Kerry-Lynn's pick: Knut Hamsun, Hunger (1890: Penguin, 1998)
16 September 2009 @ Stella's (Commercial Drive, Vancouver)
Kerry-Lynn went out on a limb with this one - Hunger is not the kind of book that you burn through, unable to turn the pages fast enough because you are so thrilled by the action. The back of the Penguin edition calls it a "searing excursion into the realm of the irrational." Sounds like the latest Nora Roberts, no? Hamsun - I think of him affectionately as Knut - presents a few days in the life of a man in late-Victorian Kristiania (Oslo), as he scrambles to forestall starvation until his body and moral rectitude can replenish themselves. Our only version of events is filtered through his half-crazed mind.
Our individual reactions to Hunger, more than anything else we've read for book club, were shaped by our personal interests and backgrounds. (I should say that Jennifer couldn't come to the meeting, and I don't know if she read the book, but those who know her best were confident that she wouldn't have liked it anyway.) For Kerry-Lynn, who spent years toughing it out in the rarefied world of ballet, Hunger was a tale of the struggling artist, whose suffering is at least partly self-induced - the result of an imprudent and even prideful commitment to his "craft."
For Nicole and I (she with a background in English literature and I with a background in English history), Hunger was a tale of alienation in the modern city, and Knut an early modernist because he privileged man's inner psychology over his outward actions - thought over plot. And Leanne, well, she didn't get past the first twenty-five or thirty pages. From what I could gather, the protagonist's disfigured thought processes and mercurial disposition repulsed her.
I won't speculate on the psychoanalytical impulses behind Leanne's violent reaction to the book (!), but I can see where she's coming from. You know the enraged homeless guy who stands in the middle of the street screaming at someone invisible? That's this guy. Fascinating, but disconcerting and frustrating too. His impaired judgment causes him to ignore and squander the few chances that do cross his path.
We all - even Leanne, perhaps - came away with a real... appreciation for Hamsun's achievement. But that is precisely what bothers me about my own assessment. I wanted to escape from myself when I was reading Hunger. It occurred to me at one point, "I should teach this for my European survey class," and from then on I was just gathering historical cues to flesh out the modernism lecture spontaneously writing itself in my head. That kind of systematic evaluation does a disservice to the story's most beautiful, brutally human moments.
Post-script: if you ever make it to Stella's, get the "Orleans" mussels, with fries.
