His life is lived hourly, if not minutely, since he always has to worry whether he would eat at all during the day. He walks the city, drafting articles in parks, hoping for them to be published so that he would have money to buy food and pay his rent, which is always overdue. In Hunger, we follow one unnamed narrator who goes about his daily business in Kristiania (Oslo), Norway.
Hamsun explores mental and physical traumas of the character in a masterful work that inspired some of the greatest philosophical fiction authors of the twentieth century, emphasising in his work that the fight to survive in a big city may take a shape of complete absurdity.
He is hard-working and not demanding, with food and shelter being his main wishes. Our unnamed narrator is a freelance writer who has one “ambition” in his life: not to die from hunger. Translated from the Norwegian by Sverre Lyngstad, Hunger explores the daily life of one lonely and desperate man on the brink of starvation in a large city. Knut Hamsun is a Nobel Prize Winner for Literature whose existentialist literary work Hunger predates Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Albert Camus’ The Stranger.
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