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3.85 AVERAGE
3.85 AVERAGE
dark
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Quite tedious in the way I tend to find works from just prior to the turn of the 20th century. You've been warned!
Hunger isn't without value, however. The passages about the physical and psychological effects of poverty are worth the price of admission, as our the frequently accompanying passages of raving/madness. Hunger definitely reads like the precursor to many a first person novel marking the first half of the 20th century. I suppose you need to at least be familiar with it.
However, above all these considerations, what really matters is how Hunger presents the settling in of capitalism. The book is littered with references to credit, wages, economic signalling, but mostly just money and work. In fact, the novel really is a fervid meditation on nature of work and what we want out of work, especially in our capitalist and volunteerist age of self-fulfillment. So in this sense, Hunger still matters.
Hunger isn't without value, however. The passages about the physical and psychological effects of poverty are worth the price of admission, as our the frequently accompanying passages of raving/madness. Hunger definitely reads like the precursor to many a first person novel marking the first half of the 20th century. I suppose you need to at least be familiar with it.
However, above all these considerations, what really matters is how Hunger presents the settling in of capitalism. The book is littered with references to credit, wages, economic signalling, but mostly just money and work. In fact, the novel really is a fervid meditation on nature of work and what we want out of work, especially in our capitalist and volunteerist age of self-fulfillment. So in this sense, Hunger still matters.
Look. I get it on a macroscale--groundbreaking form and a brutally honest and poignant experience. Formulaic postmodern classic. I value it for the education, but I absolutely did not enjoy it! No sir. I was so intrigued by this, as someone who is looking to understand the hunger that drives their artistic ambitions. However, there was not a lot of this at all. Majority of the book is the protagonist being an insecure little dickhead, the poverty he goes through, and the writing that doesn't mean much but is all he's got. I If there was more to it, I don't care to dig through--nothing about this is compelling me. I like a couple quotes and phrases though, but reading this was literally infuriating. Just pointless jackoff. Again, some sparkling phrases, but the whole of it makes me so displeased.
We follow an unnamed protagonist who is in the throes of poverty. He sells some writing to earn the smallest amounts of money. Meanwhile, he tries not to go insane from hunger--but always ending up doing so. I don't feel like recounting this anymore because I really don't care, but at some point he almsot sleeps with a woman, steals from a grocery store, donates/steals to a cake seller, squats in an inn... just this over and over again. At the end of it he finally surrenders and goes on a ship to work as a seaman. The End. Okay. I could've just read the intro (which was far more insightful, with the mention of hunger as a spiritual poverty thing and how at the end this need to be hungry jsut ends abruptly like he's paid his dues) and be done with it.
Quotes and stuff:
Writers who are truly original do not set out to fabricate new forms of expression, or to invent themes merely for the sake of appearing new. They attain their originality through extraordinary sincerity, by daring to give everything of themselves, their most secret thoughts and idio-syncrasies.
It is characteristic that upon learning of his prize Hamsun remarked that he would use the money to improve his flower garden.
Pyhrrhonism—doubting even the doubts
life that is blind, hope without faith, fight without purpose
all this hysteria about the impulses is senseless and unintelligent: the essence of right life is this—when you are hungry, eat; when you are tired, sleep
no
HAMSUN VS IBSEN!
Hamsun, however, attacked his artistic elders in person. Shortly after he published Hunger, and while he was still relatively unknown, he embarked on a lecture tour of Norway. The country had four national literary heroes: Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Alexander Kielland, Jonas Lie, and Henrik Ibsen. They were loved like Robert Frost or Marianne Moore in America- more so; clouds of national pride hung around them. Hamsun disregarded the national pride-he bored into the sentimental and contradictory ideas of Bjornson, and attacked the foggy and vague art of Jonas Lie and Kielland. Word of his offensive lectures spread. At his last stop, in Oslo, Henrik Ibsen, recently returned after twenty-some years in southern Europe, was sitting in the front row, glaring. Hamsun did not hesitate, but finished Ibsen off in the same style.
He mocked Ibsen's moral preachiness, and his argumentative drama, which Hamsun thought was far inferior to true psychological drama, and he attacked Ibsen for creating characters that had an intelligence no higher than his audience.
Knut Petersen as a boy herded cattle through the long ecstatic northern nights lit up by the Artic sun, and learned to love roaming about alone.
hemingway. some ally goats
Musway » Sort
and pungent sentences startled American readers used to the long sentences of Dickens and Henry James.
We notice that Hunger has one other quality that reminds us of a Hemingway novel: it is not a book of social protest. It is not a cry against a society that will allow the kind of poverty we see throughout the book. The reason in Hamsun's case is simple. He does not have faith enough in the middle class even to make a proposal to it.
By contrast, Zola actually trusted the middle class even as he attacked it: he thought that if an injustice was pointed out clearly, the middle class would correct it.
Hamsun's experience with the middle class as a youth had taught him, as similar experiences taught W. C. Fields, that the bourgeoisie could not be trusted. As an adult, he saw it as the killer of the impulsive and exuberant life he believed in.
prose still swift, intense, and collected
love the introduction by Robert Bly
What business was it of this heathen savage if I helped him out on such a marvelous day?
God, how eager everything was to go wrong around me!
How amazingly everything fell to pieces on all sides!
her small and tender brain
I walked along arguing with myself about these things, and could not stop; I came on the weightiest objections against the Lord's arbitrariness in letting me suffer for everyone else's sins. Even after I had found a bench and sat down, this question remained, occupying my mind and keeping me from any other thought. From that day in May when my setbacks had begun, I could see clearly all the landmarks of a gradually increasing weakness: now I had become too feeble to steer or guide myself, so to speak, where I wanted to go; a cloud of tiny vermin had forced its way inside me and eaten me out hollow.
And what if God had decided absolutely to finish me? I stood up and walked back and forth in front of my bench.
It was the hour of fall, well into the festival of what is not eternal. The roses have taken on a fever, their blood-red leaves have a strange and unnatural flush.
I seemed to myself hollowed out from head to toe.
The sad rocking chair in the corner was actually a joke of a chair: if one started laughing at it, one could die laughing.
shoes and put wen andes paper on top of them.
The darkness brooded around me. Nothing moved. But high above my head rustled endless music, the air, that distant tuneless humming which never fell silent. I listened so long to this eternal feeble sound that it began to get me confused: it was certainly symphonies coming from the orbiting universes above me, stars that were singing a song. ..
'It's not, more likely the devil!" I said, and laughed aloud to bolster me a little. "It is the night owls of Canaan hooting!"
I got up, lay down again, put on my shoes, tramped around awhile in the dark, and lay down again, fought and battled against rage and terror till far into the morning hours, when I finally fell asleep.
Was there some particular reason why absolutely every last one of a man’s most serious and most sincere endeavors should fail?
I had become intoxicated with starvation, my hunger had made me drunk.
but soon a bitter depression replaced that; I was just on the point of crying with grief over still being alive.
DEJI NOTE: Protagonist not getting a meal ticket. This is so frustrating. This is torturous
Now: you are sorely troubled, you have been battling with the Powers of Darkness, with silent monsters in the darkness, a darkness so immense that one gets horrors just thinking of it, you hunger and thirst after wine and milk, and receive them not.
The next thing is to fold your hands together and show you are a real crackerjack at believing in grace!
That was no sign from higher powers, I thought, and smiled bitterly; I could give signs from that altitude myself if I had to.
I simply couldn’t starve any more like I used to.
pg 123
What Helens!
pg 127
pg 136
The animals that have all their terror and original wildness are the ones that are valuable.
DEJI NOTE: Gave the cake woman the money. I HATE THIS BOOK.
At the end a mad open fire blazed before my eyes, a heaven and an earth ignited, men and animals of fire, mountains of fire, devils of fire, a chaos, a wilderness, a universe on fire, a smoking final day.
It gnawed without mercy in my chest, kept up a strange and silent labor in there.
Silence. Not a person around, no lights, not a sound I was in a wild state, I breathed heavily and audibly, and sobbed, gnashing my teeth, every time I had to abandon these bits of meat which might have satisfied my hunger.
When nothing helped, no matter how hard I tried, I threw the bone against the gate, maddened by the most impotent hatred. Carried away by rage, I shouted and roared threats up to the sky, shrieked God's name hoarsely and savagely, and curled my fingers like claws. . .. I'll tell you this, you sacred Baal in the sky, you do not exist, and if you do, I'll curse you so that your heaven will start shud. dering with hellfire! I'm telling you this, you know I offered myself as your servant, and you rejected me, you pushed me away, and now I turn my back on you for all eternity because you did not know your time of visitation!
I'm telling you this, I know that I am going to die, and I mock you anyway, even face to face with death, you Apis in the sky! You have used force against me and you don't realize that force does not work with me. Couldn't you have seen that? Were you asleep when you made my heart and my soul? I am telling you this, all my energy and every drop of blood in me rejoices that I mock you and spit on your grace. From this hour on, I will renounce all your works and all your ways, I will exile my thoughts if they think of you again, and I will rip my lips out it they say your name once more. Now if you do exist, I will tell you my final word in life or in death, I tell you good-bye. And so I am dumb, and I turn my back on you, and I go my way..
Silence.
whore language
an allegory about a fire in a bookstore
My brain grew clearer. I understood I was close to total collapse.
well-bred insolence
WORDS:
extirpation
outré
We follow an unnamed protagonist who is in the throes of poverty. He sells some writing to earn the smallest amounts of money. Meanwhile, he tries not to go insane from hunger--but always ending up doing so. I don't feel like recounting this anymore because I really don't care, but at some point he almsot sleeps with a woman, steals from a grocery store, donates/steals to a cake seller, squats in an inn... just this over and over again. At the end of it he finally surrenders and goes on a ship to work as a seaman. The End. Okay. I could've just read the intro (which was far more insightful, with the mention of hunger as a spiritual poverty thing and how at the end this need to be hungry jsut ends abruptly like he's paid his dues) and be done with it.
Quotes and stuff:
Writers who are truly original do not set out to fabricate new forms of expression, or to invent themes merely for the sake of appearing new. They attain their originality through extraordinary sincerity, by daring to give everything of themselves, their most secret thoughts and idio-syncrasies.
It is characteristic that upon learning of his prize Hamsun remarked that he would use the money to improve his flower garden.
Pyhrrhonism—doubting even the doubts
life that is blind, hope without faith, fight without purpose
all this hysteria about the impulses is senseless and unintelligent: the essence of right life is this—when you are hungry, eat; when you are tired, sleep
no
HAMSUN VS IBSEN!
Hamsun, however, attacked his artistic elders in person. Shortly after he published Hunger, and while he was still relatively unknown, he embarked on a lecture tour of Norway. The country had four national literary heroes: Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Alexander Kielland, Jonas Lie, and Henrik Ibsen. They were loved like Robert Frost or Marianne Moore in America- more so; clouds of national pride hung around them. Hamsun disregarded the national pride-he bored into the sentimental and contradictory ideas of Bjornson, and attacked the foggy and vague art of Jonas Lie and Kielland. Word of his offensive lectures spread. At his last stop, in Oslo, Henrik Ibsen, recently returned after twenty-some years in southern Europe, was sitting in the front row, glaring. Hamsun did not hesitate, but finished Ibsen off in the same style.
He mocked Ibsen's moral preachiness, and his argumentative drama, which Hamsun thought was far inferior to true psychological drama, and he attacked Ibsen for creating characters that had an intelligence no higher than his audience.
Knut Petersen as a boy herded cattle through the long ecstatic northern nights lit up by the Artic sun, and learned to love roaming about alone.
hemingway. some ally goats
Musway » Sort
and pungent sentences startled American readers used to the long sentences of Dickens and Henry James.
We notice that Hunger has one other quality that reminds us of a Hemingway novel: it is not a book of social protest. It is not a cry against a society that will allow the kind of poverty we see throughout the book. The reason in Hamsun's case is simple. He does not have faith enough in the middle class even to make a proposal to it.
By contrast, Zola actually trusted the middle class even as he attacked it: he thought that if an injustice was pointed out clearly, the middle class would correct it.
Hamsun's experience with the middle class as a youth had taught him, as similar experiences taught W. C. Fields, that the bourgeoisie could not be trusted. As an adult, he saw it as the killer of the impulsive and exuberant life he believed in.
prose still swift, intense, and collected
love the introduction by Robert Bly
What business was it of this heathen savage if I helped him out on such a marvelous day?
God, how eager everything was to go wrong around me!
How amazingly everything fell to pieces on all sides!
her small and tender brain
I walked along arguing with myself about these things, and could not stop; I came on the weightiest objections against the Lord's arbitrariness in letting me suffer for everyone else's sins. Even after I had found a bench and sat down, this question remained, occupying my mind and keeping me from any other thought. From that day in May when my setbacks had begun, I could see clearly all the landmarks of a gradually increasing weakness: now I had become too feeble to steer or guide myself, so to speak, where I wanted to go; a cloud of tiny vermin had forced its way inside me and eaten me out hollow.
And what if God had decided absolutely to finish me? I stood up and walked back and forth in front of my bench.
It was the hour of fall, well into the festival of what is not eternal. The roses have taken on a fever, their blood-red leaves have a strange and unnatural flush.
I seemed to myself hollowed out from head to toe.
The sad rocking chair in the corner was actually a joke of a chair: if one started laughing at it, one could die laughing.
shoes and put wen andes paper on top of them.
The darkness brooded around me. Nothing moved. But high above my head rustled endless music, the air, that distant tuneless humming which never fell silent. I listened so long to this eternal feeble sound that it began to get me confused: it was certainly symphonies coming from the orbiting universes above me, stars that were singing a song. ..
'It's not, more likely the devil!" I said, and laughed aloud to bolster me a little. "It is the night owls of Canaan hooting!"
I got up, lay down again, put on my shoes, tramped around awhile in the dark, and lay down again, fought and battled against rage and terror till far into the morning hours, when I finally fell asleep.
Was there some particular reason why absolutely every last one of a man’s most serious and most sincere endeavors should fail?
I had become intoxicated with starvation, my hunger had made me drunk.
but soon a bitter depression replaced that; I was just on the point of crying with grief over still being alive.
DEJI NOTE: Protagonist not getting a meal ticket. This is so frustrating. This is torturous
Now: you are sorely troubled, you have been battling with the Powers of Darkness, with silent monsters in the darkness, a darkness so immense that one gets horrors just thinking of it, you hunger and thirst after wine and milk, and receive them not.
The next thing is to fold your hands together and show you are a real crackerjack at believing in grace!
That was no sign from higher powers, I thought, and smiled bitterly; I could give signs from that altitude myself if I had to.
I simply couldn’t starve any more like I used to.
pg 123
What Helens!
pg 127
pg 136
The animals that have all their terror and original wildness are the ones that are valuable.
DEJI NOTE: Gave the cake woman the money. I HATE THIS BOOK.
At the end a mad open fire blazed before my eyes, a heaven and an earth ignited, men and animals of fire, mountains of fire, devils of fire, a chaos, a wilderness, a universe on fire, a smoking final day.
It gnawed without mercy in my chest, kept up a strange and silent labor in there.
Silence. Not a person around, no lights, not a sound I was in a wild state, I breathed heavily and audibly, and sobbed, gnashing my teeth, every time I had to abandon these bits of meat which might have satisfied my hunger.
When nothing helped, no matter how hard I tried, I threw the bone against the gate, maddened by the most impotent hatred. Carried away by rage, I shouted and roared threats up to the sky, shrieked God's name hoarsely and savagely, and curled my fingers like claws. . .. I'll tell you this, you sacred Baal in the sky, you do not exist, and if you do, I'll curse you so that your heaven will start shud. dering with hellfire! I'm telling you this, you know I offered myself as your servant, and you rejected me, you pushed me away, and now I turn my back on you for all eternity because you did not know your time of visitation!
I'm telling you this, I know that I am going to die, and I mock you anyway, even face to face with death, you Apis in the sky! You have used force against me and you don't realize that force does not work with me. Couldn't you have seen that? Were you asleep when you made my heart and my soul? I am telling you this, all my energy and every drop of blood in me rejoices that I mock you and spit on your grace. From this hour on, I will renounce all your works and all your ways, I will exile my thoughts if they think of you again, and I will rip my lips out it they say your name once more. Now if you do exist, I will tell you my final word in life or in death, I tell you good-bye. And so I am dumb, and I turn my back on you, and I go my way..
Silence.
whore language
an allegory about a fire in a bookstore
My brain grew clearer. I understood I was close to total collapse.
well-bred insolence
WORDS:
extirpation
outré
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Following a first person narration of a protagonist who is not quite there from the beginning, and then becomes more and more delirious as his food intake steadily decreases until he can't keep food down, in repeating cycles, is a little harrowing, but the worst of it was trying to understand his motivation for doing things.
Our nameless protagonist thinks really highly of himself, especially as a morally righteous man. Ends up crossing into self-righteous quite often. And then there are the practical jokes he likes to play on people by lying to them about something odd and inconsequential. Lying is also something he does to maintain a pretense of having more money than he has. The reader can tell, quite clearly, that nobody believes his facade, but he is in denial. This backfires several times, as well as his inability to accept charity or help without questioning the helper's motivations and inevitably coming to a paranoid conclusion. This is, of course, greatly exacerbated by his chronic state of inanition.
If you enjoyed [b:Crime and Punishment|7144|Crime and Punishment|Fyodor Dostoevsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382846449l/7144._SY75_.jpg|3393917] you will probably also enjoy this one. And I'm using "enjoy" in a you-know-what-I-mean way.
Our nameless protagonist thinks really highly of himself, especially as a morally righteous man. Ends up crossing into self-righteous quite often. And then there are the practical jokes he likes to play on people by lying to them about something odd and inconsequential. Lying is also something he does to maintain a pretense of having more money than he has. The reader can tell, quite clearly, that nobody believes his facade, but he is in denial. This backfires several times, as well as his inability to accept charity or help without questioning the helper's motivations and inevitably coming to a paranoid conclusion. This is, of course, greatly exacerbated by his chronic state of inanition.
If you enjoyed [b:Crime and Punishment|7144|Crime and Punishment|Fyodor Dostoevsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382846449l/7144._SY75_.jpg|3393917] you will probably also enjoy this one. And I'm using "enjoy" in a you-know-what-I-mean way.
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
No
Another book I read in hopes of broadening my scope beyond mysteries and police procedurals.
challenging
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
An impressively aggravating and pitiable spiral from the perspective of a starved, misguided, overthinking, desperate, and... arrogant writer. It's almost as if there are two characters pitted against each other within him: one is his proud, educated, surefooted, and eloquent internal monologue and the other is his actions, which are baffling, embarrassing, antisocial - just inexcusably rude. Whenever he begs and bargains, the ego of his internal worth shuts down any offers of help, but constantly repositions to find a new angle of "attack." His outward actions constantly betray his intentions, and they tend to almost echo how his physical appearance stands. Ragged, run over, discarded. The vicious irony of the fact that just being imprisoned would solve his dueling problems of starvation and ambition was interesting to dwell on.
Selvrespekt eller selvretfærdighed? Flink eller forfængelig? Talentfuld eller indbildsk? Hovedpersonen vakler konstant i denne fortælling, og vi finder aldrig ud af, hvad hans potentiale egentlig er, for hele tiden er der sulten, den evige kamp for overlevelse, som går i vejen for alt og rundt på det hele.
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes