Book Review XI: Hunger, by Knut Hamsun, translated by Sverre Lyngstad

It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania

I first bought this book when I was like 22 years old. I should have read it then. But I didn’t. It feels like the kind of book you are supposed to read when you are 22, not when you are, you know, my age. It’s like all those other books that boys who fancy themselves intellectuals read when they are 22: Infinite Jest, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Dharma Bums, etc. But while I did read those, I didn’t read Hunger. And my copy was long lost over the years. Probably, ironically, sold to a used bookstore at some point so I could buy cigarettes.

Years passed. And I read Karl Over Knausgaard and once again Knut Hamsun and Hunger rented space in my head. I bought yet another copy. I didn’t read that one either.

Last summer I became obsessed with Dag Solstad and read all of his (available in English) novels in the course of just a couple months. (I cannot recommend his books enough.) And then I started to seek out even more Norwegian literature (there is life after Knausgaard, I have learned). One book I came across and read was The Growth of the Soil, also by Knut Hamsun; a long, brilliant book that I truly loved. It is fiction at its peak. Each word rings out like a bell. It is for this one novel — rather than his entire body of work — that Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize.

The Growth of the Soil was translated by the Norwegian/American scholar Sverre Lyngstad, and so I started to look for other translations of his. One of which is Hunger. According to Lyngstad, the translation I currently owned was garbage. And so I bought yet another copy — the new Lyngstad translation this time. And again I didn’t read it. Not until last week when I finally cracked it and blazed through it in just a few days, lost hopelessly in the sad tale of Hamsun’s hero starving in Oslo for a few months in the 1880s.

Of course, Hunger is a better book than the other “books for boys” mentioned above. Well, maybe not better, but it has a better legacy. It has withstood the test of time better than the others. It is more widely regarded in literary circles. And the new translation is especially highly lauded (Lyngstad received Norway’s St. Olav Medal — the equivalent to Britain’s knighthood). All for good reason. It is a remarkable achievement in prose story telling. It’s a simple story, simply told. We follow a hungry man around a city, his small successes and large failures, his moments of small joy and moments of great misery. Some call it a novel of humiliation. But I think that ignores the humanity of the main character. A distasteful, rude, difficult man, but also one with a heart. A sad, black heart. We ache when bad things happen to him, despite everything.

How does one review a classic, though? I guess one thing I can say about Hunger is that it didn’t feel like old hat. So many highly influentials works of art feel dated because we have experienced ad nauseam the art that copied them. Take, for instance, the films of Hitchcock. They were, at the time, groundbreaking. But now? We’ve seen too many imitations to understand how important Hitchcock was (and is) to filmmaking. But even though every author worth their salt knows Hunger and has been influenced by Hunger — including, of course, the Norwegians mentioned above, Knausgaard and Solstad — it didn’t feel unoriginal. It felt new. And a novel that is 130 years old and feels new is something really remarkable.

Also, it is widely understood that Hamsun wrote Hunger because he was — to quote the translator — “contemptuous of novels of his time and what he saw as their stereotypical plots and empty characters.” I, too, am contemptuous of most new fiction — American fiction anyway — for their stereotypical plots and empty characters, and so maybe that’s why this old, classic book reached out to me across the centuries.

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The translator, in his forward, also says this:

If … the reader should recognize, with a shudder of delight or horror, some of the hero’s strange proclivities in his or her own soul, the labor of making this new translation of Hamsun’s breakthrough novel will have been richly rewarded.

There was a time — and I won’t go into too much detail here — when I lived a life similar to Hamsun’s hero’s. I slept on a couch, I wore filthy clothes, I didn’t work, I was hungry a lot (going to bed hungry is not something I would wish on anyone), I sold my possessions for cigarette money, all while considering myself a great writer even though I never wrote a word. It was a terrible time in my life. Looking back, I was deeply depressed. I just didn’t have a name for it. But in reading Hunger I remembered my days wandering Tucson, hungry and sad. And, in that way, again, this novel gave me a “shudder of delight (and) horror” as I recognized myself in the pages more than I care to admit. So consider yourself richly rewarded, Mr. Lyngstad.

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Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Hamsun was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer and died penniless in 1952 after being forced to forfeit his entire fortune to the Norwegian government after World War 2. It is still a matter of great debate in Norway if he truly admired Hitler or if he tried to work against the German occupation of Norway from the inside rather than the outside. Most, it seems, have forgiven him his actions, and the old novelist is once again discussed and revered in his home nation. And many in literati circles are embarrassed by how Hamsun was treated by his countrymen. “If you want to meet idiots, go to Norway,” wrote Thorkild Hansen in his book Hamsun, a defense of the novelist’s patriotism.

I don’t know enough to have an opinion on what Hamsun’s real motivations were. No one does. I am just stating this as a point of fact, as I think it would be tone deaf on my part not to.

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Next up: Sundays in August, by yet another Nobel winner, Patrick Modiano.