I had become, as it were, too languid to control or lead myself whither I would go. A dog that dashed by me, a yellow rose in a man’s buttonhole, had the power to set my thoughts vibrating and occupy me for a length of time. I could not sit down on a bench by myself or set my foot any place without being assailed by insignificant accidents, miserable details, that forced their way into my imagination and scattered my powers to all the four winds. Why had the last months pressed so strangely hard on me? I failed to recognize my own happy temperament, and I met with the most singular annoyances from all quarters. How gaily and lightly these people I met carried their radiant heads, and swung themselves through life as through a ball-room! And I, walking in the very midst of these people, young and newly-fledged as I was, had already forgotten the very look of happiness.
I wandered up Castle Hill and fell into a reverie. I stuck my elbows closely to my sides, tried to make myself look small, and slipped unperceived past some acquaintances who had taken up their stand at the corner of University Street to gaze at the passers-by. Bowing and laughing folk walked up and down Carl Johann Street. The whole town began to get on its legs as it approached the fashionable hour for promenading. Hunger: Roman.The sun stood in the south it was about twelve. 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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