“My madness was a delirium of weakness, exhaustion, but it wasn’t unconscious…” Hunger is the masterpiece of Knut Hamsun, one of the most successful novelists of this century. It is a masterfully written semi-autobiographical novel. It tells the physical and mental journey of a young writer, who falls into the streets of Christiana (which became Oslo after 1925) in the grip of hunger and despair, full of hallucinations on the verge of madness. Hunger can be considered the beginning of the literary career of Hamsun, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. It received great praise from writers such as André Gide, Henry Miller, André Breton, and Octave Mirbeau, and is considered one of the masterpieces of 20th century European literature.
