Knut Hamsun - Hunger

Knut Hamsun sprung off the list like a loaded gun. I can’t tell you just how electric this text is and how much of a change of pace this novel is from the works that I have been reading lately. The difference between a Tolstoy or a Burke is from a Hamsun is like a Cadillac and a Ferrari. Both are cars, but one does a lot of different things than the other. Hamsun’s writing is deeply engrossing but in a way that is disorienting and alarming at once. Similar to Huxley’s writing, the chaos of the moment with the use of soma and the sanctioned time of the group sex, the pressure just builds and builds but there is a kindness in that text that feels like it is going somewhere that you know that the brakes aren’t on now but will be clamping down soon. Hamsun did not have that same level of assurance. The momentum of this novel just builds and builds and builds until the moment of the crisis hits, and you are not sure you are in calm hands until the very, very end.

Like reading Kafka, there is something different happening here than what you might expect from a codex, written in your language, with a cover and the prose is assembled in a familiar way. This reminds me of the shrine devoted to the traditional site in Bethlehem to Jesus’ birth. When you approach the church from the outside, there is a very small door you are meant to enter because the first thing you should do in this sacred space is bow. In the approach to Hamsun or Kafka, the same is true though the object isn’t to bow but that you will have to tilt your head ever-so-slightly to read this text. There is a moment that is ferociously funny in this book that I had to pause the reading of it because I had to laugh. The main character that remains nameless throughout the text is picked up by the police for being homeless and taken to a jail sort of place for people similarly situated for the night. In the morning, they are all promised breakfast and so he waits barely sleeping through the night until breakfast is served pained by hunger as he is. In order to not be thought of as a common vagrant like the others, the narrator makes up a story that he is attached to an important person and should be thought of as better off than the others to avoid being treated as a commoner which he ostensibly is not but his common cause renders him so.  In the morning, he is not offered breakfast because he has lied well enough to convince those in charge that he is well off and won’t need the ration. He is back out on the street worse for wear because of his lie, and the reveal is both catastrophic and hilariously told. 

The narrator ends up in the thrall of a young woman who seemingly takes a liking to him though he is destitute. They agree to meet at a set time and connect, being that they are both not well off, the only thing to do is to retire to her residence. While there, very rapidly they begin a physical engagement, during the course of this engagement his hair starts to fall out because he is so malnourished. Their engagement does not end exactly then but continues on in a horrifyingly strange way. Their dalliance does not last much longer and he is back out on the street. This is a final upset for our narrator that seems to sink him to his lowest point. After this, he finds himself in a part of town here he is near a butcher that he remembers and goes to the butcher and requests some bones for his fictious dog, the butcher complies and our narrator commences to chew on bones and some of the gristle still attached until his own revulsion of his activities makes him vomit. This is calamitous to a degree that you cannot help but laugh even though it is a type of horror that pulls you asunder.