Hunger - Knut Hamsun
 
A semi-autobiographical novel of great psychological finesse, "Hunger" relates the setbacks of a lonely and hungry young writer wandering the streets of Christiania (today Oslo). Refusing all material constraints, he maintains his anorexia out of pride and provokes his own misery and despair in order to be able to write, to invent other destinies, other identities. At the end, fully assuming his life as a stray dog in the heart of the world, he gets hired on a departing ship. Partly influenced by the work of Dostoyevsky and opposed to the realistic genre then in vogue, "Hunger" marks the real beginning of the literary career of Knut Hamsun, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. In many ways, the novel prefigures the writings of Kafka and other existentialist authors who will write about the condition of contemporary man. Hailed by André Gide, Henry Miller, André Breton and Octave Mirbeau, “La Faim” is today considered one of the masterpieces of 20th century European literature.