Karl Ove Knausgård - Min kamp

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

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