It was in the those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no leaves before it has set its mark upon him… The novel opening’s reads and feels surprisingly contemporary, not at all like a work written in the last decade of the 19th Century: Most English translations include as an introduction the long and laudatory essay The Art of Hunger by the American post-modernist writer Paul Auster. It has been describes as, “one of the most disturbing novels in existence” and is rightfully considered the first work of 20th Century Modernism despite its publication date. Hamsun’s first and most famous novel Hunger (Sult) was published in 1890.

The charges were eventually dropped due to “impaired mental abilities”, but he was left financially ruined by a civil liability suit brought against him for membership of Nasjonal Samling (the Norwegian Fascist party) and the moral support he gave to the German cause, though he was cleared of any direct Nazi affiliation. Hamsun denied belonging to any political party and of being anti-semitic (to be fair there cannot be found in his novels any evidence that he was), yet his actions during the war pose a huge question mark, in Norway and beyond, as to the value of his writing, particularly the radical early novels.

Yet this is the man who presented his Nobel Prize for Literature to Joseph Goebbels, had a private audience with Hitler (though the deaf Hamsun keep on shouting over Hitler, who not used to been interrupted, was left in a rage that lasted three days), and whose books were burned in Norway at the end of the war while he was committed to a psychiatric hospital awaiting trial for treason. He is one of the four Scandinavian writers from the 19th/early 20th century (the other three being Ibsen, Strindberg and Undset) to have an impact outside of, and far beyond, Scandinavia. They were all Hamsun’s disciples: Thomas Mann and Arthur Schnitzler…and even such American writers as Fitzgerald and Hemingway.” Henry Miller, whose literary tastes were somewhat idiosyncratic but perceptive, idolised Hamsun’s work and according to Charles Bukowski he was the greatest writer that ever lived. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun. Isaac Bashevis Singer said of Hamsun “the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect-his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun remains a controversial figure. Edvard Munch-Evening on Karl Johan Street-1892

Knut hamsun glad