archipelago books

Yeah, my struggle was an insanely big deal in denmark as well. Stuff like saying it would be as era-defining as Sorrows of Young Werther, and professors writing about how fiction was impossible afterwards. I don't really care for realism, and it sounds as if the language is pretty poor in the later sections, so it's a bit down my list. I still have eight volumes of proust to get through, for instance.

I've read and liked Cortázar, Musil, Novalis and Rilke from that list, but none of the works listed. I'd check them out anyway.

Yeah, I'm afraid so, unless some enterprising soul has taken on collecting and translating a heap of it someplace. I couldn't find any, at least. I imagine someone might publish a collection of it at some point, though perhaps not before most of the books have made it to English. I'm afraid I'm not quite up to the task of doing any of the sort myself, and I don't imagine the papers would be too pleased if someone just posted translations of their stuff without permission.

If you're really curious, and incredibly patient, I suppose you could give Google Translate a shot. A couple of pieces of interest might be this overview
Knausgård for Dummies
and this interview with Knausgård's high school teacher: My life as a character in a novel
I couldn't find the article by the heap of family letters, which isn't online at the paper's (Klassekampen's) website.

Hrm, first link doesn't seem to work. Let's try again: Knausgård for Dummies

i would bump it above proust if i were you, it was a breeze i read it in like 2 sittings? idk i thought it was pretty dope, surprised at the negative reaction tbh! i thought it had a great flow & you find yourself getting really into all the banality and detail, little digressions, nice feeling of recognition at his little thoughts and insecurities. i didn't think too much about it being non-fiction while reading it, aside from a couple things like how he keeps referring to his awful memory while writing a book with all this minutiae from twenty years older, and of course wondering about how people in the book reacted to it (particularly to things like "i told my wife i loved her, and wondered if it was really true" or when he talks about hating his children)

thx for the links oystein

Like, all six volumes in 2 sittings? Have they all been translated already? It's more vols 3, 4 and 5 I've heard bad things about. But yeah, I will get around to it. The translation of Proust is pretty slow anyway, they just released no 6 out of 13, a year after no 5. Anyways, this wasn't the proust-thread.

i just finished 'bacacay' - i love gombrowicz's loopy polish absurdism but he's probably not for all tastes

nah just the first

I liked In Red a whole, whole lot - From the Observatory less. These guys are great anyway imo. I wanna get to Stone Upon Stone and The Chukchi Bible this year if I can. In Red anyway doesn't take more than an afternoon and is a really absorbing poem of a book

cool i'll checkitout

reading My Struggle vol. 1 and man is it slow - amazed you got through it in 2 sittings. I like some of the banality of it (and for once don't feel much guilt about skipping some slow episodes I don't particularly care about) and enjoy the book while I read it, but I never ever feel compelled to pick it up. It's been on my bedstand for a month now

very unfortunate that a german translation of my struggle would prob have to recycle the title: mein kampf in order to be accurate. more likely they'd flip to an entirely different title.

I'm reading it in French. Title here is "Death of a Father"

Yeah, I took a look at Amazon.de now. Looks like they're doing single word titles for each book. The two I could find were "Sterben" (die) and "Lieben" (love.)

I just got Jan Jacob Slauerhoff's _The Forbidden Kingdom_ in the mail.
I've only browsed it aimlessly, not started reading it, but the 16th century chapters have a charming narrator. On poetry: (in Portugal, I guess?) "That women, who have nothing to do but weave, should alternate this with embroidering on the cloth of language, in imitation of others of their sex at the countless Italian courts, is all well and good. But that men should also participate in such vanity when there are still so many countries to conquer, to discover, and the Moors are still nestling just across the water, is worse."
Exactly how I feel about Norwegian poetry. Sweden is right fucking there, and here we're sitting around dribbling and scribbling about the infantilizing effect of oil-money on our population? Get thee to an armory!

Oh, by the way, amazon.com are selling _Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer_ for just $6.80 right now, for some reason.

good interview w/ karl ove knausgaard here - http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/07/03/completely-without-dignity-an-interview-with-karl-ove-knausgaard/

i'm half way through my struggle now & im still not sure how i feel about it

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.

Peter Altenberg's _Telegrams of the Soul_ is a really enjoyable collection of short pieces; letter-like observations or essays from Vienna café-life. At one point he visits an amusement park and befriends some somewhat embarrassed Africans that are on exhibit, but mostly it's about fairly inconsequential but charming stuff. Some may find his willful eccentricity — and fondness of exclamation marks! — annoying, but do give it a look.

Just read this--it was really lovely.

Cool -- I'd love to read more by him, but so far my german is much too schlecht. Haven't gotten around to the Slauerhoff I mentioned upthread.

Oh, this was in the newsletter they sent out today:
"To celebrate our website launch, we are offering a special 50% off coupon for today only. Act quickly! It expires tomorrow, July 9. This coupon is valid for your whole purchase, so buy as many books as your shelves can bear. Simply type in LAUNCH2013 at checkout."

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.

sounds really good to me!

I just went to their website, ordered 3 paperbacks of poetry and only paid $18.40, including shipping. Yippee!

free shipping = $6.80 heine, sweet

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

on knausgaard (and tao lin)

by zadie smith!

Thanks flopson! Somehow she has a gift for non-fiction tangents (the Joni Mitchell meltdown maybe most notoriously, but even there the vision of her vision somehow doesn't burn my corneas). I want to check her new collection of essays too ("Joy" is fave so far).

Lenz
by Georg Büchner
trans. from German
by Richard Sieburth

Interview and reading by Sieburth and its a fantastic broadcast! I read the first para of Lenz alongside Reddick's version for Penguin and I felt it held up well. Love the idea of the edition -- to centre this as THE piece of prose for that particular time -- although in the intro of the Penguin its very much acknowledged that no one was writing like this in 1835. Still, would be tempted to pick this up 2nd hand.

Things I want to pick up are Hyperion, Novalis, maybe Pla although I'll give him a go on NYRB first.

btw if you go ctrl + "archipelago" there is a ton of good stuff to try out.

We've just made 30 of our ebooks free on our website. Just go to the links in this post and select "ebook" or "epub" and check out and you'll be good to go! https://t.co/XJ3bdQ2Pkj

— Archipelago Books (@archipelagobks) March 20, 2020

Thank you comrade!

(I found it via James Morrison's twitter btw..)

Forgot there was an archipelago thread!