Lu-Hai Liang

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The great ambition of journalists is to make the front page. Or it’s to be part of an investigation so powerful it becomes the news agenda. To win Pulitzer prizes, and cited by congressman. To write longform narrative features that are adapted into movies or expanded into books.

For writers, however, the great ambition is simultaneously simpler and infinitely more difficult.

Recently, I spent a happy afternoon wandering the shelves of the big Waterstones in Piccadilly after wanting a change from the Foyles on Charing Cross road.

Meandering among the tables, I happened upon a classic paperback that piqued my interest. It was Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, which was published in 1890.

A semi-autobiographical novel, of somewhat slim length, Hunger has a formidable reputation, its influence and legacy secure, and is considered a literary masterpiece.

The book I had actually come to check out, though, since I was in London anyway, was Caleb Azumah Nelson’s debut novel Open Water. Published just a few years ago, it has been acclaimed among contemporary literature. I spent the afternoon on a sofa reading passages from both books, making comparison even as Hunger had been a random pick-up. And I considered ambition from a literary perspective.

Hunger focuses on an aspiring writer’s movements around a Norwegian city, with spare descriptions, and much internal monologue on the hunger, both physical and psychological, experienced by the protagonist. It is heavy on narrative. Reading Hunger, in the 2020s, can seem a touch quaint since the internal monologue and lack of plot is no longer so novel, so new. But in the late nineteenth century it was considered special, with the force and depth of its psychological focus, and its central tension pulsing underneath.

While I read from this famous work, which helped Hamsun win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920, I was struck by something. There was a consistency and rhythm to its descriptions, which can often observe seemingly banal things. Some lady the unnamed narrator notices on the street; how he feels about a lamp or some other commonplace thing, like drinking tea, etc. Yet the weightiness of the descriptions, which are pungent and philosophical, steadily accretes and transforms the slender book into a truthful encounter with a mind that has thought intensely about life’s struggle amidst the deceptions of society.

There is great discipline to Hunger, an unhurried rhythm that you often find in pre-twentieth century prose. I guess in the late 1800s people didn’t have to contend with constant push notifications, although the masses were far likelier to experience the gnaw of starvation. It was instructive for me, as a writer, to understand that insightful writing has to be well paced, that potent insights have to be strung along, placed every so often, or even submerged within the narrative, rather than coming along too quickly, too cheaply.

To be a good writer is to…

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