Sult[Hunger]
Knut Hamsun
Copenhagen, 1890
 
First book edition of Hamsun's masterpiece, breakthrough novel, and one of the earliest Modernist works.  Excerpts had appeared two years earlier in the Danish magazine Ny Jord.  It follows the inner workings of a poor writer as he becomes devoured by his environment's harsh conditions.
 
Bound in contemporary half morocco with Bindesboll paper boards.  Save for a bit of dustiness at the top edge, a Fine clean copy.  Rare - particularly in meaningful condition. 
 
“The story of an unnamed journalist who haunts the streets of Christiana(now Oslo), treading the fine line between existence and death.  Maintaining his high ideals, he refuses help while he struggles to provide for himself but, with his writing barely earning him a wage, he is forced to pawn his scant belongings to survive, all the while continuing in his own self-delusion of artistic integrity and respectability.  As the narrator wanders about, chewing on wood shavings and vomiting what little food he is able to get hold of, desperately seeking nourishment, both essential and creative/spiritual, he spirals into a terrifying cycle of starvation and redemption which leads him to suffer wild delusions and become disturbed by insignificant events, often misunderstanding the behavior of others.  Lost and deluded, he shuns every chance at intimate human contact, and attempts to live a self-sufficient life, alone but blinded to his own sorry state.The central character’s lacks identity; he exists in the present without a name, a past, or any clear roots.  His acts of ludicrous generosity, delusion, indecisiveness and violence – in short, his fragmented self, riddled with anxiety and confusion – represents the struggle to exist in an age that lacks moral certainty and which seems absurd. The inauthenticity of a mind torn between an internal reality and suffocating social constructs draws on the ideas of Kierkegaard and is built upon by later modernist and existential literature.”(Selwyn)