A young writer walks the streets of Christiania with nothing in his stomach, pawning his waistcoat, refusing help, and narrating his own mind as it comes apart. Hamsun had lived it — road laborer, tram conductor, farmhand in America — and the book made him famous in 1890 for a kind of attention nobody had used before. His later politics were disgraceful: he gave his Nobel medal to Goebbels.
