HUNGER

"It was at that time that I wandered around and starved in Kristiania, this wonderful city that no one leaves until he has been marked by it..."

"The awareness that I was honest rose to my head, filling me with a wonderful feeling of being a character, a white lighthouse in the middle of a murky human sea where wreckage floated about."

1890

The anonymous first-person narrator in Hunger (1890) is followed over the course of barely a year as he tries to break through as a writer. The concrete experience of hunger influences his actions, thoughts and understanding of reality and is an important source of his creativity.

The main character is depicted without close social relationships, and his advances towards the young, beautiful Ylajali end in disappointment. The story is set in Kristiania around 1890.

Hunger was Knut Hamsun's breakthrough novel, and is a central work within literary modernism. Along with The Produce of the Field, Hunger is Hamsun's best-selling novel today.

"Beautiful? She was lovely, she was sinfully sweet! Eyes like raw silk, arms of amber! Just a single glance from her was as seductive as a kiss and when she called me her voice drove me like a jet of wine right into the heart."