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wjmcomposer

wjmcomposer

Currently reading

Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories
China Miéville
Operation Greylord: The True Story of an Untrained Undercover Agent and America's Biggest Corruption Bust
Terrence Hake, Wayne Klatt
Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto
Aaron Franklin, Jordan Mackay
My System: 21st Century Edition
Aron Nimzowitsch
The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book
Ted Kooser
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
Francis Fukuyama
My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love
Karl Ove Knausgård, Don Bartlett
James Madison: A Biography
Ralph Louis Ketcham
The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805
Richard Zacks

Hunger, by Knut Hamsun - Review

Hunger - Knut Hamsun, George Egerton

The frenetic story of a young man down on his luck, starving, near homeless, freezing, manic. This is Raskolnikov minus malice, by all accounts a vital stepping stone in the development of modern literature.

I just didn't love it.

Now if I had read this around the same age I was when I read Crime and Punishment, I probably would have loved it, but maybe the romance without finance is a nuisance, to quote a line by Tiny Grimes. The writing is good, compelling even, and the narrator demands both sympathy and revulsion at times, and his exploits both tragic and harrowing.

I just didn't love it.