Based on some recommendation -- I have forgotten where I saw it -- I read Knut Hamsun's Hunger. It might have been in a letter from James Wright to Robert Bly, whose afterword to the novel I skipped. The introduction by Auster also skipped. It is a relatively short novel, and certainly modernist in the pre-war sense. The basics of the novel are that it appears as the first person narrative of a journalist who is both without any steady or even remotely sufficient work and likely somewhat insane. I think it is both. Not that I have ever been hungry enough to live the relevant circumstances. But it seems so very different from the description of hunger's effect on the mind by, e.g., Achebe. That is pretty limited evidence, and however thin it is was I relied on. Mostly, though, it seemed to me a novel about a man whose mind is not entirely all interconnected, as shown by his odd thoughts and behavior. And modernist in the self-awareness of the pieces moving apart from one another. It reminded me, as it does many, of Dostoevsky or, in places, Gogol. Like them, Hamsun's character is very chatty with himself, and quite funny. Most of the book I think is quite funny, not just the inner monologues. The things the speaker does and his circumstances are absurd -- a journalist writing pieces about the meaning of the world while too hungry to think, and the many times his peculiar sense of duty requires him to give away everything. In that sense, a bit kantian. And fit quite well into travel to and from a deposition -- another peculiar use of one's time, use to limited ends.
On a different subject, I recommend the comments on the Iranian situation at Fistful of Euros.
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