Hunger is a fictional account of what might have occurred at a botanical institute during the Hitlerite seige of Leningrad in 1941. It is told in the first person by one of the botanists. The premise is that the scientists agree to protect (and not feed upon) the rare seeds housed at the institute.
The prose comes in relatively short chunks, mixing personal observations and the backstory of the narrator with contemporary Russian history and ancient Babylonian history; interspersed with some science and several eulogies to food. Descriptions of pre-siege food seem tailored to awaken a tiny empathic taste of hunger. It works.
It is a strange eclectic mixture, fractured and sometimes abrupt, an unusual style, but successfully indicative of a narrator’s self-doubt. Profound observations are hurled brusquely from time to time, but the narrative changes direction and moves on briskly, leaving the reader in doubt, and unable to validate (or not) the narrator’s self-justifications.
“If I wished to draw a conclusion, the conclusion I would arrive at is this: if I am a coward, then what I fear are my own thoughts. And my own thoughts were precisely what cold and hunger delivered to me. Brave of body and weak of mind, yes, and alive to think about it.”
I wondered why the author had chosen to use a first person male narrator, a conceivably risky venture, but not without renowned precedent in the persons of Marilynne Robinson and Emily Brontë. However, it did seem to facilitate the character of the narrator’s wife who is an unusually, and refreshingly, (in terms of fiction) strong and independent woman.
Hunger, if you’ll forgive the expression, is not spoon fed to the reader. The connections are there but I am not sure if any two individuals would connect the same dots in the same way. With the conclusion, likewise. I found it sad and slightly ironic. And, ultimately, it left me feeling reflective.
