Hunger

by Knut Hamsun, Gunnar Cauthery (Read by)

Overview

The story of a starving writer in Norway, Hunger is a pivotal masterpiece of European modernism. The protagonist is anonymous and the plot is meager. What holds the text together is the focus on the protagonist's emotions. These emotions are reveled to the reader by the minute descriptions of the inner landscape of the mind, interspersed with the unnamed writer's random encounters with strangers and acquaintances in the streets, or short meetings with various editors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781094057149
Publisher:	Naxos
Publication date:	10/15/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.50(h) x 5.00(d)

About the Author

Tore Rem,Terence Cave

Tore Rem is Professor of literatures in English at the University of Oslo and director of the interdisciplinary initiative UiO:Democracy. He is an academic and a non-fiction writer and has published widely on Scandinavian and British literature. His Knut Hamsun: Reisen til Hitler ('The Journey to Hitler') came out in Norwegian in 2014 and has been translated into several languages. He is general editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Henrik Ibsen, and has, together with Narve Fulsås, published the monograph Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama (2018) and edited Ibsen in Context (2021).

Terence Cave CBE FBA is Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. Known primarily for his contributions to French Renaissance studies (The Cornucopian Text, 1979; Pré-histoires I and II, 1999 and 2001), he has also written on Aristotelian poetics (Recognitions, 1988) and on the relations between literature and music (Mignon's Afterlives, 2011). In 2009, he won the Balzan Prize for literature since 1500; he subsequently directed the Balzan project 'Literature as an object of knowledge', which explored cognitive approaches to literature. His books Thinking with Literature (2016), Reading Beyond the Code (jointly edited with Deirdre Wilson; 2018), and Live Artefacts (2022) are among the outcomes of this project. He has also translated Mme de Lafayette's The Princesse de Clèves for Oxford World's Classics.

Table of Contents

IntroductionNote on the TranslationSelect BibliographyA Chronology of Knut HamsunHungerExplanatory Notes

Editorial Reviews

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“Knut Hamsun’s writing is magical, his sentences are glowing, he could write about anything and make it alive.” —Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New York Times Book Review

 “The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer

 “The classic novel of humiliation, even beyond Dostoyevsky . . . Lyngstad’s translation restores to the English-speaking reader one of the cold summits in modern prose literature.” —George Steiner

From the Publisher

Disturbing and difficult as this nightmarish novel is, it is a work of imaginative brilliance that resonates in our own day

Herald

Hamsun has the qualities that belong to the very great, a complete omniscience on human nature

Rebecca West

Hunger was published in 1890 and its power has not faded

London Review of Books

One of the most disturbing novels in existence

Time Out

Hunger is the crux of Hamsun's claims to mastery. This is the classic novel of humiliation, even beyond Dostoevsky

Observer

Hunger is undoubtedly one of the most important novels of the modern age. At last it has found a translator capable of doing justice to its immense power and complexity: Lyngstad's deserves to become the standard English version

Duncan McClean

An excellent new translation . . . this Hunger deserves to be the standard English version

Times Literary Supplement