Hunger Strike

I just finished Hamsun's Hunger.  I think it is a young person's book, and I perhaps would have had more sympathy or identified a bit more with the narrator when I was in my twenties.  Now I just found him an incredibly annoying person who kept sabotaging himself and his life chances.  It wasn't just that he was a never-ending fount of self-pity, but he insisted on dragging all these other people into his miserable state.  (In that way, he was even worse than the narrator of Celine's Death on the Installment Plan, who was also pretty insufferable.)  I really would have preferred Hunger at novella length.  I do hope that I like Mysteries better, as that is coming up pretty soon.

Anyway, I can now return to Dead Souls.  I should be able to make pretty good progress on this next week.  I may make a major push to get through Reuss's Horace Afoot, and I suppose Amis's Take a Girl Like You after that.  I'm scheduled to tackle Baker's A Fine Madness next (another book I rescued from a box in the basement).  I would certainly hope by this point, Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur has shown up in the mail (along with a bunch of Simic*)!  If not, then it is lost in the post, and I'll have to try to get a refund.  I suspect that, even if it turns up, I may need to borrow a standard paperback version for reading on the train...

* I can report that last week I read Simic's White, Classic Ballroom Dances, Austerities and even Frightening Toys (which is actually a selected volume for the UK market).  Not bad.  One thing that I discovered is that Simic often revised his poems quite extensively when he collected them and then revised them again in Selected Early Poems!  Audre Lorde did the same thing in Undersong.