Tales of a hunger artist

Although his career was a long and productive one, it is fair to say that the Norwegian writer and 1920 Nobel Laureate for Literature, Knut Hamsun (1859-1952), is mainly famous for his remarkable debut, Hunger. That novel established him as a pioneering Modernist as well as an extraordinarily daring, experimental writer. It is also an early example of the urban novel as both physical and psychological odyssey, featuring a lone anti-hero wandering around a great city.

Set in Kristiania (now Oslo), Hunger is the story of an aspiring writer whose rage at not having his genius recognised surpasses even the poverty which drives him to pawning his vest and, ultimately, the buttons off his coat. Starvation causes him to bite his own finger savagely.

Hamsun's narrator is no Leopold Bloom; there is little of the benign bumbler about him, and his only fantasies are concerned with ambition, not adulterous romance. His story is black, funny, evocative and exasperating. Central to the novel's success and to Hamsun's work is the urgency of his style and the palpable influence of Dostoyevsky. As the twenty stories gathered in Tales of Love and Loss (Souvenir Press, £8.99 in UK) testify, Hamsun's imaginative range is as diverse as his narrative voice is urgent. But while he remains most closely associated with the relentlessly obsessive first-person narrator at war with his inner world, Hamsun is also capable of acting as detached observer and matching his often hilarious, exasperated frenzy with a deadpan comedy worthy of Beckett. Some of the these stories, particularly those chronicling small-town life, approach the genre of moral fable and the more violent variety of fairy tale . Also evident in his fiction is the effect of Hamsun's travels in the United States: he worked on a prairie farm during the 1880s as well as spending a period as a tram-car conductor in Chicago.

He is at heart an autobiographical writer. Even when not working in the familiar first-person voice, he draws on his own experience, as seen from the use of gambling as a theme in stories as contrasting as "On the Prairie" and "Father and Son: A Gambling Story". Hamsun married a wealthy woman, and later lost much of her fortune through gaming.

The first of the stories, "A Lecture Tour", offers a variation on Hunger. The narrator begins: "I was going to give a lecture on modern fiction in Drammen. I was short of money, and this seemed to me a good way to get hold of a little." The desperation that pervaded the novel is present here, yet the anger and frustration are more understated. On arrival at the town where is to lecture, he visits a local newspaper editor. "I am going to talk about literature" he says, to which the editor replies: "I realise that. I'm just warning you, you'll probably lose money on it." As ever with Hamsun, much of the humour lies in the exasperated asides: "Lose money on it?" he seethes inwardly, "Priceless! Perhaps he thought I was a salesman travelling for a firm."

As in Hunger, the narrator experiences dramatic mood shifts: hope and despair alternate wildly as he plans and then witnesses the collapse of his schemes. Among his many problems is the presence in town of another lecturer, a dandy who is an anti-spiritualist and speaks "a horrible mixture of Swedish and Norwegian" but who nevertheless has a more popular subject to sell. No prizes for guessing who wins the largest audience. "The director himself - the anti-spiritualist - astounded everyone with his tricks. He pulled a string of handkerchiefs out of his nose . . . and made a table walk across the floor . . ."

Elsewhere, an invariably incredulous Hamsun narrator meets up with an assortment of oddballs, the sort of people who beat him up in carriages or confess sordid deeds; a ghost with a missing tooth is eager for revenge, while a tragic, insane mystery woman is intent on exhuming the body of a child who was buried alive. "Why do you say it was my child?" she asks, "I didn't say that, I'm only saying that I know the mother." Of course, it is her child.

Even Hamsun is not above the occasional dash of melodrama. In another story, a cocksure narrator interprets a young girl's reluctant permission for him to sleep in her vacant bed as proof of a love he misguidedly believes her to have for him. In "A Woman's Triumph" he refers to his tram-car days: "Those of us working the nightshift never felt particularly safe on that line because of all the dubious types who used it. We weren't allowed to shoot and kill people, in case the company was held responsible and made to pay compensation," he announces matter of factly. A soon-to-be-deserted husband has a plan which backfires in the face of his wife's superior organisational skills.

"Zachaeus" begins with an un-typical calm: "The deepest peace reigns over the prairie. For miles, as far as the eye can see, there is not a house, not a tree, nothing but wheat and green grass." Yet all is no better in the New World than it is in Hamsun's unhappy Norwegian small fishing towns. Two sworn enemies, Polly the cook, a huge Irishman who looks like a parrot, and Zachaeus, both live on Billybonny Farm which "lies quite alone, without neighbours, without any connection with the world".

Although half blind, the eponymous anti-hero makes the mistake of taking Polly's precious newspaper. War is declared between them, fuelled by various insults aimed at Polly's cooking. Hamsun steps back from the immediate situation and describes the twilight zone the farm workers live in. "There are all nations, all races, young and old, immigrants from Europe and native-born American wanderers, every last one of them some kind of villain living out his derailed existence."

When Zachaeus loses a finger in an accident, Polly of course cooks it and serves it to the owner, who then asks: "Did you cook that finger in with the other meat, Polly?" The cook is insulted. "What kind of man do you take me for? I cooked it by itself, in a casserole all on its own . . ."

Most of these stories are excellent. Hamsun is an original. Isaac Bashevis Singer once commented that "the whole modern school of 20th century literature stems from Hamsun". It is an observation which has often been quoted, including by translator Robert Ferguson in his introduction to this wonderful book by a singular master-storyteller.