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Title: Hunger

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Knut Hamsun

Narrator: Kevin Foley

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-28-11

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 64 votes

Genres: Classics, European Literature

Publisher's Summary:

Knut Hamsun's Hunger, first published in 1890 and hailed as the literary beginning of the 20th century, is a masterpiece of psychologically driven fiction. The story of a struggling artist living on the edge of starvation, the novel portrays the unnamed first-person narrator's descent into paranoia, despair, and madness as hunger overtakes him. As the protagonist loses his grip on reality, Hamsun brilliantly portrays the disturbing and irrational recesses of the human mind through increasingly disjointed and urgent prose. Loosely based on the author's own experiences prior to becoming a successful writer, Hunger announced the arrival of a new kind of novel and heavily influenced such later writers as Kafka and Camus. This edition is the translation by George Egerton.

Critic Reviews:

"After reading Hunger, one can easily understand why Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hunger should appeal to any reader who is interested in a masterpiece by one of this century's great novelists." (James Goldwasser, Detroit News)

Members Reviews:

Book quite good; wrong narrator

The description of the book gives the plot quite well, so I won't repeat it here. The book is very well written, and reminiscent of Dostoevsky or Kafka in its description of a man struggling to keep his self-dignity while losing his grip on reality, in this case due to lack of food. However, I think the book could have been better had there been more of a story or structure to it.

As for the narrator: he's clearly very good, but not the best choice for this book, I'm afraid. I found the following review of his work on another audiobook in AudioFile magazine, and I think it fits my impression perfectly: "Narrator Kevin Foley plods along with a listener-friendly cadence, something like that of a radio newscaster, avoiding high emotion or monosyllabic detachment--professional to the nth degree but adding little to a true and sad tale." I couldn't agree more. Especially in a first person narrative, I think the narrator should show a little more emotion; most of the time, Foley's tone sounds like the voiceover on a nature show, which made it harder to focus on the story. I generally don't like it when audiobook narrators use too much emotion or act the characters, but the narration here is just too detached.

Liked it better when I was 21

Charles Bukowski mentioned "Hunger" and I remember being blown away by it when I read it as an impressionable 21 year old. I re-read it almost two decades later and its not 'all that.' I remember liking Growth of Soil and Pan much, much better. Wish some wild Norwegian would put it on audio.

The greatest Norwegian author of all time

I had a lot of expectations going in to the book, i am from Norway and Hamsun is synonymus with great literature. I wasn't dissapointed at all, the book in itself is great and i also thought that the narrator fitted.

Crazy? Hungry? Both?

The basic problem for me was that the central character, an author in Christiania (Oslo), Norway, just didn't convince me he was really hungry. I guess he was, because his hair was falling out in clumps. At the same time he had such pride and this stopped him from accepting any help offered him. If you are really starving do you refuse food? One thing is clear. He was ether hallucinating, due to a lack of food, or he was quite simply crazy.