How does Hamsun navigate these scenes in such a way that renders them unforgettable? Why does this book haunt me and so many other readers? Yet for a work of such incredible originality, Hunger is steeped in material that in different hands might fall flatly into cliché or melodrama: A starving artist! Unrequited love! A man who spends his days wandering the streets of Kristiania (Oslo), moaning and weeping, shaking his fist at God. According to Isaac Bashevis Singer, “the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century ‘came out of Gogol’s greatcoat.’” Notably, Hamsun’s innovative use of internal monologue and stream-of-consciousness directly influenced major writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and Charles Bukowski. Telling a semi-autobiographical story of a starving writer’s decent into madness, the novel is celebrated for its deft explorations of the mind. Norwegian author Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) is widely regarded as one of the pioneering works of Modernist fiction.
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