Hunger

A true classic of modern literature—and a forerunner of the psychologically driven fiction of Kafka, Camus, and Saramago—Hunger is the story of a Norwegian artist who wanders the streets of Christiania (now Olso), struggling on the edge of starvation while trying to sell his articles to the local newspaper. As the hunger overtakes his body and his mind, the writer slides inexorably into paranoia and despair. The descent into madness is recounted by the unnamed narrator in increasingly urgent and disjointed prose as he loses his grip on his body and on reality itself. At the end—for reasons that remain unclear—he suddenly decides to sign on as a crewman aboard a ship and leave the city behind, saving himself from his otherwise certain death. Arising from Hamsun's belief that literature ought to be about the mysterious workings of the human mind—an attempt as he wrote, to describe "the whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow"—Hunger is a landmark work that pointed the way toward a new kind of novel.