that is going to help you survive as a starving artist.
At the time, I thought I understood the book. I'd long before read Kafka's Hunger Artist, and I understood the idea of physically starving because within your life you can't find what you need spiritually, and you have to make these two realms consistent. Your soul starves, so your body must starve. Hamson takes this to the logical conclusion.
I recently read Auster's essay on Hamsun's Hunger and realized I hadn't understood the book at all. There is much more to this piece of art than my hypoglycemic mind grasped when I read it, and Auster is the perfect guide to help you interpret it. He really gets it.
Hunger is a book about the extremes you go to in a writer's life. The perversions you will put yourself through when what you are about doesn't really match the world, where there's no niche. When you need to find your way but there's no way to find. When you get angry at yourself for having no niche and you get self-destructive, and more perverse.
It's a brilliant read. Get it. Hamsun is an important writer and this might be his best work.
Rating: 5
Summary: Top Five Material!
Comment: This book by Knut Hamsun makes my Top Five favorite books. I picked up this book only because I heard that he had influenced writers like Kafka and Camus which I admire greatly. I did not think that a book written before the 20th century outside of Dostoevsky could be so relevent today.
I was wrong, just like Dostoevsky, Camus and Kafka this book is very relevant today. It is indeed so relevant that I doubt it was accepted very eaisly when it was published in the late 19th century!
Though it came out decades earlier, this novel deals with the same ideas that Camus and Kafka deal with. Alienation from the world. The main character in this novel is not of this world, he is alone, isolated.
His struggle is to find his niche, a struggle that is faced by a lot of people today. Does is find is niche? His reason for living? Or is there one at all?
He is not hungry for food as much as he is hungry for answers to these questions. He does not find the answers, this should give nothing away to you. It is predictable that he does not find answers because that is the whole point to the book.
If you have not read Dostoevsky yet I reccomend reading, Notes From Underground before you read this book, it deals with similar ideas and it preceeds it. Also, if you are going to buy this book, buy it alongside The Stranger by Camus and The Metamorphosis or The Trial by Kafka. They are closely related. These books will change your lives.
Now I will rate the novel from a scale of A-F as I do in all of my reviews.
Character Devolpment: A
Plot: B
Thought Provoking: A++
Suspense: A
With an overall grade of an A this book is one of my favorite books, it is short, so it is one that I will read over and over again many times.
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