books@cc.

by Knut Hamsun (1890)

A poor, emaciated writer, unable to afford a rent (but with too big of an ego), roams the city, his state of mind and physique heavily disoriented by his hunger. Tragically impulsive, he swings from one grandiose, “dignified” idea and perception to the next, only to regret and to chastise himself in between, encountering misadventures, “imagining things” and suspecting everything, making up lies which deprive him further of any help, desperately and painfully clinging to his “intellectual vanity”, e.g. refusing to admit himself as a vagrant at the police station (saying instead that he’s a journalist on a wild night out), which lost him the free meals he so badly needed.

The book is divided into four parts, each part ending in a kind of temporary, doomed salvation before going through another predilection in the next. I picked this up due to numerous recommendations, but to be honest I’m not too blown away…

Hunger e-book at Project Guntenberg (and other Knut Hamsun’s)

Tags:biography & memoirs, fiction, Norwegia
biography & memoirs, fiction, Hamsun, Knut, Norwegia

March 22, 2007 @ 6:49 pm