Hunger (1890)

by Knut Hamsun

Hunger pits a man’s pride against the his needs as an animal: sustenance, warmth.

It had been a long time since I’d had such an ample meal, and I gradually felt that same sense of satiated repose you experience after a good cry. (pg. 10)

The unnamed protagonist feeds himself through intermittent windfalls from sales of his essays. He is an early representative of what would later be termed the quaternary (knowledge) economy, equipped with mind and mannerisms suitable for the mechanized world.

Yet he falls through the cracks.

My intestines were squirming inside me like snakes. As time went on I was getting more and more hollowed out, spiritually and physically. (pg. 45)

During his descent into destitution, he carefully avoids consideration of escape routes that contradict his image of himself. His tool is the pen, not the spade. He is a giver of alms; he does not beg. He is honest and does not steal. His current condition is temporary.

I had often been able to hold out for several days on end, but I had begun to grow alarmingly thinner. I wasn’t nearly as good at starving as I used to be; a single day could now put me into a near daze. (pg. 103)

His visits to “Uncle” (the pawnbroker) had stripped his life of the adornments that masked the underlying reality: even by the bizarre accounting of the quaternary economy, he contributed insufficient value to society. Without employment, prospects, or an institutional safety net and a with rigid floor set by his ego on how low he could stoop, the only resource left to him to burn was his own fat.

I clenched my teeth, knitted my brows and rolled my eyes in despair, and it began to help. My mind cleared up, I understood I was about to go under. (pg. 187)

Hunger shares its central theme with Hamsun’s 1917 novel Growth of the Soil: this towering thing that we’ve built called civilization produces unmoored people. A man so far down the supply chain and in close proximity with so many others lives a distracted and preoccupied life surrounded by so much but propped up by so little.

I was sinking, sinking everywhere I turned, sinking to my knees, to my middle, going down in infamy never to come up again, never! (pg. 189)

Hunger is a gripping read. It is a plunge into an unwell mind as it falls off of the knife’s edge on which our world teeters.

I’d love to hear recommendations of similar works, especially those written more recently.