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Mon at 1pm, Gboyega Odubanjo Author of While I Yet Live.

This is indeed a case of afflictio gratia artis (suffering for the sake of art). It’s not easy to read about, but both Hamsun and Bly do a superb job of portraying it in all of its insidious glory. In any case, our protagonist’s problem is the title of this book - and it never disappears.

(What happens to the human animal as it passes through the several stages of extreme dehydration is something you may be tempted to read about, but never want to actually witness.) The only thing worse? I can still recall Luis Alberto Urrea’s description (in The Devil’s Highway) of what occurs when people emerge in the Arizona desert after having walked up from Mexico (or from points even further south) … and are out of water. For anyone who’s ever been homeless and felt prolonged hunger pangs for the sake of his art (or through the sheer absence of work), Hamsun’s words and Bly’s translation of those words may ring truer than any of us would care to remember. And Robert Bly has done an excellent job of translating (I assume) and injecting (I don't assume) that same excitability into Hamsun’s Norwegian prose. Our anonymous protagonist’s “excitability” is quite understandable given his uncertain living conditions and constant state of hunger. Anyway, I’ll read it.’ Then he turned to his desk work” (p. If you could only be a little more composed! There is too much fever all the time. ‘Of course everything you write will cost you labor the only trouble with your work perhaps is excitability. “‘I will read it,’ he (the editor of a city paper in Christiania) said, taking it. And neither would be out of place sitting alongside Dostoyevsky’s Notes from (the) Underground. Knut Hamsun’s semiautobiographical Hunger could well serve as a companion piece to London’s equally semiautobiographical novel. I only recently (July 17) read and reviewed Jack London’s Martin Eden. His solution? To seek room and board in the city jail whence he can contemplate the rain falling on the outside.

‘Andreas Tangen’ is the fictitious name our nameless protagonist gives to the Officer on Duty the night he finds himself cold, wet, famished, keyless (not to say clueless, and consequently without even a room to go home to) and nearing delirium.

Hunger book knut