Hunger-SULT- is the first novel written by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, who later received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1920 for his novel “Markens Grøde” Growth of the soil.  The novel was considered innovative in its style, theme, and the deep psychological approach of the main protagonist facing  both physical  and psychological dilemmas; a fight for a writer who wants to start authoring while living in a deep & miserable poverty, struggling to find a piece of bread and cheese by selling his own coat and other trivial personal belongings, roaming  the streets of his city Kristiania, now Oslo, trying hard to find a shelter for a night or fortnight , then finding himself thrown out on the streets again because he couldn’t pay the rent, writing few articles, receiving ten krones for them,….. and so on. The four chapters of the book, covering 203 pages, was a journey of disappointments, failure to love Ylagali, whom he tried to befriend but in vain- for Kim Leine Ylagali is the antagonist that  symbolizes the city Kristiana  with all its attractiveness and repulsion- , misery, hallucinations, severe hungriness, loneliness, weeping alone for his destiny, obliged to steal five krones from a shop, only to aggravate his guilt and later payed them back after receiving ten krones for his article from the “Commandant”, ending in a wish to die standing, p.193, but succeeded in the very end to find a job on a ship sailing to England. Knut is a controversial writer in Norway even nowadays, because of his Nazi past, especially of the eulogy he wrote on the first page of Norway’s main newspaper, praising Hitler after his death. -Kim Leine’s introduction to the book pp 5-10 is great to read in order to know both the past of Hamsun and the difficulty Kim faces when trying to translate the novel from Norwegian to Danish.    

Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Kundera, Badir Shakir al-Sayyab  and many other European & worldwide writers were influenced by his stile and in-depth analysis of the human being’s psyche.

(NB) One of the main reasons that I came accidentally to read Knut’s novel is what I saw nowadays for the last 22 months  on TVs, Outlets and social media:  how thousands of children in the 21th  century were either killed by the most advanced modern intelligente !! weapons, or starved to death by preventing food and medicine to enter Gaza. The novel is written in 1890, speaking about one person’s hunger; and now, more than a century after, in 2025, on livestream media for the last 22 months. we see hundreds of children die in an  instrumental and engineered starvation to achieve cynical political goals- what a shame for humanity especially to those who supplied weaponry to the occupiers;  or those who are silent, thus complicit in the horrors  for not raising their voices to STOP the ongoing GENOCIDE & STARVATION now.