He remembered how lonely and desperate he had felt in Kristiania. He remembered the girl he had fallen in love with, the times he stood outside her house waiting to catch a glimpse of her. He remembered the people who had lent him money. He remembered the houses and the attic rooms where he had stayed, suffering from the cold. Hamsun walked around on the deck of the ship and the sight of the city of Kristiania brought back many painful memories of a time when he had wandered around that very same city, almost dying of hunger. The ship stayed in the Kristiania harbor for a full day but Hamsun felt he could not face the city where he had once lived in poverty, trying to become a successful writer. When, after about a week of traveling, the ship stopped at the harbor of Kristiania (the city now known as Oslo), Hamsun decided to stay on board. In 1888, twenty-nine-year-old Knut Hamsun (born as Knud Pedersen) sat on board of the transatlantic ocean liner ‘Thingvalla', traveling back to his homeland Norway from the United States, where he had worked as a laborer, a trolley conductor, and a pastor's assistant. Hunger: Roman.The birth of the modern psychological novel Sales Rank Publication Date Lowest New Price
His ordeal, enhanced by his inability or unwillingness to pursue a professional career, which he deems unfit for someone of his abilities, is pictured in a series of encounters which Hamsun himself described as 'a series of analyses.' While he vainly tries to maintain an outer shell of respectability, his mental and physical decay are recounted in detail. Set in late 19th century Kristiania, the novel recounts the adventures of a starving young man whose sense of reality is giving way to a delusionary existence on the darker side of a modern metropolis. Written after Hamsun's return from an ill-fated tour of America, Hunger is loosely based on the author's own impoverished life before his breakthrough in 1890. It has been translated into English three times: in 1899 by Mary Chavelita Dunne (under the alias George Egerton), by Robert Bly in 1967, and by Sverre Lyngstad, whose translation is considered definitive. It hails the irrationality of the human mind in an intriguing and sometimes humorous novel. The novel is hailed as the literary opening of the 20th century and an outstanding example of modern, psychology-driven literature. Parts of it had been published anonymously in the Danish magazine Ny Jord in 1888. Hunger is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and was published in its final form in 1890.
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