Karl Ove Knausgård - Min kamp

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.

Lots of mistakes. Refers to Jägerstätter as German