Karl Ove Knausgård - Min kamp

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.