Hunger

This novel cannot even claim to have a redeeming social value. Although Hunger puts us in the jaws of misery, it offers no analysis of that misery, contains no call for political action. Hamsun, who turned a fascist in his old age during the Second World War, never concerned himself with the problems of class injustice, and his narrator – hero, like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, is not so much of an underdog as a monster of intellectual arrogance. Pity plays no part in Hunger. The hero suffers, but only because he has chosen to suffer. Hamsun's art is such that he rigorously prevents us from feeling any compassion for his character. From the very beginning, it is made clear that the hero need not starve. Solutions exist, if not in the city, then at least in departure. But buoyed by an obsessive, suicidal pride, the young man's action continually betray a scorn for his own best interests.

– Paul Auster, in an Introduction to Knut Hamsun's Hunger