Karl Ove Knausgård - Min kamp

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.