Hunger

It's becoming increasingly apparent to me that human memory is unreliable, at best. This unreliability is especially apparent to me when I think of the novel, Hunger, by the Norwegian writer, Knut Hamsun.

To the best of my recollection, I first heard of Hamsun in the 1980's, in a magazine interview with the American writer, Henry Miller who, in the interview, gave Hamsun credit for being an influence on his writing.

I can remember having read the interview in the mid 1980s when I was living in Rome, GA. It must have been an old magazine because Miller died in 1980, before I ever moved to Rome. I actually don't recall anything else from that interview - only Miller's praise of Hamsun, who I had never read or heard of before this.

I remember going to the local library in Rome to try and find any novel written by Hamsun. This was long before the Internet and Amazon.com. The only novel by Hamsun in the library was Hunger, which I immediately checked out.

I don't recall just how much of the novel I read at the time. I know it wasn't very much. I can remember finding the life of the unnamed protagonist just a wee bit too close to an earlier life experience of my own - thereby depressing and frightening me to no end.

Many years later, I felt a need to pick up Hamsun. He was being favorably compared to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who is nearly incomparable in my eyes. At some point, I downloaded a copy of Hunger as an ebook.

This time, upon reading it, I fell in love with the novel. Yes, I still recognized the similar life experiences, but this time I didn't find them depressing or frightening.

I've been recently meaning to reread the novel, and after finishing a number of novels by C.S. Forester, I uploaded Hunger to my Kindle. Prior to this new reread, I remembered having read the novel twice before on Kindle. However, I've been keeping lists of the books I've read each year since 2011 and that year is the only year I've had Hunger on my book list.

In 2014 I did put two of Hamsun's novels -Pan and Shallow Soil- on my book list. That is also the year my first Kindle was destroyed while traveling to Philippines from the U.S., and I may have reread the novel that year and simply neglected to put onto a proper list.

At any rate, I've begun rereading Hunger and at this point in the novel, most of what I'm reading seems new to me. I have forgotten a good deal of the novel, but it has been years, after all.

The version I'm reading, and have read, is the 1899 translation by Mary Chavelita Dunne (under the alias George Egerton). That version is available for free at Project Gutenberg. From what I've seen lately, the 1996 translation by Sverre Lyngstad is considered to be definitive. Lyngstad's translation is available for Kindle at Amazon.com - for a price. Perhaps one day I will see my way into purchasing it and rereading the novel once again.