Hunger

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. An unnamed young writer walks the streets of Kristiania with nothing to eat. He pawns his waistcoat, then his blanket, chews wood shavings, and composes brilliant sentences in his head that he cannot sell. When money comes he gives it away. When help is offered he refuses it, or sabotages it, or lies so elaborately that he talks himself out of the meal in front of him.

Published in 1890, Hunger has almost no plot and no explanation — there is no social argument being made, no villain, no cause of the destitution beyond the man himself. What it has instead is the inside of a starving mind rendered minute by minute: the euphoria, the paranoia, the sudden grandiosity, the shame, the strange lucidity that comes and goes with the hunger.

Hamsun invented something here. The interior monologue, the unreliable and self-dramatising narrator, the refusal to moralise — writers from Kafka to Henry Miller to Bukowski took it directly from this book, and Isaac Bashevis Singer called him the father of the modern school of literature. It reads as though it were written yesterday. This is an unabridged recording of a fresh modern translation.