Hunger, by Knut Hamsun

Hunger
(Tr. Spa-Eng. from a review by By Pablo García Mejía, Mexico city)

  
 Hunger, is the crowning work of a writer (Knut Hamsun) who has taken his young character to his highest spiritual need through his meager body. The character has no name nor destiny and refuses to eat because, at all costs, he wants to reach the limits of sanity, of the rational mind, where everything is vast and mysterious.  

 The character lives in the city of Kristiania (Oslo) in 1890, is a man who wanders the city without a fixed goal, without purpose. He just walks and starves because he has decided so - the question is: Has he decided it? or has his writer-creator decided it?

 It seems this beautiful and regrettable character should join other characters shamelessly used by their writers-creators, as is the case of Quixote of La Mancha, poetic, gentle and sad to laughter character, used for our shame and solace by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. It could also be said of Sophocles, who did with Oedipus everything an author can do with a character to the point of removing his eyes and make the Earth swallow him. However, the character of Hunger does not arrive so far perhaps, and Knut Hamsun stops a bit: he stays hidden and does not take the mask off completely so the reader is not fully aware of everything that is done with his own character. 

 This character (a young man, it seems) is a writer full of humanity and mercy that is a little crazy, so crazy that he cares about others, but his weakness leads him to an unspeakable punishment because it is a self-imposed punishment: he runs full of fatigue and starvation and he is about to collapse, he rises a little and, agitated, attempts to stand up with his head to burst, about to pass away, but before that, lose his sanity completely. 

 Nevertheless, he does not want to die because it is not a hunger strike, and he does not want to live like that either, then what does he want? When he gets to eat something he immediately brings it up as he cannot withhold food and he incredibly lives a romance with a girl, a romance that leads nowhere. He lies shamelessly, but his lies weigh as much as his truths---lies and truths have the same value---, so no matter if he lies or not, finally it is better to lie because us, the readers, do not want to know the truth. The truth is beyond our reach in the author's sky, but not in the narrator's. 

 Hunger is, together with Metamorphosis, the most disturbing novel of the late XIX. The difference is that Kafka turns Gregor Samsa into a bug, into a deplorable insect which did not understand what the author made of him. It does not happen with the character of Hunger who survives in that city of Kristiania; because this young man is willing to take the bet against the author, even if he knows he will lose, since it is the author who has got all weapons, those of a God, to make whatever he wants of him... 

 But it seems that literature, turned into poetic justice, does not abandon this beloved character, nameless. This time Literature bets on the character, and beside him it picks up the game to, eventually, overcome the author. It is then when the wonder of art happens and the character is the winner completely entering art as a literary winner of his own destiny. Knut Hamsun could not run with the fate of his predecessors and was defeated for the only time ín all the history of Literature by a character who refused to die of hunger, who never faltered, nor begged a little mercy. Nothing was able to kill his insurmountable spirit, no one, not even his own creator, whom he had definitely granted an indomitable spirit .