hunger by knutty knut hamsun

hunger is about this nightmarishly sensitive, doubting, and impulsive guy. he accosts people on the street with aggressive nonsense and suffers (glories in?) spectacular mood swings. he lives off his writing but he writes feverishly; he's got infrequent streaks of brilliance but mostly it's unpublishable. he's also often freezing and starving to death.

everything is in this guy's head! he's got this "cathedral" of thought and feeling inside of him where outwardly he's just a crazy person, raving alternately with joy and self hate. the amazing thing is that this total lunatic, this guy stricken with a mind he describes as a wound god probes his finger in, is so lucid and reasonable. that might be the ultimate fantasy of the book, that our protagonist could actually chronicle the epic inner dramas of briefly losing his pencil or spending a night in jail in such an orderly way. maybe he could; part of the elegance, the wonder of this story is how spare it is. physically, there's really nothing in it. there are few characters and we never see anybody more than twice, really. there's just his body, his buttons he's trying to pawn, etc. having him be so radically impoverished ends up making that body an exposed nerve, a more direct link to his brain. there's never a full stomach, a warm body to pacify his raving.

he's a "spiritual aristocrat." (the intro.) this book's called the hunger and our guy is often hungry but this is not hunger like down and out in paris and london, this is "anti-social" mania, proud, superior suffering. this book, as isaac bashevis singer pointed out super insightfully, came out in a period of social upheaval in norway and it was about some obscenely wretched guy and his sufferings, but it was NOT a book people who care about the sufferings of poor people could use to advance their cause. this guy is an individual, rising and falling (pretty much always falling) on the wild whims of his soul. this guy is all, all, all alone.