He encounters charity, but hates it. A fierce pride prevents him from accepting a meal ticket at the police station and he feels under an obligation to offer help to others even when he is possibly worse off than they are.

His days and nights are either uncomfortable or painful. He meets tramps and policemen and thin, ugly children and either teases them or tries to impress. There is very little joy in this novel but it is, surprisingly, an enjoyable and a thought-provoking read.

The key questions

How much pity, if any, do you feel for the narrator?

Is his romance real or imagined?

Does it matter that very little happens?

Is the novel about hunger or humiliation?

Alyson writes:

THIS IS THE SORT OF NOVEL THAT, once you have put it down, makes you wonder what you were supposed to feel. I knew I had read an important piece of literature, that it created stark and disturbing images, but there was no obvious message despite the subject matter being emotive. This was not a celebration of the poor, nor a plea for understanding of the hungry. It was not political. It was about the individual.

Hunger was Knut Hamsun’s first novel, published in 1890. He criticised his contemporaries for not addressing the “unconscious life of the mind” and produced a book that rejected the traditions of plot development. We do not even know the central character’s name. He is a writer living in Oslo and he is hungry.

Hamsun takes us through every degree of hunger. The would-be journalist thinks about little else. He is intrigued by his hunger, even though he almost reaches the point of starvation. It is as if he wants to punish himself, to discover how far he can push himself. He chews on wood shavings and pieces of his clothing. But stronger than his need for food is his need to maintain a sense a dignity. The hero is proud. He refuses charity and would prefer to give than to receive even when at his most desperate. Even so, it is hard to really like him or pity him.

“I wasn’t going to be ridiculous, you could die from too much pride,” the journalist says when he sees a chance to eat some cakes, but he is contradicting himself. He is bursting with pride and it is pride that is causing his hunger. His hunger affects his mind, which in turn affects his ability to write the articles he needs to produce to earn a living.

“I had noticed distinctly that every time I went hungry for quite a long time it was as though my brain trickled quietly out of my head, leaving me empty.”

Is he experimenting with hunger? Sometimes it feels that he is merely testing himself but at other junctures he has no choice at all and is desperately unhappy.

There is little meaningful interaction with other characters. An attempt at romance is described as if a dream sequence and I found this episode quite confusing. It was difficult to believe this woman would want to spend time alone with this hungry, strange young man but it was not clear either that he was hallucinating or exaggerating. Certainly his descriptions of the people he meets are tainted by his desperation.

Thomas Blake states in his e-mail that the prose feels contemporary and that it is startlingly modern. It is a timeless sort of novel, for the hunger is not created out of social deprivation but through choice. The journalist suddenly decides to leave Oslo on board a ship. He is “wet with fever and fatigue” but he will live. His experiment is over.

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