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A review by casparb
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
3.0
I feel this is most important as a slice of literary history, rather than a novel in itself. Hunger is a poverty novel - I'm sure we're familiar with the type. The Kafkayevskian sort, seen in Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, or in Zola, or Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.
So initially I was a little unimpressed: Hunger seemed overfamiliar. But then I had a look about and noticed it was published in 1890! This rather changed things - the novel seems half a century ahead of itself, so I must applaud Hamsun there. This is a sort of literary prophecy of which I can only say that Dostoevsky achieved on a similar level (others spring to mind, but in quite different manners).
The great asterisk looms here too, though in a more complicated way than usual, perhaps. Hamsun became rather controversial for being quite a vocal Nazi when he was in his eighties. I feel it is probably too glib to diagnose this in Hunger, fifty or so years before the fact, though there is a curious sort of class-disgust that makes itself present, insofar as the narrator perceives himself as superior to any working other, such that he feels viscerally sickened by the sight of a poor person, while also being himself entirely penniless. I'm more inclined to register this as a psychological twist, a complication, rather than a symptom of burgeoning proto-fascism. But that reading remains available.
So initially I was a little unimpressed: Hunger seemed overfamiliar. But then I had a look about and noticed it was published in 1890! This rather changed things - the novel seems half a century ahead of itself, so I must applaud Hamsun there. This is a sort of literary prophecy of which I can only say that Dostoevsky achieved on a similar level (others spring to mind, but in quite different manners).
The great asterisk looms here too, though in a more complicated way than usual, perhaps. Hamsun became rather controversial for being quite a vocal Nazi when he was in his eighties. I feel it is probably too glib to diagnose this in Hunger, fifty or so years before the fact, though there is a curious sort of class-disgust that makes itself present, insofar as the narrator perceives himself as superior to any working other, such that he feels viscerally sickened by the sight of a poor person, while also being himself entirely penniless. I'm more inclined to register this as a psychological twist, a complication, rather than a symptom of burgeoning proto-fascism. But that reading remains available.