قصة الكتاب :
\"Hunger\" is a novel by the Norwegian Noble Prize author Knut Hamsun. It has been celebrated as one of the most intriguing twentieth\'s century literary works. In his youth Hamsun has migrated to America. When he returned to Norway he launched an unrestrained critique of the overexcited American materialism. He also attacked the American democracy and branded it fake. This anti-materialism intellectual stance inspired him writing his novel \"Hunger\", along with the influence of the puritan religious sects he had engaged with as a teenager. Hamsun admired Hitler, and has thus been convicted with death sentence to be saved by an international advocacy campaign supported by famous literary figures such as Earnest Hemingway, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Jaen Paul Sartre and William Falkner.
Tangen, the protagonist of \"Hunger\", is a freelance journalist who works in a town called Christiana. Homeless and constantly starving he lives on the hardly sufficient day to day earnings of his writing. He resolves to look for a full time job, but he fails to pay the deposit of 50 korons as insurance. He ends up a starved and helpless man. However, he retains the kindness of his heart that can still be filled with pleasure for sharing a hard-earned meal with a poor. He experiences the insolvency of life and weeps as he whispers to himself that he is \"a shining white beacon in a muddy, human sea amidst floating wreck\". At some point of his bankruptcy, he has to sell his jacket\'s buttons or trick a butcher by asking for a bone for his dog hoping that there left some flesh on the bone for him to eat. When every possible way of survival is shut on his face, despite his competence, he boards himself on a coal ship and travels back home.
Literary critics consider that the magnificence of the novel surpasses its critique of the materialistic approach to life and its apocalyptic poisoning of humanity, to a certain aesthetics developed through musicality and intimacy of language and the ability to attend to the subtlest human feelings.