"Not an hour without a problem, here for seven or eight months, not even the necessary food for a week, before misery kneels me again. And furthermore, despite all my wretchedness, I had remained honest, completely honest. God forgive me, but how foolish I was! If I find right now on the street the godfather of a student, the only relative of a poor widow, I will collect them and put them in my pocket without hesitation, and I will sleep carefree on them all night. I had not passed unscathed through so many incredible difficulties, my patience had run out, I was ready for anything. [...]"

"Hunger", the most popular and translated work of Hamsun, is a description of the loneliness and destitution of the man who makes the "mistake" of engaging in intellectual and creative activities, in a materialistic world of seeking pleasures. It is perhaps the most "biological" study of this condition (compared to Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" or Hesse's "Steppenwolf"), as the reader literally feels in his guts this terrible sensation of hunger that devours the hero, from the first to the last page of the book. However, "Hunger" is also a semiotics of the non-random, of necessity and destiny, a battle of the hero with the invisible forces that condemn him, like the gods did to Prometheus, to a terrible punishment for the Hubris he commits, that is, for not engaging in purely earthly activities."

(from the translator's preface)