Karl Ove Knausgård - Min kamp

halfway through vol. 1.

a very interesting Macrocosm and a very boring microcosm. the contradiction between those two is what makes the novel remarkable, after all.

anyone else read it?

or: the most readable experimental novel ever written?

Not sure what you're getting at with that macro/microcosm distinction. I've read Vol. 1. Reposting my thoughts from one of the "currently reading" threads: "First half is about his high-school years, second half deals with his dad's death from alcoholism. Both halves pretty great. His ersatz-Proustian tic of recounting mundane activities in minute detail sometimes seems almost OCD, but the fastidious style pays dividends by capturing subtle emotional nuances in its fine mesh."

i think he is anti-proust:
where proust dig as deep as possible, Knausgård stays on the surface.

interesting macrocosm because of the the simple yet original idea of describing the banal everyday life as they are (the boring microcosm), without any decoration or technique whatsoever, as simple as possible. like modern art - everyone can do it,yes, but only he did.

When is this going to be on HBO?

never. too anti dramatic

There is an article in that awful paper - can't even face linking to that thrash anymore - where he talks about how basically, you know, you should write without any sense of shame.

I mean, will someone give this guy a medal?

I'll wait till he is dead. Might turn into a masterpiece then.

funny, because it's not as provocative as he think it is.

I read the first, have just started the second. I still can't tell whether he has such an eye for the telling detail that he can identify way more of them than anyone else, or whether that means he has no eye for the telling detail whatsoever. So many things are mentioned or half-described in passing, and then disappear having had no consequence. Maybe I'm missing it, or maybe they'll all be knitted together in volume six.

The first book *is* great though. It's not quite a two-halves book either, there are long digressions on e.g. life in Stockholm which don't seem to belong to either half. They're the most boring bits. The second book starts with one of these, a boring though still perceptive episode of parenthood. It makes for an unpromising opening though, it's going to take an effort to heave myself into this volume.

So much great stuff on being an adolescent. His band playing its first gig at the shopping mall is delightfully embarrassing.

still, it's like a study on detachment: everything has the feeling of indifferent, and it seems like he wasn't a "thinker" till after his teenage years, when he and everything around him is either shallow or very repressed. or is it just the Norwegian way of living?

Might be a Norwegian thing. Repression is kind of what we're about. We make up for it by getting far too drunk.

Re: seeing himself as provocative. When reading recent interviews, you probably have to keep in mind that his books were a HUGE deal here, with lots of discussion about whether writing them was immoral etc. Some of the people he wrote about didn't appreciate it. I cannot go into details, because I avoided those discussion and articles.

'it seems like he wasn't a "thinker" till after his teenage years'

hm.

got the first one of these for a pound at the weekend. that's all i have to add, unfortunately.

I've almost finished the second volume. Still can't quite articulate what I find so great about it. There is something bracing about the relentless, horrific mundanity of, eg, cleaning the dad's house in book I. As IK sez, book II opens with the most stupefyingly detailed account of a children's party imaginable, yet I found it engrossing. Suppose I don't find it very hard to identify with a guy who grew up in the 80s trying to make his hair look like Ian McCulloch's and discussing ideal LFC back 4s. Or the 30-something househusbandry. Wonder if I would find it quite so acute if it were written by some guy in Hackney.

How does it compare to Javier Mariás in terms of, idk what to call it, hyper-extension of event and time?

marias is more boring

disagree

i've only read 2 marias books & 1 knausgard

There is an article in that awful paper - can't even face linking to that thrash anymore - where he talks about how basically, you know, you should write without any sense of shame.

I'm nearly finished volume 1 now. Puzzled by this shame thing, because he seems to be just about as straight and moral and well-adjusted as a writer-type is likely to be. It's easy to write without shame when you don't have all that much to be ashamed of.

I dread to think of the books that will come out influenced by this.

It is pretty much impossible to imagine this being written by a woman.

i cannot believe that any of us, no matter how straight and moral, don't have a gajillion instances of personal inward shame

This Paris Review interview is pretty good on shame: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/12/26/completely-without-dignity-an-interview-with-karl-ove-knausgaard/

Was talking to the Pinefox about Knausgaard a few weeks ago and it occurred to me that nearest UK equivalent, to the first volume at least, and with a lot more playfulness, is Paul Morley's Nothing. The bit where Morley spends a long night considering suicide because of his school trousers is totally Knausgaardian.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/dec/05/zadie-smith-man-vs-corpse/

This is a good read about Knausgaard and another chronicler of the everyday who I'm fairly sure I like a bit more, although I've only read bits and pieces of Min Kamp. What the fuck is with that title btw

trolling for pageviews iirc

re tao lin (and re 'this written by a woman') i think i have seen the sheila heti comparison more often?

yeah I put it "on pause" - let's see if I ever get back to it. I liked the idea and somehow I relate so much to it, it's just a shame that it's such a drag to get through it.

= my status on the archipelago thread. Hasn't changed in teh last 12 months

Knausgaard makes Tao Lin look like the hollowed out peanut shell that he is

waterface: opinions 4 u

Read the first page of My Struggle Book 1 and then Taipei and tell me I'm wrong

IF YOU DARE

Explanation of what happens when you die v. lame ass party in NYC

Go ahead, prove it. Work it out, show your work

i feel like whether a book signposts it is about something important on its first page is not a great algorithm for determining literary value

^ gets it

I never said it was a determination of total value. Saying it's a starting point

Go ahead guys

I'm willing to say I'm wrong! I just don't see it

You can criticize Taipei for a lot of things, but lack of meditations on what happens when you die isn't one of them.

The whole book is basically premised on the main character's fear that he went wrong somehow, fell out of sync with the universe, and is continuing down a path that is somehow not "really" his life.

ok

but the first few pages of My Struggle are masterful, and I'm not seeing that with Taipei. Can you point to a particular page or section I should check out

i'm just going to mention tao lin on a bunch of threads about southern rock or brutalist architecture or artisan cheese and see if you show up to sidetrack them and all

"sidetrack"

And I didn't bring up Tao Lin, Treeship did

Zadie Smith did actually

Think i might download vol 1 of the knausgaard for my iphone

duh

;-)

The only bit I really liked in vol.1 was when they visited this poet:

Scandinavia doesn’t have a tradition of tell-all memoirs, but it does have diarists. Olav H. Hauge, the Norwegian poet, wrote a three-thousand-page diary which was published after his death, when you were about twenty-six. Did you have a strong reaction to it?

Yes, I did. I read it very intensely over a short period of time, during a kind of crisis in my life. I was obsessed with it. And it was very strange because he wrote his diaries from 1916, or something, until 1990, so it covers his whole life. And he was basically only on his farm. Nothing happens in his life at all. And he really writes about nothing. Nothing is going on there except for him thinking, and harvesting apples.

And I really wanted to read his diary.

I think I will read the whole cycle but in one go. In no hurry and its very very easy to read..

I'm about halfway through the second volume: at times, the lack of a predetermined plan for the work really shows, but I appreciate the unpredictability of the work's narrative rhythms, as well as Knausgaard's willingness to be essayistic in the vein of someone like Musil (even if Knausgaard's ideas about society are not especially exciting), and the first volume's later sections dealing with Karl Ove's return to the site of his father's death were extraordinarily moving.

I'm also fond of this reading by Knausgaard, if only because of a superstitious belief in the interest of the grain of the writer's voice: http://youtu.be/1ODhM41VOYg

"belief in the interest" should be "interest" in that last sentence.

willingness to be essayistic in the vein of someone like Musil (even if Knausgaard's ideas about society are not especially exciting)

I suppose its what Musil said about Broch (when he was accusing him of stealing his idea for MwQ), something like "why has he completed this (The Sleepwalkers) so easily when it should be so hard".

This is probably a good thing about Knausgaard, that is his attempt to disprove how art transforms the mundane into something extraordinary and all that blah. The mundane by itself is apparently amazing, but it seems so easy and casual and tossed off too.

in the guardian review today. not v intersting article tho.

surely not as uninteresting as the profile in the observer last weekend.

I went to that article, did a CTRL+F "Proust" and that didn't come up w/anything! :)

It wasn't awful then, the problem is we don't have the whole thing so commentators are as at sea as the rest of us..

The second book is awfully frustrating, now that I've got a feel for how this works. I know something significant is going to happen, sometime, but there passes inciting incident after inciting incident and I'm practically screaming out for one to stick so we can get on with it. I mean:

... when I was staying at the flat Norstedts, the publishers, had put at my disposal a stone's throw further up the street. I had weighed over a hundred kilos at the time and moved in a semi-catatonic darkness, escaping from my former life. It hadn't been much fun. But I had decided to pick myself up, so every evening I went to the Lill-Jansskogen forest to run. I couldn't even manage a hundred metres before my heart was pounding so fast and my lungs were gasping so much that I had to stop. Another hundred metres and my legs were trembling. Then it was back to the hotel-like flat at walking pace for crispbread and soup.

One day I had seen a woman in the shop, suddenly she was standing next to me, by the meat counter of all places, and there was something about her, the sheer physicality of her appearance, which from one moment to the next filled me with almost explosive lust. She was holding her basket in front of her with both hands, her hair was auburn, her pale complexion freckled. I caught a whiff of her body, a faint smell of sweat and soap, and stood staring straight ahead with a thumping heart and constricted throat for maybe fifteen seconds, for that was the time it took her to come alongside me, take a pack of salami from the counter and go on her way. I saw her again when she was about to pay, she was at the other cash desk, and the desire, which had not gone away, welled up in me again. She put her items in her bag, turned and went out of the door.

I never saw her again.

The verisimilitude! I can't take much more!

actually this seems quite riveting compared to a lot fo other stuff in the book

i don't find that tension frustrating. it provides momentum, so that each incident and digression seems to flow necessarily from the previous, and afterward i don't feel i've wasted my time with any of them, so far anyway (near the end of book two.) and then when significant things do happen, they appear suddenly and unceremoniously, but aren't any less joyous or sad or humiliating for it.

I'd like to draw out my Proust comparison a bit further, but I fear that it would become increasingly obvious that I haven't read Proust. So instead, allow me to substitute a Sun Kil Moon comparison. His new album "Benji" is kind of the sonic equivalent of "My Struggle" - seeming artlessness, the piling up of small inconsequential details ("Spent the day with my dad and his old friend, Jim Wise/He's on house arrest and he sits around inside./We brought him food from Panera Bread"), over-sharing of personal information about oneself and one's relatives, fearlessness in the face of taboo subjects (sex, death, insecurity). Perhaps these are harbingers of a new "reality hunger" style for the TMI generation.

That's where any comparisons with Proust don't make sense. He uses a complicated set of metaphors as a way to say what can't be easy to say and at the same time obscure meanings.

I see a desire to live through an ambitious novelistic project in a lot of the reviews. After all we've only had Harry Potter in the last 30 years and that doesn't seem to be good enough for many people.

For the record:

The final book (yet to appear in English) contains a 400-page essay on the Nazis and ends with a discussion of the anti-immigrant mass murderer Anders Breivik.

I think in the FAP earlier in the wk I said this section was 1000 pages. Sorry for the mistake but still I haven't read much from what I can only describe as 'middle class guy w/kids watches terrorism on TV' type stuff. I have to say I can't wait.

A newly translated essay (written last year, after Knausgaard had finished "My Struggle") on writing and editing:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-04-03-knausgard-en.html

Awesome!

Volume 2 has really picked up since I got past about the 150-page mark and he's finally talking about meeting his wife. I'm getting riveted sometimes now. I just passed a bit where they went to the theatre and saw a play with a terrible Act I, but which opens up into something wonderful later. I hope it's just coincidence, I'd be annoyed at having slogged through that for conceptual neatness.

Another hundred pages and this is getting really good now. Some very good episodes - a trip to Norway, a drunken night out, a dinner-party conversation - which don't add up to a great deal but are fascinating in themselves. The accretion of details by the end should be very satisfying.

I like his frustration with the Swedish liberal consensus - but there are a couple of places where he's declined to give his thoughts on certain aspects of it. I'm wondering if that might foreshadow the rumoured Brevik monologue being quite unpopular/uncomfortable reading?

lol i hope it was just for conceptual neatness!! i really like how almost everything can be read as another lens through which to examine karl ove's project. i really dug book one, waiting for my so to finish book two

oh look, we have a thread

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/books/karl-ove-knausgaards-my-struggle-is-a-movement.html

Have seen the name Knausgaard over the last few days, finally decided to investigate, and whoa: just put vol. 1 on hold at the library. Weird that I missed the narrative until now.

A recent essay on necks and the body: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/05/28/the-other-side-of-the-face/

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/karl-ove-knausgaard-brings-his-struggle-to-brooklyn/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

has anybody read this.... whats the deal.... i just got book 2

I took a little photo to give you guys some idea what you're getting into here ...
http://i.imgur.com/TYia23G.jpg
For reference — vol 1 is about 430 pages, vol 6 1110.

(I've still not read a page of this stuff, fwiw.)

Wow

I'm about halfway through the third volume (Boyhood) at the moment; Karl Ove's terror of his father, the main recurring motif in most of this volume's episodes, was already suggested pretty thoroughly in the first volume, and I find myself missing the essayistic passages from the first two volumes, but Knausgaard is very effective at maintaining a tone of naive immediacy.

lol v good use of props øystein

Oystein - can I ask why you haven't read a word of it. Too much conversation about it? Too near it?

I admire øystein's ambition - getting all the volumes first, before sitting down to take them on?
Me, I'm still stuck miway volume 1, can't imagine ever reading them all

was just thinking about this again and how I'm not going to read it

Yet another recent essay, this one on fame and the childish desire to be seen: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/karl-ove-knausgaard-on-fame-my-struggle/

xyzzzz: yeah, too much hype made it all very tiring, and I wanted some distance to find out if people still thought highly of it once things have settled down. Apparently the last two or three volumes sold a lot less than the first lot, but I guess that's not too surprising, considering just how many copies were sold of the first few.

licorice: ha, yeah, I feel kinda ridiculous, but stores here have been flooded with the books, so with a little patience I could get them all for next to nothing. Figured I might as well pick them up, since I am pretty curious about them. They're far less intimidating than, say, The Tale of Genji.

my mind still boggles as to how volume 1 could become a bestseller

http://observer.com/2014/06/actually-hes-doing-pretty-o-k-karl-ove-knausgaard-arrives-in-new-york/

because it's Proust as if written for the masses. for better and worse.
xpost

I've nothing on Knausgaard-as-book (read a few pages, may read more but life is short), but thought this was interesting on his being a bestseller – basically, he isn't in the anglophone world:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jul/19/raise-your-hand-if-youve-read-knausgaard/
It's a bit off in that it doesn't address Europe at all (except for Denmark, where he's incontestably a bestseller, right?) but I was interested to see the US/UK stats.

You mean Norway?

genre authors like John Le Carré or Isaac Asimov were justly noted for their literary qualities

Is this true at all, in Asimov's case? I always thought that even his fans admitted he was a pretty horrible prose stylist

I think the Norway figures are remarkable - Parks is really good on these issues, but here it is off to give short shrift because Norway is a small country. In terms of proportion this is staggering.

For something 'literary' to actually have any wider cultural impact anywhere in Europe is amazing. Nothing in the UK in the last 25 years (or more) has that and the likelihood of that ever happening again is next to nil. Zadie Smith, Ian McWean etc. sounds like a smaller level of conversation.

And then to use the impact on another country (and the parochial English do not care about Norway) to push a translation too. Again, it would've taken 20 years for this kind of work to be fully translated if it hadn't generated the conversation in the first place.

25 years is about right - The Satanic Verses had quite an impact, and I doubt anyone's got the guts to try that again any time soon.

I'll be finishing volume 3 tonight. Volume 4's not out until March :o( I've been careful in looking it up, for fear of spoilers, but even so I'm surprised not to be able to find out even when it's set. I don't know if I could take another round of thirtysomething petty domesticity.

Oh yeah, Norway, sorry (to both Norway and Denmark), hasty and not quite awake.

I'm old enough to remember when Milan Kundera was the talk of the town

I think the Norway figures are remarkable - Parks is really good on these issues, but here it is off to give short shrift because Norway is a small country. In terms of proportion this is staggering.

Yes – and I'd make a blind guess that there'd be impressive figures across Scandinavia (that's not an attempt to excuse my earlier confusion…), then maybe into Germany (though ok the overall title might put them off).

FWIW, Knausgard's appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August sold out pretty quickly

https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/karl-ove-knausgaard

Nothing in the UK in the last 25 years (or more) has that and the likelihood of that ever happening again is next to nil.

tbh I wouldn't write it off – UK is definitely not where the literary action is, but if we fluked up a talent or two, and they hit the right fault-line, then things could kick up to the level of international discussion.

(But ok this is basically some 'winning the world cup' idle speculation & probably ignores institutional structures and cultures that make the UK so 2nd division)

not that satanic verses = winning the world cup.

26 years of hurt.

woof dissing Norway like Gazza

Yeah, Knausgård is a star in Denmark, and I asume in Sweden as well. My Swedish uncle was reading part six last time we visited. The toppoint of hysteria was a reviewer in Danish newspaper Politiken writing that My Struggle would mean as much for the youth of today as The Sufferings of Young Werther did back in the day. Which is absolutely ridiculous and wrong.

actually realised that I'm stupidly parochial so I don't really have the perspective to see UK lit in an international perspective & that in my head I've put Knausgaard in the 'one non-Anglophone author that serious people talk about for a bit' category.

This is not like the world cup because the tournament is held every 6-8 years (Knausgaard '13 - Bolano '07 - Murakami '00 - 1994 championship cancelled due to Britpop - Kundera/Marquez shared title '86)

There was a 1994 tourney - Jostein Gaarder should've won, but Louis de Bernieres sneaked in and snatched it with his funny-sounding name.

that's the separate and more regular 'everyone is reading this slightly literary book' tournament! Open to anglophones, doesn't generate much critical discussion.

everyone is reading this slightly literary book tournament!

New board description!

Irvine Welsh seemed like a big deal for a while there?

Yeah – I was trying to remember what was going on then – as an undergrad I was in a studenty bubble so 94-6 did seem to be a lot of people reading Trainspotting.

I cannot remember if there was an ISO Serious Author Worth Discussing for that period. Saramago, Sebald, Murakami, Houellebecq all break a bit later iirc.

94-01 seemed like a lot of people reading trainspotting tbf

haha i just don't know if i trust the figures in the nyrb article, though i guess that's one of those 'but i've read it ... and two people i know have read it ...' arguments

bought the first volume, but haven't cracked it open yet

But Freedom did sell, 68,236 in hardback in the UK, rather fewer in paperback, about half of what The Corrections sold. Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, a memoir telling of his years in hiding after the fatwa, commanded enormous column space in the press, understandably given the subject matter, but UK sales were just 7,521 in hardback and only 1,896 in paperback. However in these cases, as soon as the wave doesn’t happen the critical buzz quickly subsides.

kind of amazed, cheered at how few people read freedom though

I finished no.3 earlier, now to sit on my hands for eight months.

The last dozen or so pages were some unpleasant, uncomfortable reading - I shan't give details, not that it's a spoiler as such anyway and in any case it's not as significant as it'll sound, but it feels like between that era and this there's been a shift in morality which actually left me feeling a little: 'this not okay, he shouldn't be writing this'. Which isn't a good thing. For several reasons, not least because we'd be talking about a morality shift almost within my own life experience, and I haven't really had to face that before.

I guess what I really want to do is lay a question for Øystein, should he ever reach those pages himself - is this remotely plausible as an account of how it is/was at that particular point of adolescence in Norway?

man now i wish i'd not given up on that volume. pm me?

I've emailed you. It's not earth-shattering, sorry it came across that way. It's more just topical.

thank you. yeah, that all seems like it kind of fits from the attitude he takes towards Being A Man and suchlike throughout, i don't know

certainly some books are quite popular, in various places, but the blog article was, I think, more about suggesting that books that sounded very very popular (in US or perhaps UK) hadn't really sold that many in US / UK. The figures seemed to bear this out. I quite liked the article.

Ismael: If it's something that can be summed up, feel free to ask directly, as I don't mind knowing what happens in the books before reading them.

If not, well, I'll put a note in my copy to come back here when I've read it. But that might not happen for a long time yet.

Here's one response to Parks' blog post: http://conversationalreading.com/yes-virginia-my-struggle-is-a-bestseller/

Okay I'll delete this in a while. Basically: it's a series of descriptions of mid-level sexual assaults carried by adolescent boys, including the narrator, on adolescent girls, which the girls protest but really consent to by the glint in their eyes. e.g. a couple of boys will spot a girl alone, pounce on her, whip up her top, have a grope, then all go their separate ways.

It made me uncomfortable for several reasons, but principally because I grew up in a place, time and class not far removed from what Knausgaard is describing, and afaic remember there was nothing like this, everyone knew better. It doesn't fit with my understanding of Norway - it's all very caveman - and I find it hard to accept as a normal growing-up thing, which is how it's presented.

Maybe that last bit isn't right. Maybe I was a somewhat sheltered kid and this actually was common in most adolescences, in the UK too - instinctively I rail against the characterisations of rape culture that you see here & there, because it doesn't fit at all with my experience. Maybe that's what makes me uncomfortable - the idea that the world is and has always been like that, and I missed it. Maybe it's nothing to do with Norway.

Ok, I found one of those scenes. It doesn't sound implausible to me, though I can't say I knew any groups doing shit like that where I grew up in the early/mid 90s. There were individual pushy kids, however, who would always try to see how far they could go — I imagine there are people like that everywhere.

They sound a bit too old to really get away with acting like that, but I imagine most groups of kids would experiment with how far they could go with one another, and different groups would stop one another at different points. These girls were sorta part of their "gang", right?
I might be the worst person to answer this, simply because I was such a shy kid that I was always uncomfortable and afraid of making other people equally uncomfortable, so this would've been unthinkable.

Thanks, that's much the same position as I'm in. It's also more-or-less the same position I'd imagined the narrator to be in - so to either have him turn unreliable in the closing stretch, or to have misunderstood him or the society he's been describing, was horribly disorientating. Which isn't a trick I thought Knausgaard was going to play.

Oh, I can't delete it after all. So much for mod superpowers. I'll just leave it up i think, it's not really a spoiler as such.

I didn't know Ismael Klata was from Norway.

Like others, I have never encountered any behaviour like what he describes.

This reminds me of the way that people think everyone is into drugs but I have virtually never seen any. When I was at school most of the things that schoolchildren now are supposedly controversially into, like sex and drugs, were mainly nonexistent. One could hear of them in the media, but they did not happen in real life.

A new essay on Peter Handke, "Handke and Singularity"--I'm curious whether this overlaps with the passages on Paul Celan in the last volume, though that at the current rate that won't be out in English before 2017: http://archipelagobooks.org/read-karl-ove-knausgaards-essay-on-international-ibsen-award-winner-peter-handke/

"though at the current rate," I mean

Thanks for linking that: first time I really feel like reading Handke...has anyone seen a staging of Kaspar?

interesting - I spent my late teens obsessed with Handke (only to progressively admit to myself that most of the time his stuff would bore me senseless). I still see his influence in my tastes and what I'm drawn to. I would never have spotted the connection with Knausgard but now it makes perfect sense.

Yes, looking at a Sorrow Beyond Dreams and then turning to K's description of his father's death in vol.1..

Had to google that title to realise that book had a very different title in French (approx. "the indifferent sorrow"). Funny you bring it up since I recently put it my pile of books to read: re-read in this case, 15 years after the first time. It made a strong impression on me as a melancholy early 20sth, can't imagine how it'll hit me now, in the midst of struggling with my mother's mental illness and depression .

Sorry to hear it.

Went onto this Amazon review, accuses it of being "heartless", attacking it for the same reasons that Knausgaard praises it.

Original German title is also different - Wunchloses Unglück is a play on "wunchloses glücklich," usually translated as "perfectly happy" - so happy you don't have a wish! So literal translation of title would have been "perfectly unhappy," you can see why it got modified in translation. Definitely one of his more accessible books, although some of his shorter novels about writers or his diary excerpts are also easy to deal with, but don't pack that same emotional punch.

Wonder if that Amazon review was written by John Gardner.

Wait, that is a positive review, doesn't say "heartless" but "ruthless."

I was looking @ Marjorie's review, scroll down.

Slightly regret linking it alongside Knausgaard, but as a flipside, guessing she is into boring 'literary' clap trap.

Hm. I only see the one review here in the US.

"Perfect unhappiness"

Reading Peter Handke's newly reprinted memoir of his mother's suicide, I was more arrested by the author's steely, emotionless tone than I was by the horrific circumstances of his mother's death by poisoning. I was expecting a poetic, elegiac recollection of Handke's mother, perhaps a tribute to her maternity, her authenticity or whatever in the ultimate sense makes a woman memorable. We are taught to believe that a mother's love is all important, the essence of the relationship between mother and son a unique experience, inspiring, as it should, all sorts of choices in the man as he grows older as well as an assortment of leanings - toward religion, for instance, or learning or perhaps the arts. We think of mothers as exemplifying the Jungian concept of the "anima" in the man - that elusive image of the perfect woman which the maturing male formulates from his experience with his mother and seeks out in other females as part of his search for the woman he once knew intimately and still recalls with idealistic yearnings.

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Jeffrey Euginides' "The Virgin Suicides" about a family of gifted, beautiful female siblings who ultimately killed themselves, I should have been wary of this book, knowing it was Euginides whose efforts revitalized it; and indeed as I read the memoir I realized that the theme of Handke's book is similar to Euginides' in that both authors depict the fifties as a time of moral, spiritual and emotional suppression of women. Handke's account of his mother's death is simply one more reminder of how oppressive the fifties really were to the souls of all women, not just gorgeous, gifted teenagers, as Euginides' masterpiece portrays some of the era's hapless victims. That this death occurred in Austria makes plain that the post-War era was destructive to women all over the world - reflective of a global malaise, not just an American aberration, as one might conclude after reading Euginides' book.

For me, Handke's book suggests that the old ways of keeping women in their place were indeed widespread and every bit as destructive as some of us guessed when we were young and told to remain in our place - silent and pleasing to men. Alas, we were not permitted to be "unpleasant." Had we been allowed to be candid, perhaps we would have grown up less angry, less depressed and more confident. Yet it was not in the cards. Women were at the mercy of their unforgiving fertile bodies and thus dependent upon men for their rights as human beings. If a woman was lucky, she married the exception: a man who allowed her full emotional expression without consequences or caveats. Alas, few women were so fortunate, and the result was an epidemic of nervous breakdowns, alcoholism and valium dependency, screwed up children and workaholic and philandering men - none of these desirable rewards for a generation of women suddenly freed from the laborious demands of domesticity to express themselves in ways unheard of before. Yet deprived of meaningful professional opportunity and intimidated by men's expectations, many women retreated into their own guarded, depressed and ultimately psychotic worlds, thereby emotionally abandoning their children, their homes and their clueless husbands.

For Handke's mother the fifties were the apotheosis of personal subjugation. Compute the psychological effects of her Holocaust experience, and one recognizes that her life symbolized the marginalized position of most women of her time. She bore a child out of wedlock, she exuded a manic, hyper-energized, optimistic personality that was out of sync with the ruthlessly serious social atmosphere of the times. The father of her child was a Nazi; she subsequently married a man she didn't love for the purpose of security and mothered other children, confined, as she was, to a decrepit house with the stench of poverty and despair. Her periodic bouts with depression and female disease further defined her as unconventional during a period of gross conventionality.

As Handke points out, "For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in itself deadly." The surroundings the author describes are those of extreme penury, exemplified by his mother's father having lost his entire savings more than once due to the inflation of the times. "Staying home was a woman's place," Handke reminds the reader. Outside the home environment and the broader world as a whole were the province of the male while the woman was confined to the house and the drudgery implicit in motherhood and domesticity. Because there were no suitable options, his mother flees her family home as a young woman and becomes involved with a married German Army official; because of her illegitimate status of an unwed mother, she eventually marries a sergeant, "hoping he will die in the War," only to find him repulsive later when he returns to her. Thus, she experiences the penalties of being female as well as the female codified stages of the times: "Tired/Exhausted/Sick/Dying/Dead." Oppressed by the limits of her existence, she describes the resulting claustrophobia. The rain comes to symbolize her depression at the lack of novelty in her life. When she fled her hopeless destiny as a young woman, it is understandable that she would see in the Nazi years a release from the humdrum of female existence. Instead of the mundane lack of novelty in her family life then, she experiences in the heady days of World War 11 a sense of promise and deliverance from monotony. After all, she was still young, and at that point she possessed hope in the future.

Handke emphasizes that in those days "a girl's future was a joke," but the times offered hope and so Handke's mother strove to believe in the future. The woman remained indefatigable in her optimism, her manic search for variety and a future beyond the dismal consolations of her times. As "Sorrow" notes, "Women were not supposed to have a life of their own, and so his mother is emotionally "starved" as fifties women were, as the adolescent protagonists of Euginides' "Virgin Suicides" indeed were. In her misery Handke's mother aborts herself and subsequently becomes sexless. She had a "miserable life," Handke affirms. "She became nothing." His unspoken sorrow is just that. Even such a positive woman would in the end submit to the tyranny of the times.

Nor was she the only family member who suffered during those hard years. Her husband endured TB; her son had paralyzing headaches as he detached himself emotionally from his mother in order to survive. In those days, people didn't consider the possibility of mental illness in a peculiarly acting female. A woman wasn't allowed to be spontaneous in her behavior. Rigid social norms controlled her every move. Although his mother believed in happiness and earnestly sought it, Handke points out "happiness was not for her." She took to smoking because it was frivolous and wasn't condoned by the rigid moral code. She forged on, giving for Christmas presents only the barest of necessities because that was all the family could afford. She ate the last scrap of food left after a meal, delicately, as if that was enough to sustain her. In every way, she sacrificed her own needs to the demands of a tyrannical social order until she could do it no more. Her husband spent money on drink and a girlfriend, but such options were not hers. Instead she drank coffee at the local pub and endured his beatings. In all her efforts, she kept up appearances. She "adopted the penance of a united family," ignoring her red, chafed hands, her hunger, her physical pain. She cried quietly and in private until she discovered the outlet of reading which came to define her and legitimized her as well. She became a socialist. In the end, she had repressed her feelings so long that she had nothing to say. She had been silenced.

When at last debilitating headaches kept her captive to a dark room, she claimed "I'm not human anymore." Reduced to an automaton, she acknowledges "the idiocy of her life." Every sight becomes a torment; she loses all sense of time and place. At the last she can't even talk. "I can't talk; don't torture me," she tells her son. Handke observes, "Mere existence had become a torture to her."

The crushing defeat of not being able to express oneself fully and honestly is the worst experience of all. It denies a woman her very identity and the cathartic release of emotion. That her joyful, unbridled, naïve enthusiasm should be derided and quelled was the biggest injustice of all, for what it did was to devalue exuberance and optimism, the very coping mechanisms one needs to endure suffering, thereby forcing her into premature dementia. To be quelled in one's self-expression is to be marginalized, to be vulnerable, alas to be female in those unforgiving times. Seeing the Jews herded into lorries must have seemed analogous to the victim-hood she realized she would eventually endure. As Handke notes, the gymnasium was the last meaningful experience of females before they were mired in domestic rituals that were stultifying and dehumanizing.

It is obvious why Euginides championed this book; it has many thematic similarities to his own. However, Handke's prose is not melodic; his approach is not fluid, but disjointed. His objective and seemingly heartless discussion of his mother begs the question as to why he wrote the book. Perhaps he felt expunged of guilt for her death by addressing his mother's pathetic situation, her marginalized, psychotic existence. Perhaps he felt the need to justify his own detachment in the face of her suffering by chronicling the dispassionate nature of the times. Whatever his purpose, the book is not on the same level as Euginides' novel and as such reveals more about the author and the times than it does about the woman herself. The son's feelings for his mother lacked a true appreciation of her dilemma as well as a corresponding compassion for the downtrodden under whatever guise. Understated? Yes, but compassionate? I don't think so.

Marjorie Meyerle
Colorado Writer
Author of "Bread of Shame"

Whoa.

This is basically a variant of this

In any case, Handke is trying to understand something, to find a way to approach understanding and write about it, he is not trying to "be understanding" and come away with a teachable moment talk show best seller.

yeah talk about missing the point

hmmm, jumping aroudn Handke reviews on Goodreads has made me wanna check him out again. My fave, "The Left Handed Woman", also seems an influence on "Min Kamp"

Big row in Norway in the aftermath of that Ibsen award, Knausgård heavily involved in a pretty hostile debate over the debate over Handke winning and his supposed politics.

Wiki sez:

In 2014, the prize was awarded to the controversial playwright and historical revisionist Peter Handke, who is noted for denying the Srebrenica genocide and for his support of Slobodan Milošević.[2] The award led to calls for the jury to resign.[3] A large number of people protested against him as he arrived to receive the prize, shouting "fascist, fascist" repeatedly and calling him a "genocide denier."[4] The award was condemned by PEN Norway.[5] Bernt Hagtvet, an expert on totalitarianism, called the award an "unprecedented scandal," stating that "awarding Handke the Ibsen Prize is comparable to awarding the Immanuel Kant Prize to Goebbels."[5]

I only know bits and pieces about it (having never read the actual articles from Handke) so...yes its a hole to have started from Celan and Holocaust to the comparative silence over Serbia: K deals with it in a couple of paragraphs towards the end..

yeah it was pretty mortifying seeing Handke dig himself in an increasingly deep hole by going to ever greater length to defend Serbia 15 years ago. He really did lose it.

Steered clear of him once he went that route but in addition to Sorrow I recommend Afternoon of a Writer and especially The Weight of the World.

Reviewed by Michael Hofmann! But I can't see it:( http://www.lrb.co.uk/v07/n04/michael-hofmann/winking-at-myself

I guess we should start a Handke thread but I'd also recommend Goalie/Penalty, Left-Handed Woman and Short Letter, Long Farewell

After a deliberate wait I am about to start Book Three. In spite of all of the detractors I think what matters to me is the sense of fate or destiny apart from urgency or authenticity because how could you be urgent and authentic about what is so abundant yet never enough? A part of this could be my romanticizing Norway and roles and callings and knowing your neighbors (also acknowledging the seeming foreignness and isolation of the writers' workshop and everlasting seventies, etc -- hey reminds me of the Jacques Tati films made with Scandinavian audiences ... Swedish?).

3/4 through Part 2. Structurally doesn't seem to work as well at Part 1, much more "this this happened, then this happened." Still great.

reading part three made me realize that i hate this dude

i felt like i was dying like cell by cell just physically decaying and that every minute i spent reading about his struggle my body was atrophying

sorry i - it took you three books to figure this out?

yeah idk - i really liked the first one and enjoyed the second but the third i just couldnt take

my unhappiness with it was the physical thing that felt like death

he definitely seems less sympathetic - relatable lol - as things go on but ... surely there's no way that i'll end up feeling like you ... i'm totally gonna read that 400-page essay on Hitler

i would not think that part three the would be the one that broke the spell

it's just about him being a dumb kid, why'd that seal the deal for you?

was not into the second one at all, loved the first

After reading all 3, I thought the third was the weakest. Maybe I just don't enjoy childhood reveries though. Not a lot of drama for an adult to get into except for the tension with his dad.

Got volume 2.

I got Vol. 2 a year ago, but just started reading it last week.

i've now read the first three volumes and will have to wait until next month for the fourth to come out in english before continuing. i am reading his novel "a time for everything" now, and i also picked up a copy of the times today, which included a copy of the magazines that featured the first part of this story of his: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/karl-ove-knausgaard-travels-through-america.html

i think the next fiction writer i'm going to focus on is tom mccarthy

"my struggle" is totally worth reading by the way. i might buy a copy of the first volume for one of my former professors. but i can't recommend "a time for everything" yet, and i'm not sure i will be able to. there are at least one or two paralells to his own life in here though, as least to his life as he tells it in "my struggle"

honestly, the nyt piece wasn't the best either. heh. he does cause a toilet to overflow, though

did your enthusiasm hold all through the third volume, marks? w me as soon as the past-time sequence opened it just hit me that i'd stopped caring somewhere in the middle of book two

i like to say

'mah struggel'

I guess I'll have to read this thing eventually.

thomp: i have a shit memory, so i don't remember exactly how i felt at different points in the book off the top of my head. i don't think we had the same experience though.

i do wonder how much my positive view of the books is influenced by positive things i've heard about the books, but i am not forcing myself to enjoy them. i just do

reading one of his novels after reading half of "my struggle" is an odd experience though. *SPOILER ALERT* there's some dude who sees angels. at another point, wow, there are cain and abel! and then later on they're gone, and now we're talking about noah!

alfred, i've started reading vol. 1 (thought i had posted about that here, maybe i mentioned it in the sheila heti thred). at least that much does seem like it's worth a good look, for writery types. he's onto something.

i can't have a wank, my fathers just died

isn't this being translated slower than it was written at this point

upthread xyz is complaining about the banality of 'writing without a sense of shame' but in volume one the banality of some of the shameful memories revealed along with the big ones is what makes it interesting, like he's already gone beyond that point of view. vol two seemed sort of a retrograde step in that there were revelations of big dramatic moments instead

also vol one had some intriguing mysteries of ellipsis in re working out what happened in his life and others lives in the time skipped over + what was the whole thing with his dad's name about?

One Swede took the extreme critical step of setting fire to the K section of a Malmö bookstore, telling police that he did it because Knausgaard was "the worst author in the world".

isn't this being translated slower than it was written at this point

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Monday, 2 March 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We need to allow for 100 companion pieces to appear per vol published. Iron law.

Yet another piece. He has a 'writerly' beard.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/01/karl-ove-knausgaard-interview-shame-dancing-in-the-dark

The first two volumes were written together and published before he began the third. But such was the pain that the first two inflicted on family and friends that he pulled back in the third, fourth and fifth. In the sixth he returned to full disclosure, cataloguing the breakdown his wife, Linda, suffered during the fall-out over the first two volumes of My Struggle.

Wonder whether this is behind the perceived fall off (Lamp had given up on this around vol. 3)

Look at the pic in his writing studio, you can see a book with the word HITLER in block letters. Bastard.

He met Bostrom at a writer’s conference while he was still married to his first wife, the journalist Tonje Aursland. He made a pass at her, which she rejected, and, in a drunken state of demoralisation, he deliberately cut up his face with broken glass. He later left Aursland and moved to Sweden, but she only learned of the initial episode with Bostrom when she read the second volume, A Man in Love, where it is recorded with characteristically scrupulous candour. Deeply upset, she made a radio documentary in which she confronted Knausgaard.

Hilarious or what? Anyone heard it? Makes you wonder whether everyone is in it and the whole controversy was made up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/karl-ove-knausgaard-travels-through-america.html

― markers, Sunday, March 1, 2015 4:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I thought this was cool. I enjoyed when he was confused by hot wings.

i liked it to. we have the same norwegian fisherman's sweater which is very warm

guy needs to straighten out his credit sitch

love the whole nyt thing. read part 2 last night. don't know if i can read all the books, but the nyt thing should make a lot of people put their pencils down.

Based on the amount of ILB love expended on this, I checked volume one out of my local library. I may get to it in the next few weeks.

both of you should read it! it's worth it imo.

plus, if you catch up now, you'll be all ready for when the next volume drops next month

I finished Book 2 recently. I'm actually relieved to hear that he pulls back a bit on Book 3 and returns to the (more distant) past. I was starting to get a bit uncomfortable reading about all the fights with his wife (and felt bad for the mother in law too).

About sixty percent through Volume One and I remain mostly unmoved except when he admitted in the first third that the cries of his children irritate him.

and this Beckett-esque bit: "Soon I will be forty, and when I’m forty, it won’t be long before I’m fifty. And when I’m fifty, it won’t be long before I’m sixty."

"And when I’m sixty, it won’t be long before I’m seventy. And that will be that."

Volume 4 is coming to my house . . . on Tuesday(?).

http://the-toast.net/2015/04/29/karl-ove-knausgaard-reviews-everything-else-in-america/

this is a really bad parody of his style

I think I liked his American travelogue thing better than I liked Vol. 1. Not sure if I'll continue on with the series. I've got a copy of Swann's Way, gonna see how that hits me.

Maybe there is life in the old dog yet:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-inexplicable

oh shit thanks for the link! hadn't seen this

Øystein:

http://lithub.com/lydia-davis-at-the-end-of-the-world/

Do you like Dag Solstad?

http://www.vulture.com/2015/05/saltz-how-kim-kardashian-became-important.html

DWW: And what do you make of the book itself?

JS: I won't buy the book because in a way, the book is within me already, and we all have our own Selfish. Selfish is a kind of American My Struggle — that’s Karl Ove Knausgaard's epic, not Hitler’s. I mean, a chorus of one, written in a personal language of compassion, infinite theater, stage sets, setpieces, ceremony, shallowness, despairs, self-awareness, sexuality, unable to curtail one's selfishness and obsession with one's own image. Extras enter and leave the stage, but photography, rather than writing, as homeopathic medicament, remedy, used to relieve and express painful malaise. As with Knausgaard, I can imagine Selfish soon being forgotten; another struggle of a young girl inventing herself in and out of the spotlight amidst Southern California insanity, hedonism, and wealth, but at the epicenter of the most highly charged racial trial of an era; where the black man won at the same time as her body became deformed, shaped, changed. All while she does something in public that so many women do it private: look at herself in the mirror and through a camera at the same time. Some kind of love is born and maybe dies in this book, a sort of nervousness, inaccurate explanations, liberation. And I only need to see it once to get all this.

xyzzz: fwiw I think "Novel 11, Book 18", the second of the three Solstad novels so far published in English, is effing brilliant; I even think you might like it.

Ah yes I think you told me about it in the pub!

Yes, I do like Solstad a great deal. I picked up his recent novel — the one Lydia Davis is reading — but haven't started it properly. From the cursory reading of random pages, it seems a lot more fun than various miffed Norwegian reviewers have made it sound. I suspect it might get tiring as a whole, but that might be interesting too. (But I'll admit that while I'm intrigued by the idea of using boredom as an artistic/literary effect, I'm probably not patient enough to appreciate it.)

Not read Novel 11, but I hear it's really good. I know his terrific novel _Shyness & Dignity_ is available in English and would certainly recommend that. It's often (half-jokingly) described as a novel about a guy who can't get his umbrella open.

surprisingly few books of his translated in English or French

That's true - only three at present in English, which is a sadness.

"Killing another person requires a tremendous amount of distance, and the space that makes such distance possible has appeared in the midst of our culture. It has appeared among us, and it exists here, now."

seems bleak

The character I identify most with in these books is the dad

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/me-myself-and-hitler/

Might read vol.5 as soon as

dude can write a book review like nobody's business:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/books/review/michel-houellebecqs-submission.html

i have no time for this guy. you know there is life and stuff so why should i read reviews of books which have not been read by the reviewer, wtf. whatever kausgard does we all can do. write books about our everyday life. so why should i waste my time? this guy has turned his shitty life in a money machine by writing about every fart he has made but why should i support it? tell me.

He read the book (allegedly)

he has read the book he reviews, as you can tell if you read the review.

as for "whatever knausgaard does we all can do"? complete canard of a criticism when it's directed towards art made without the use of technical skill - e.g. some contemporary art, noise or free improv music - and even more redundant when directed towards a large corpus of well-written novel-memoirs.

so why does he write this first sentence then?
"Before I begin this review, I have to make a small confession. I have never read Michel Houellebecq’s books."

i read a lot of crit and not everyone can write a review like that. trust me!

i've never read his novels. but this and that long-ass NYT magazine piece prove to me that he is really good at what he does. better than i could ever write. and i'm a helluva writer lemme tellya!

so why does he write this first sentence then?
"Before I begin this review, I have to make a small confession. I have never read Michel Houellebecq’s books."
― it's the distortion, stupid! (alex in mainhattan)

Probably thought it was a good place to start a book review by admitting his unfamiliarity with the works of the author? Then goes on to describe why he hasn't read him, and how he's glad accepting the commission of the book review forced him to finally read him. But keep misreading/deliberately refusing to engage with something while simultaneously trying to criticise it, I'm sure this will be very fruitful and of interest to us all.

but that means that his first two sentences were a lie. that's the kind of beginning of a review i find loathsome, sorry. and that is where i stop reading as i - naive as i am - think writers try to to be honest. i am not interested in the rest, he has discredited himself there. if he had been sincere he might have added "i have never read mh books before this review." but he didn't.

that's a bewildering reading of that line.

I have never read x's books at the start of a book review clearly signposts to me that the reviewer does not mean by that the very book that they are currently reviewing

the present perfect sense is generally used in english to refer to an unspecified time in the past

wouldn't that be the past present perfect as in "i had never read his books."? i learnt in my english lessons that the present perfect refers to operations which are not yet finished, which still connect to the present. that is also the reason why it bears the word "present" in its name. but probably i am wrong, you are the native speaker.

^willfully thick poster of the day award, this guy

You might be right my understanding of English grammar is poor despite (or because) of being a native speakers. But e.g. I could definitely say something like "I have never eaten Thai food. But I ate at a Thai restaurant last week and it was good". Would be perfectly correct way of expressing myself as far as I know.

all right then, thanks for the clarification. i learnt something new tonight.

what would the I Love Books equivalent of the michael jackson popcorn gif be? something tamer...

I think it's more the context than the grammar doing the work here tbh, it sort of depends on understanding "read his books" as meaning "generally, on my own initiative" as opposed to on commission for this review. Sort of like saying "I've never traveled in Europe" at the beginning of a travel article about Rome or something. It can be sort of elegant to write minimally and let context do the rest of the work, rather than "Prior to getting assigned to write this review, I had never read his books"

maybe a gif of dame margaret smith eating toffee really slowly...

thanks, i get the gist but how far does context go? one page, ten pages, hundred pages? it's only in the third paragraph after many sentences that he admits that he finally read the book in question. i never reached that point in the review.

Thanks for the link Scott will look at it later! There is def a theme to his newspaper/lit. rev pieces - the piece I linked on Brevik, his appreciation of controversial writers like MH or Handke, which all goes back to his writing on Hitler (covered in that LARB piece) as well.

Ouch http://www.sindrebangstad.com/the-artist-as-provocateur-handke-and-knausgard/

I think it's more the context than the grammar doing the work here tbh, it sort of depends on understanding "read his books" as meaning "generally, on my own initiative" as opposed to on commission for this review. Sort of like saying "I've never traveled in Europe" at the beginning of a travel article about Rome or something. It can be sort of elegant to write minimally and let context do the rest of the work, rather than "Prior to getting assigned to write this review, I had never read his books"

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Tuesday, November 3, 2015 9:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this usage of present perfect is kinda shibboleth-y and points to a particular kind of university education i think. its deployment here however is probably more to do with the translator than it is knausgaard -- who knows how you indicate this sort of thing in norwegian, though

hey the review actually kinda makes me want to read houllebecq for the first time in a while, though i feel like it would mostly infuriate me

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/vanishing-point

acceptance speech for the Welt Literaturpreis, November 6th, berlin.

new times piece is soooo goooooooood

excerpt from book 5 in the new yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/at-the-writing-academy

Just finished book 4. Waiting for book 5 to come out in paperback before I buy it.

thoughts after listening to him reading from vs naipaul's the enigma of arrival on the new yorker podcast - http://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/karl-ove-knausgaard-reads-v-s-naipaul

1. this is a brilliant story, i need to read the book.
2. knausgaard is a good voice actor and also maybe should read children's bedtime stories.

one of the best new yorker podcasts imo.

I'm somewhat biased by being friends with two of the writers, but I've been enjoying this series of letters on My Struggle, which has covered the first volume so far, and will continue through book 5 by the end of the summer: http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/06/the-slow-burn-volume-2-an-introduction/

i still have uh a ways to go w/ karl's struggle and the gradual slumping of his press has been giving me the slightest of misgivings

so i found this reassuring even if it does imply that the middle books would still be kinda meh

http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-struggle-against-language

started the second one recently, a year or more since finishing the first. i am generally enjoying the mixture of feelings i have towards him, as i go on. in book 1 i often thought "what an idiot" and occasionally enjoyed the long, tedious descriptions of things. it felt sort of sub-musil or like a trashy airport novel for people who enjoy literature. in book 2 after 100 pages or so i'm finding myself laughing at his juvenile, petty, pretentious anger, about his kids or swedish parents or his life, but not to the point that it makes me ridicule him. it's like a mixture of boorishness, sensitivity, sexism, and alternative thinking. as a writer he's almost impossible to pin down. there are so many feelings at war with each other - it can be trite or bad-tempered one second, and profound the next.

overall good page-turners, but still feel like airport or holiday reading.

the stuff about him being a parent in this liberal swedish milieu and being a small c conservative and basically finding it awful but having no choice but to be around because of his kids is the funniest stuff in the books so far for me and I've read the first 3. there's this really funny bit - well for some reason it jumped out at me as particularly funny - where people are talking about immigration and he intentionally says nothing because one of the guys there works in refugee settlement and his views on immigration have previously made people think he's a racist

also his view of childrearing - he is a house husband because he can't justify not being one - his wife needs to go out to work, he's a writer and can work from home - but basically finds it unfulfilling and emasculating because he is really, despite his extreme sensitivity, someone who prescribes to traditional gender roles

the mixture of profundity and basic misanthropy makes for a fairly amusing read. p sexist tho throughout.

As far as I know, I own all of this dude’s works that’ve been published in book form in English. If you’re a My Struggle superfan, check out A Time for Everything, which is different from My Struggle, but there’s a connection there that might be interesting to you.

Here’s a link: https://archipelagobooks.org/book/a-time-for-everything/

There’s also some more books of his coming out in the future listed on that website here: https://archipelagobooks.org/book_author/knausgaard-karl/

the mixture of profundity and basic misanthropy makes for a fairly amusing read. p sexist tho throughout.

― Bein' Sean Bean (LocalGarda), Friday, May 12, 2017 4:57 AM (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh it's very sexist. i mean, it's very candid, so, i think most men being extremely candid would come across somewhat sexist. but he really takes the cake, i feel completely chaste compared to his constant lechery.

the saving grace for me is that in writing this autobiographical account of being a drunk, sometimes pretentious, chauvinistic, male writer he doesn't ever really try to do the male writer thing and elevate himself by romanticizing himself as a struggling artist, or charming rogue, or whatever. his frailty, banality, and weakness is constantly apparent. you're often laughing at him and rarely with him.

I got tired of the guy 3/4 of the way through Book 1. Not really interested in checking out more by him tbh

his frailty, banality, and weakness is constantly apparent. you're often laughing at him and rarely with him.

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Friday, May 12, 2017 5:08 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

do you think this is a central part of the project? like, is the book a masochistic deconstruction of the heroic male author archetype?

i think knausgaard would have no interest in that in the abstract, or like from a point of principle. but it is that in effect.

the central conceit is his relationship with his abusive father and his desire to not be like him and perhaps part of that is the openness and nakedness of this book. contrasts greatly with his father who remains an enigma throughout.

I got tired of the guy 3/4 of the way through Book 1. Not really interested in checking out more by him tbh

i found book one sporadically engaging, mostly a bit bemusing, even with the melancholy. book 2 has a lot more intellectual heft. both are page-turners imo. maybe his approach is building through me as i go too.

the scene in book 2 where his wife gives birth was incredibly powerful imo, don't think i've ever read somebody detail childbirth from a viewer's perspective like that, it was extremely moving.

book 2 is so much better than the first one. he does like some shit indie music tho.

he does like some shit indie music tho.

the cardigans just emerged in book 2. and i mean, i guess damon albarn's mali album might not be shit, idk, but just seems the kind of lame thoughtless indie-fan purchase of the time. i realise he does like some good things as well, i think, based on his interviews.

wtf Lovefool is the best song ever

i dunno if it's diff in diff parts of the world but that record is one of the most irritating i can remember - the earlier stuff was fine i guess but that era is basically like texas or the stereophonics in my mind.

i really do not know what to make of this guy. he is so bloody talkative. i get bored after one page. how can someone take himself so seriously. "min kamp" reminds me of rousseau's confessions which are unsupportable as well. on the other hand he thinks "engführung" by paul celan is the best poem in the world. paul celan and knausgard, that is about the largest distance you can have between two authors. weird guy.

"boring" is definitely the right word but i dunno, the tediousness is kind of key to the whole experience. i'm a bit torn about him, parts of it are weaker than others. i find myself tearing through the books tho, there's something addictive about them, in a sort of trashy way.

Pretty good interview. Anyone read/is planning to read his new book?

ranked:

part 2
part 5
part 3
part 1
part 4

part 6 - waiting for translation.

hmm, that's a conundrum. i've read 1-3. do i push through struggle through 4 in order to get to 5 and the promise of learning about how his trip to the grocery store goes in 6?

ultimately i think i will, because for the most part i just really enjoy reading him describe his non-adventures. and it helps me to see someone who is about as successful as one can be, at least in terms of his career and standing among peers, feel like utter shit so much of the time.

Not strictly related but interesting profile of Gunnhild Øyehaug in the NYer. Somehow I'd never heard of her.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/14/magazine/a-literary-road-trip-into-the-heart-of-russia.html

Reading Part 6 now. i will really miss those books.
The most important novels in the last 20 years i think.
part 6 is more meditative than the rest, and i think it makes it just a little weaker.
part 2 and 5 are the best imo.
1 is the worst (though it is great on it's own regardless).
He kinda learned to write them along the way.

Hate this series (gave up after vol.2) but mildly interested in just picking this last book -- I think 'meditative' could really work for me.

1 >>>> 3

One is my fave so far, only read first 3.

He cancelled his U.S "tour" due to family crisis.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n21/fredric-jameson/itemised

nice

lol at Q3, pffft at the answer to Q5, he shd have done the whole thing Q&A style

when jameson said

But all of this – the essay or essays scattered throughout this enormous final volume, where it might be argued that he ought at least to be allowed to draw a few conclusions – is not to be judged on the basis of its interest (some of it is interesting, some jejune or embarrassing, some simply conventional) but rather on generic (I won’t say aesthetic) grounds; and this, however much you are willing to sacrifice on the altar of heterogeneity, is a value I also personally prize. But these essays are not narrative, they are opinion – that doxa the Greeks so sharply distinguished from episteme or ‘knowledge’. I am willing to argue that this opposition has its literary and formal version, and that there is, in fact, something we may call narrative truth. Knausgaard’s accounts of his own opinions are not the narrative of someone thinking, arguing, discovering plausible or pernicious ideas; they are simply a collection of his own personal thoughts, which he might better have projected in a truly rhetorical and literary form, i.e. the essay. There have been remarkable essays in which an author effectively tells the story of his own opinions. Here, however, we already know what Knausgaard is doing, and where the flaw lies: he is itemising them. He has already discovered and thought them through; now he is listing them for us, no matter how elaborate the entries.

i felt that

this was really good, thanks for linking to it. i especially liked the section discussing the pronouns, subjectivity/objectivity, the perceived "you" of the books, etc, ending with this:

I believe that this is a unique and as yet untheorised human relationship: not new certainly, but unnamed, and not subsumed under any of our pronominal categories – not ‘I-you’, or ‘them-us’ or ‘we’, but a peculiar absent presence of an otherness which is neither the big Other nor the crowd of eyes; and its shame is permanent, its openness an ever possible vulnerability to some unknown consciousness which is not an entity and can never really be reached by us in any active way. Knausgaard’s achievement is to have foregrounded this immeasurably strange relationship which is there all the time but to which we so rarely attend directly.

to me that gets to the heart of what i have enjoyed about these books (having only read the first three so far): they place the reader in a strange relationship with the author, intimate but distant all the same (the style of itemization contributes to that, i think) that i find kind of addicting

i haven't read any knausgaard so this may be totally unfair but this piece does nothing to correct my general view: that everything jameson writes could be cut be at least a third and lose nothing substantive

stylistically it is somewhat less tiresome than i generally find him: is he doing a thing where he writes "in the style" of the object critiqued?

ha I don't think so.

I read this a week ago (as I was about to board a plane) and didn't much like it, and I am usually ok with his book reviewing but it sounded like he was reproducing the 'this isn't very good but I can't stop reading it and I can't explain it at all to you' reaction this has sometimes gotten -- that's how I see this weird Q&A (why is it stop-and-start?)

Except he has an in-the-end explanation of how the book isn't that good, which he seems to take ages to arrive at.

to me that gets to the heart of what i have enjoyed about these books (having only read the first three so far): they place the reader in a strange relationship with the author, intimate but distant all the same (the style of itemization contributes to that, i think) that i find kind of addicting

absolutely this.

in addition I think I consume these books really compulsively for idiosyncratic reasons. there's something about a growing up in a shame-based, emotionally repressed culture that also has very liberal, post-60s ideals (which Karl Ove did in Norway, and I did in Minnesota) that I hadn't felt captured before. in particular the experience of a free-floating sense of shame as one's primary lens for experience.

i devoured these for similar reasons, i think, though my shame is southern protestant in origin. my mother loved them as well, with her southern baptist repression.

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/10/linda-bostrom-knausgard-i-would-like-to-be-seen-as-a-person-and-author-in-my-own-right?

His wife is an ok novelist. I read The Helios Disaster last yr.

Critics have often failed with Karl, here is a character from Dasa Drnic.

Drndic's character Andreas Ban on Knausgaard. 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/nwOEF7C1tO

— Emmett Stinson (@EmmettStinson) September 2, 2020

I file him with Tao Lin under "fad authors I will never read".

pffft

tao lin could never

mini kampyhttps://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=77&threadid=110847#unread

I posted this essay in the terrence malick thread a few weeks ago, but it also draws heavily on knausgard and I think it's fantastic so figured I'd share it here too:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/08/14/the-unbearable-toward-an-antifascist-aesthetic/

thanks so much for posting that! one of the more thought provoking essays i've read in quite a while, i loved it

also, i spotted a typo in the essay.

feels good man

I spotted that typo as well. Always teach the spellchecker the proper name of the author, so you don’t ignore the one time you screw it up

i think that might be a different typo! there's definitely one in the second to last paragraph. multiple typos! jesus, does anyone even edit the new york review of books, come on

Lots of mistakes. Refers to Jägerstätter as German