Description
"Hunger is the first-person story of a young man desperately trying to establish himself in the city as a writer, living in shabby lodgings where he can seldom afford to pay the rent, eating almost nothing, and engaging spasmodically with landladies, eccentric elderly men, policemen, shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, and others on the way. The traces of a consistent narrative logic are uncertain and blurred; the voice of the narrator keeps shifting between pragmatic appraisal of his situation, wild fantasies, manic outbursts, anger, and despair. This is a story that lies on the threshold of modernism, anticipating many of the dislocations that narrative will be subject to in the decades to come. This new translation seeks to restore the startling unease of Hamsun's breakthrough story of 1890. It remains faithful to the style and voice of the text, the shifts of tense, the indirect free style, and the constant changes of register. Tore Rem and Terence Cave's introduction provides an updated and fresh account of the Scandinavian contexts of Hunger, its genesis and its reception. Some important variants from the first edition are included, as well as a note on place names and a map of 1890s Kristiania (now Oslo)"--
