The blanket isn’t even his, it’s a loan from a friend. He finds his situation deeply embarrassing. I took out my bundle, a red handkerchief that contained a couple of clean collars and some crumpled newspapers I had carried my bread home in, rolled up my blanket and pocketed my stack of white writing paper. I decided to buckle down at once and get going with my move. He has to leave, and when he packs it becomes quickly evident quite how poor he is: He’s not paid the rent in an age, and time is running out there. The book opens with him living in a dismal one room apartment, barely furnished. As time goes on he goes longer and longer without food, becomes more and more estranged from the society around him. Increasingly though he’s too hungry to write, and the pawnshop gives less on each visit as he slowly works through anything he owns of any value. He survives by writing freelance newspaper pieces and pawning his few possessions bit by bit (down to the buttons on his coat). The unnamed narrator lives in Kristiana, now known as Oslo. Put that way it can sound like a work of social critique, but it absolutely isn’t. The novel doesn’t blink, doesn’t look away even for an instant. Written in 1890 it follows the needless descent of a young writer into starvation and alienation. I’ve read few novels as unsparing as Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. Hunger, by Knut Hamsun and translated by Sverre Lyngstad
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