If JD Salinger's books were touchstones to my adolescent psyche, no book reminds me more of my young 20s starting out than Hamsun's Hunger. It was recommended to me by a friend who used to infuriate me by deliberately playing the slowest game of chess when he knew I had to go to work. I forgave him this transgression because he turned me on to this funny and harrowing book.

The greatest attribute of Hunger is that it accurately and credibly depicts an idealist's zealous pursuit of his dream at the risk of starving himself to death with such energy, high spirits and humor that the reader is shielded from the dire truth the book conveys. This novel is almost cheerful, a celebration, if you will, of the manic and puzzling need we have to do things that are outside our purview. This character has clearly fallen too far from the tree of his parents and he pays a terrible price.

Hunger is also distinctive in that it is a novel without a clear nemesis or person-to-person conflict. There is no villain here, no evil overseer like Claggart in Billy Budd, no thief, blackmailer, or murderer. In this sense Hunger was way ahead of its time; it belongs more with the neo-realist films of the Italians--the Bicycle Thief, for instance--or with the Beat novel, On the Road. Anyone who has been in the protagonist's situation--desperate, broke, without connections or specific prospects--surely understands that in our world, villains are everywhere and responsibility for the crime of poverty and hunger is diffused throughout society. The hero of Hunger wanders around in a city that is indifferent to his vision and his strife/ What makes Hunger so scary is that we realize that when you are in this situation, you have nowhere to turn and and no one to turn to.

But Hamsun is not Upton Sinclair and this is no muckraking novel about the tribulations of young writers in Oslo. Ultimately, the novel is about the psyche of the individual,the emotional needs that drive him to such extremes, and how the spirit powerfully tortures the body to achieve its mercurial ends. For the young artist, Hunger should be a companion in the lonely first lap of a long and arduous race.