Hunger

by Knut Hamsun

This is the first book written by Knut Hamsun about a struggling writer living in Kristiana and the desperate times faced whilst trying to make ends meet and even have a place to stay or food to eat. All throughout the book the character is constantly hungry and cold and damp, and one gets to feel this misery in great realism as the character feels it. And slowly, page by page, the character's condition degrades further still as he is subject to whatever situation his life and luck would have upon his well being. But still he is proud and stand by his principles of how he should behave as a decent human being. So he is the man that would rather go hungry and be in the cold that be slighted and be thought of as a fool.

This book reminds me of reading Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger in its content but the style is quite different, both beautiful books. Both has turns in pace that are constantly unexpected and so you would not know what would happen in the next page or even the next paragraph. Sometimes reading a book, you get the sense that this has been copied from somewhere else and this is not the case here. It is so real and organic but yet so unique that you can't help being surprised by what is happening. That said, I found it really hard to first get into this book when I just read a few pages now and then. Then I had to get my car serviced one morning and was stuck at the waiting area for about 3+ hours and finally I really got into the book. Some book have to be slowly savored (as with most classics) but with this one (which is also a classic), I really had to take large chunks of it at once. Maybe it was as the namesake says, Hunger, and so must be consumed with ravenous intent. I was so influenced by this book that I decided that I would now eat a thick slice of cheese and several pieces of bread for lunches from now on. This is just as a reminder of how simple things can be nice too and always appreciate the simpler things in life. But also, I was running out of ideas of stuff to make for lunch and am too lazy to make anything complicated. Always have to have multiple reasons for doing anything. Ah, what drivel. I am getting off track...

It is said that Knut Hamsun is the father of 20th century literature and I could not comprehend this at first. But  after thinking back of how people before that period wrote and after, Hamsun is probably the person whose writing seem to bring about that transition. From the older style of writing that I would deem more smooth, controlled and 'poetic'. To the modern more raw, straightforward pace of modern fiction. Hamsun also describes very well the way the human mind works, in all its logic and lack of. His writing is a timeless capsule of how the human thought process has not evolved that much in the last hundred years and people are as irrational as they ever were.