TBB Book of the Month: March 2015: HUNGER

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > TBB Book of the Month: March 2015: HUNGER

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Welcome earthlings to the Awful Book of the Month!
In this thread, we choose one work of ~~literature~~ absolute crap and read/discuss it over a month. If you have any suggestions of books, choose something that will be appreciated by many people, and has many avenues of discussion. We'd also appreciate if it were a work of ~~literature~~ complete drivel that is easily located from a local library or book shop, as opposed to ordering something second hand off the internet and missing out on a week's worth of reading. Better yet, books available on e-readers.

Resources:

Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org

- A database of over 17000 books available online. If you can suggest books from here, that'd be the best.

SparkNotes - http://www.sparknotes.com/

- A very helpful Cliffnotes-esque site, but much better, in my opinion. If you happen to come in late and need to catch-up, you can get great character/chapter/plot summaries here.

:siren:

For recommendations on future material, suggestions on how to improve the club, or just a general rant, feel free to PM me. :siren:

Past Books of the Month
2011:
January: John Keats, Endymion
Febuary/March: Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote
April: Laurell K. Hamilton, Obsidian Butterfly
May: Richard A. Knaak - Diablo #1: Legacy of Blood
June: Pamela Britton - On The Move
July: Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
August: Louis L'Amour - Bendigo Shafter
September: Ian Fleming - Moonraker
October: Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes
November: John Ringo - Ghost
December: James Branch Cabell - Jurgen

2012:
January: G.K. Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday
Febuary: M. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage
March: Joseph Heller - Catch-22
April: Zack Parsons - Liminal States
May: Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood
June: James Joyce - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
July: William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
August: William Faulkner - The Sound & The Fury
September/October: Leo Tolstoy - War & Peace
November: David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
December: Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

2013
January: Walter M. Miller - A Canticle for Liebowitz
Febuary: Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
March: Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains Of The Day
April: Don Delillo - White Noise
May: Anton LeVey - The Satanic Bible
June/July: Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
August: Michael Swanwick - Stations of the Tide
September: John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids
October: Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House
November: Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory
December: Roderick Thorp - Nothing Lasts Forever

2014:
January: Ursula K. LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness
February: Mikhail Bulgalov - Master & Margarita
March: Richard P. Feynman -- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
April: James Joyce -- Dubliners
May: Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- 100 Years of Solitude
June: Howard Zinn -- A People's History of the United States
July: Mary Renault -- The Last of the Wine
August: Barbara Tuchtman -- The Guns of August
September: Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice
October: Roger Zelazny -- A Night in the Lonesome October
November: John Gardner -- Grendel
December: Christopher Moore -- The Stupidest Angel

2015:
January: Italo Calvino -- Invisible Cities
February: Karl Ove Knausgaard -- My Struggle: Book 1.

Current:

Knut Hamsen: Hunger

quote:

Hunger (Norwegian: Sult) is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun published in 1890. Parts of it had been published anonymously in the Danish magazine Ny Jord in 1888. The novel has been hailed as the literary opening of the 20th century[1] and an outstanding example of modern, psychology-driven literature.[2] Hunger portrays the irrationality of the human mind in an intriguing and sometimes humorous manner.

. . . .

Written after Hamsun's return from an ill-fated tour of America, Hunger is loosely based on the author's own impoverished life before his breakthrough in 1890. Set in late 19th-century Kristiania, the novel recounts the adventures of a starving young man whose sense of reality is giving way to a delusionary existence on the darker side of a modern metropolis. While he vainly tries to maintain an outer shell of respectability, his mental and physical decay are recounted in detail. His ordeal, enhanced by his inability or unwillingness to pursue a professional career, which he deems unfit for someone of his abilities, is pictured in a series of encounters which Hamsun himself described as 'a series of analyses.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_%28Hamsun_novel%29

About the Author

quote:

Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 � February 19, 1952) was a Norwegian author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun's work spans more than 70 years and shows variation with regard to the subject, perspective and environment. He published more than 20 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, and some essays.

The young Hamsun objected to realism and naturalism. He argued that the main object of modernist literature should be the intricacies of the human mind, that writers should describe the "whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow".[1] Hamsun is considered the "leader of the Neo-Romantic revolt at the turn of the [20th] century", with works such as Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894), and Victoria (1898).[2] His later works�in particular his "Nordland novels"�were influenced by the Norwegian new realism, portraying everyday life in rural Norway and often employing local dialect, irony, and humour.[3]

Hamsun is considered to be "one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists of the past hundred years" (ca. 1890�1990).[4] He pioneered psychological literature with techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, and influenced authors such as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Maxim Gorky, Stefan Zweig, Henry Miller, Hermann Hesse, and Ernest Hemingway.[5] Isaac Bashevis Singer called Hamsun "the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect�his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun".[6]

But wait, there's more!

quote:

When World War II started, he was over 80 years old, almost deaf and his main source of information was the conservative newspaper Aftenposten, which had been sympathetic to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany from the beginning. He suffered two intracranial hemorrhages during the war.

Hamsun wrote several newspaper articles in the course of the war, including his notorious 1940 assertion that "the Germans are fighting for us, and now are crushing England's tyranny over us and all neutrals".[14] In 1943, he sent Germany�s minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal as a gift. His biographer Thorkild Hansen interpreted this as part of the strategy to get an audience with Hitler.[24] Hamsun was eventually invited to meet with Hitler; during the meeting, he complained about the German civilian administrator in Norway, Josef Terboven, and asked that imprisoned Norwegian citizens be released, enraging Hitler.[25] Otto Dietrich describes the meeting in his memoirs as the only time that another person was able to get a word in edgeways with Hitler. He attributes the cause to Hamsun's deafness. Regardless, Dietrich notes that it took Hitler three days to get over his anger.[26] Hamsun also on other occasions helped Norwegians who had been imprisoned for resistance activities and tried to influence German policies in Norway.[27]

Nevertheless, a week after Hitler's death, Hamsun wrote a eulogy for him, saying �He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.�[22] Following the end of the war, angry crowds burned his books in public in major Norwegian cities and Hamsun was confined for several months in a psychiatric hospital.

Hamsun was forced to undergo a psychiatric examination, which concluded that he had "permanently impaired mental faculties," and on that basis the charges of treason were dropped. Instead, a civil liability case was raised against him, and in 1948 he had to pay a ruinous sum to the Norwegian government of 325,000 kroner ($65,000 or �16,250 at that time) for his alleged membership in Nasjonal Samling and for the moral support he gave to the Germans, but was cleared of any direct Nazi affiliation. Whether he was a member of Nasjonal Samling or not and whether his mental abilities were impaired is a much debated issue even today. Hamsun stated he was never a member of any political party.[citation needed] He wrote his last book Paa giengrodde Stier (On Overgrown Paths) in 1949, a book many take as evidence of his functioning mental capabilities.[citation needed] In it, he harshly criticizes the psychiatrists and the judges and, in his own words, proves that he is not mentally ill.

The Danish author Thorkild Hansen investigated the trial and wrote the book The Hamsun Trial (1978), which created a storm in Norway. Among other things Hansen stated: "If you want to meet idiots, go to Norway," as he felt that such treatment of the old Nobel Prize-winning author was outrageous. In 1996 the Swedish director Jan Troell based the movie Hamsun on Hansen's book. In Hamsun, the Swedish actor Max von Sydow plays Knut Hamsun; his wife, Marie, is played by the Danish actress Ghita N�rby.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Hamsun#Political_sympathies

Discussion, Questions & Themes:

quote:

Hunger encompasses two of Hamsun's literary and ideological leitmotifs:

-- His insistence that the intricacies of the human mind ought to be the main object of modern literature: Hamsun's own literary program, to describe 'the whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow', is thoroughly manifest in Hunger.

-- His depreciation of modern, urban civilization: In the famous opening lines of the novel, he ambivalently describes Kristiania as 'this wondrous city that no one leaves before it has made its marks upon him.' The latter is counterbalanced in other Hamsun works, such as Mysteries (Mysterier) (1892) and Growth of the Soil (Markens Gr�de), which earned him the Nobel prize in literature but also a reputation for being a proto-National Socialist Blut und Boden author.[4]

Which Edition?

Hedningen posted:

The Lyngstad translation is the best. Bly's translation is all right, but mixes up a few key points in the novel - while the geography is kept slightly vague, there's a definite topography to Hunger that gets harder to follow in the older translation. And avoid the translation by Egerton - it censors and omits a lot of stuff that's kinda crucial to the text. Overall, I've taught to both the Bly and Lyngstad translations, but Lyndgstad is better for when people are reading in a mixed Norwegian/English reading group.

The only benefit to the Egerton translation is that you can get it for free, but it's not worth it. A lot of early translations of Scandinavian texts got hit hard by the censors back in the day, which is especially hilarious when you consider that one of the major points of the Modern Breakthrough (the most important literary period people never seem to know about) is that open discussion of topics like sexuality and social issues in literature is the only way to prevent literature from dying. Someday, I will finish my translation of Den Bergtagna to right some of those wrongs.

Pacing

No pacing or spoiler rules this month. Just read!

Final Note:

If you have any suggestions to change, improve or assess the book club generally, please PM or email me -- i.e., keep it out of this thread -- at least until into the last five days of the month, just so we don't derail discussion of the current book with meta-discussion. I do want to hear new ideas though, seriously, so please do actually PM or email me or whatever, or if you can't do either of those things, just hold that thought till the last five days of the month before posting it in this thread. Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book!

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Mar 2, 2015

# ¿ Mar 2, 2015 04:46

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# ¿ Nov 12, 2025 02:49

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Mira posted:

I'm about a third of the way through this. With all the preambles and disclaimers, I'm really surprised at how accessible the book is.

Yeah the first chapter or so at least has been really accessible. I dove right into the text and while the dude is clearly at least half-cracked he's cracking up in a way that's easy for the reader to understand, at least so far. It's a really great depiction of, yes, exactly what it says on the tin -- just how hosed up your head gets when you don't eat for long periods of time.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2015 03:27

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

This book is great but I still have about a third to go.

I'm thinking something relatively light for next month, maybe Hemingway's A Moveable Feast based on this blurb here:

quote:

"Finally when we were eating the cherry tart and had a last carafe of wine he said, 'You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.'

'No, I didn't.'

'I thought I'd told you.'

'No. You told me a lot of things but not that.'

'That is what I want to ask you about.'

'Good. Go on.'

'Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. [This conversation was held somewhat after what Hemingway describes as "what was then called her first nervous breakdown."] She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.'

'Come out to the office,' I said.

'Where is the office?'

'Le water," [the men's room] I said.

We came back into the room and sat down at the table.

'You're perfectly fine,' I said. 'You are O.K. There's nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.'

'Those statues may not be accurate.'

'They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.'

'But why would she say it?'

'To put you out of business. That's the oldest way in the world of putting people out of business. Scott, you asked me to tell you the truth and I can tell you a lot more but this is the absolute truth and all you need. You could have gone to a doctor.'

'I didn't want to. I wanted you to tell me truly.'

'Now do you believe me?'

'I don't know,' he said.

'Come on over to the Louvre,' I said. 'It's just down the street and across the river.'

We went over to the Louvre and he looked at the statues but still he was doubtful about himself.

'It is not basically a question of the size in repose,' I said. 'It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.'

I explained to him about using a pillow and a few other things that might be useful for him to know.

'There is one girl,' he said, 'who has been very nice to me. But after what Zelda said--'

'Forget what Zelda said,' I told him. 'Zelda is crazy. There's nothing wrong with you. Just have confidence and do what the girl wants. Zelda just wants to destroy you.'

'You don't know anything about Zelda.'

'All right,' I said. 'Let it go at that. But you came to lunch to ask me a question and I've tried to give you an honest answer.'

But he was still doubtful.

'Should we go and see some pictures?' I asked. 'Have you ever seen anything in here except the Mona Lisa?'

'I'm not in the mood for looking at pictures,' he said. 'I promised to meet some people at the Ritz bar.'"

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/03/hemingway-reassures-fitzgerald-about-his-penis.html

Other option I've thought of would be Steinbeck's Cannery Row:

quote:

Doc is the owner and operator of the Western Biological Laboratory. Doc is rather small, deceptively small, for he is wiry and very strong and when passionate anger comes on him he can be very fierce. He wears a beard and his face is half Christ and half satyr and his face tells the truth. It is said that he has helped many a girl out of one trouble and into another. Doc has the hands of a brain surgeon, and a cool warm mind. Doc tips his hat to dogs as he drives by and the dogs look up and smile at him. He can kill anything for need but he could not even hurt a feeling for pleasure. He has one great fear�that of getting his head wet, so that summer or winter he ordinarily wears a rain hat. He will wade in a tide pool up to the chest without feeling damp, but a drop of rain water on his head makes him panicky�Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you to a kind of wisdom. His mind had no horizon�and his sympathy had no warp. He could talk to children, telling them very profound things so that they understood. He lived in a world of wonders, of excitement. He was concupiscent as a rabbit and gentle as hell. Everyone who knew him was indebted to him. And everyone who thought of him thought next, �I really must do something nice for Doc.�

quote:

�He�s been building that boat for seven years that I know of� Every time he gets it nearly finished he changes it and starts over again. I think he�s nuts. Seven years on a boat.�

Doc was sitting on the ground pulling off his rubber boots. �You don�t understand,� he said gently. �Henri loves boats but he�s afraid of the ocean.�

�What�s he want a boat for then?� Hazel demanded.

�He likes boats,� said Doc. �But suppose he finishes his boat. Once it�s finished people will say, �Why don�t you ever put it in the water?� Then if he puts it in the water, he�ll have to go out in it, and he hates the water. So you see, he never finishes the boat - so he doesn�t ever have to launch it.�

quote:

While he ate his sandwich and sipped his beer, a bit of conversation came back to him. Blaisedell, the poet, had said to him, �You love beer so much. I�ll bet some day you�ll go in and order a beer milk shake.� It was a simple piece of foolery but it had bothered Doc ever since. He wondered what a beer milk shake would taste like. The idea gagged him but he couldn�t let it alone. It cropped up every time he had a glass of beer. Would it curdle the milk? Would you add sugar? It was like a shrimp ice cream. If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he�d better do it in a town where he wasn�t known. But then, a man with a beard, ordering a beer milk shake in a town where he wasn�t known - they might call the police. A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn�t say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn�t like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn�t shave.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Mar 19, 2015

# ¿ Mar 19, 2015 15:28

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Mira posted:

Might be time for a good old-fashioned poll?

Yeah, I think you're right. Tosss me some more suggestions though.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2015 13:05

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Book for April is Three Body Problem. I'll get a thread up as soon as I can.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2015 15:11

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > TBB Book of the Month: March 2015: HUNGER