Karl Ove Knausgård - Min kamp

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.

everyone is reading this slightly literary book tournament!

New board description!

Irvine Welsh seemed like a big deal for a while there?

Yeah – I was trying to remember what was going on then – as an undergrad I was in a studenty bubble so 94-6 did seem to be a lot of people reading Trainspotting.

I cannot remember if there was an ISO Serious Author Worth Discussing for that period. Saramago, Sebald, Murakami, Houellebecq all break a bit later iirc.

94-01 seemed like a lot of people reading trainspotting tbf

haha i just don't know if i trust the figures in the nyrb article, though i guess that's one of those 'but i've read it ... and two people i know have read it ...' arguments

bought the first volume, but haven't cracked it open yet

But Freedom did sell, 68,236 in hardback in the UK, rather fewer in paperback, about half of what The Corrections sold. Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, a memoir telling of his years in hiding after the fatwa, commanded enormous column space in the press, understandably given the subject matter, but UK sales were just 7,521 in hardback and only 1,896 in paperback. However in these cases, as soon as the wave doesn’t happen the critical buzz quickly subsides.

kind of amazed, cheered at how few people read freedom though

I finished no.3 earlier, now to sit on my hands for eight months.

The last dozen or so pages were some unpleasant, uncomfortable reading - I shan't give details, not that it's a spoiler as such anyway and in any case it's not as significant as it'll sound, but it feels like between that era and this there's been a shift in morality which actually left me feeling a little: 'this not okay, he shouldn't be writing this'. Which isn't a good thing. For several reasons, not least because we'd be talking about a morality shift almost within my own life experience, and I haven't really had to face that before.

I guess what I really want to do is lay a question for Øystein, should he ever reach those pages himself - is this remotely plausible as an account of how it is/was at that particular point of adolescence in Norway?

man now i wish i'd not given up on that volume. pm me?

I've emailed you. It's not earth-shattering, sorry it came across that way. It's more just topical.

thank you. yeah, that all seems like it kind of fits from the attitude he takes towards Being A Man and suchlike throughout, i don't know

certainly some books are quite popular, in various places, but the blog article was, I think, more about suggesting that books that sounded very very popular (in US or perhaps UK) hadn't really sold that many in US / UK. The figures seemed to bear this out. I quite liked the article.

Ismael: If it's something that can be summed up, feel free to ask directly, as I don't mind knowing what happens in the books before reading them.

If not, well, I'll put a note in my copy to come back here when I've read it. But that might not happen for a long time yet.

Here's one response to Parks' blog post: http://conversationalreading.com/yes-virginia-my-struggle-is-a-bestseller/

Okay I'll delete this in a while. Basically: it's a series of descriptions of mid-level sexual assaults carried by adolescent boys, including the narrator, on adolescent girls, which the girls protest but really consent to by the glint in their eyes. e.g. a couple of boys will spot a girl alone, pounce on her, whip up her top, have a grope, then all go their separate ways.

It made me uncomfortable for several reasons, but principally because I grew up in a place, time and class not far removed from what Knausgaard is describing, and afaic remember there was nothing like this, everyone knew better. It doesn't fit with my understanding of Norway - it's all very caveman - and I find it hard to accept as a normal growing-up thing, which is how it's presented.

Maybe that last bit isn't right. Maybe I was a somewhat sheltered kid and this actually was common in most adolescences, in the UK too - instinctively I rail against the characterisations of rape culture that you see here & there, because it doesn't fit at all with my experience. Maybe that's what makes me uncomfortable - the idea that the world is and has always been like that, and I missed it. Maybe it's nothing to do with Norway.

Ok, I found one of those scenes. It doesn't sound implausible to me, though I can't say I knew any groups doing shit like that where I grew up in the early/mid 90s. There were individual pushy kids, however, who would always try to see how far they could go — I imagine there are people like that everywhere.

They sound a bit too old to really get away with acting like that, but I imagine most groups of kids would experiment with how far they could go with one another, and different groups would stop one another at different points. These girls were sorta part of their "gang", right?
I might be the worst person to answer this, simply because I was such a shy kid that I was always uncomfortable and afraid of making other people equally uncomfortable, so this would've been unthinkable.

Thanks, that's much the same position as I'm in. It's also more-or-less the same position I'd imagined the narrator to be in - so to either have him turn unreliable in the closing stretch, or to have misunderstood him or the society he's been describing, was horribly disorientating. Which isn't a trick I thought Knausgaard was going to play.

Oh, I can't delete it after all. So much for mod superpowers. I'll just leave it up i think, it's not really a spoiler as such.

I didn't know Ismael Klata was from Norway.

Like others, I have never encountered any behaviour like what he describes.

This reminds me of the way that people think everyone is into drugs but I have virtually never seen any. When I was at school most of the things that schoolchildren now are supposedly controversially into, like sex and drugs, were mainly nonexistent. One could hear of them in the media, but they did not happen in real life.

A new essay on Peter Handke, "Handke and Singularity"--I'm curious whether this overlaps with the passages on Paul Celan in the last volume, though that at the current rate that won't be out in English before 2017: http://archipelagobooks.org/read-karl-ove-knausgaards-essay-on-international-ibsen-award-winner-peter-handke/

"though at the current rate," I mean

Thanks for linking that: first time I really feel like reading Handke...has anyone seen a staging of Kaspar?

interesting - I spent my late teens obsessed with Handke (only to progressively admit to myself that most of the time his stuff would bore me senseless). I still see his influence in my tastes and what I'm drawn to. I would never have spotted the connection with Knausgard but now it makes perfect sense.

Yes, looking at a Sorrow Beyond Dreams and then turning to K's description of his father's death in vol.1..

Had to google that title to realise that book had a very different title in French (approx. "the indifferent sorrow"). Funny you bring it up since I recently put it my pile of books to read: re-read in this case, 15 years after the first time. It made a strong impression on me as a melancholy early 20sth, can't imagine how it'll hit me now, in the midst of struggling with my mother's mental illness and depression .

Sorry to hear it.

Went onto this Amazon review, accuses it of being "heartless", attacking it for the same reasons that Knausgaard praises it.

Original German title is also different - Wunchloses Unglück is a play on "wunchloses glücklich," usually translated as "perfectly happy" - so happy you don't have a wish! So literal translation of title would have been "perfectly unhappy," you can see why it got modified in translation. Definitely one of his more accessible books, although some of his shorter novels about writers or his diary excerpts are also easy to deal with, but don't pack that same emotional punch.

Wonder if that Amazon review was written by John Gardner.

Wait, that is a positive review, doesn't say "heartless" but "ruthless."

I was looking @ Marjorie's review, scroll down.

Slightly regret linking it alongside Knausgaard, but as a flipside, guessing she is into boring 'literary' clap trap.

Hm. I only see the one review here in the US.

"Perfect unhappiness"

Reading Peter Handke's newly reprinted memoir of his mother's suicide, I was more arrested by the author's steely, emotionless tone than I was by the horrific circumstances of his mother's death by poisoning. I was expecting a poetic, elegiac recollection of Handke's mother, perhaps a tribute to her maternity, her authenticity or whatever in the ultimate sense makes a woman memorable. We are taught to believe that a mother's love is all important, the essence of the relationship between mother and son a unique experience, inspiring, as it should, all sorts of choices in the man as he grows older as well as an assortment of leanings - toward religion, for instance, or learning or perhaps the arts. We think of mothers as exemplifying the Jungian concept of the "anima" in the man - that elusive image of the perfect woman which the maturing male formulates from his experience with his mother and seeks out in other females as part of his search for the woman he once knew intimately and still recalls with idealistic yearnings.

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Jeffrey Euginides' "The Virgin Suicides" about a family of gifted, beautiful female siblings who ultimately killed themselves, I should have been wary of this book, knowing it was Euginides whose efforts revitalized it; and indeed as I read the memoir I realized that the theme of Handke's book is similar to Euginides' in that both authors depict the fifties as a time of moral, spiritual and emotional suppression of women. Handke's account of his mother's death is simply one more reminder of how oppressive the fifties really were to the souls of all women, not just gorgeous, gifted teenagers, as Euginides' masterpiece portrays some of the era's hapless victims. That this death occurred in Austria makes plain that the post-War era was destructive to women all over the world - reflective of a global malaise, not just an American aberration, as one might conclude after reading Euginides' book.

For me, Handke's book suggests that the old ways of keeping women in their place were indeed widespread and every bit as destructive as some of us guessed when we were young and told to remain in our place - silent and pleasing to men. Alas, we were not permitted to be "unpleasant." Had we been allowed to be candid, perhaps we would have grown up less angry, less depressed and more confident. Yet it was not in the cards. Women were at the mercy of their unforgiving fertile bodies and thus dependent upon men for their rights as human beings. If a woman was lucky, she married the exception: a man who allowed her full emotional expression without consequences or caveats. Alas, few women were so fortunate, and the result was an epidemic of nervous breakdowns, alcoholism and valium dependency, screwed up children and workaholic and philandering men - none of these desirable rewards for a generation of women suddenly freed from the laborious demands of domesticity to express themselves in ways unheard of before. Yet deprived of meaningful professional opportunity and intimidated by men's expectations, many women retreated into their own guarded, depressed and ultimately psychotic worlds, thereby emotionally abandoning their children, their homes and their clueless husbands.

For Handke's mother the fifties were the apotheosis of personal subjugation. Compute the psychological effects of her Holocaust experience, and one recognizes that her life symbolized the marginalized position of most women of her time. She bore a child out of wedlock, she exuded a manic, hyper-energized, optimistic personality that was out of sync with the ruthlessly serious social atmosphere of the times. The father of her child was a Nazi; she subsequently married a man she didn't love for the purpose of security and mothered other children, confined, as she was, to a decrepit house with the stench of poverty and despair. Her periodic bouts with depression and female disease further defined her as unconventional during a period of gross conventionality.

As Handke points out, "For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in itself deadly." The surroundings the author describes are those of extreme penury, exemplified by his mother's father having lost his entire savings more than once due to the inflation of the times. "Staying home was a woman's place," Handke reminds the reader. Outside the home environment and the broader world as a whole were the province of the male while the woman was confined to the house and the drudgery implicit in motherhood and domesticity. Because there were no suitable options, his mother flees her family home as a young woman and becomes involved with a married German Army official; because of her illegitimate status of an unwed mother, she eventually marries a sergeant, "hoping he will die in the War," only to find him repulsive later when he returns to her. Thus, she experiences the penalties of being female as well as the female codified stages of the times: "Tired/Exhausted/Sick/Dying/Dead." Oppressed by the limits of her existence, she describes the resulting claustrophobia. The rain comes to symbolize her depression at the lack of novelty in her life. When she fled her hopeless destiny as a young woman, it is understandable that she would see in the Nazi years a release from the humdrum of female existence. Instead of the mundane lack of novelty in her family life then, she experiences in the heady days of World War 11 a sense of promise and deliverance from monotony. After all, she was still young, and at that point she possessed hope in the future.

Handke emphasizes that in those days "a girl's future was a joke," but the times offered hope and so Handke's mother strove to believe in the future. The woman remained indefatigable in her optimism, her manic search for variety and a future beyond the dismal consolations of her times. As "Sorrow" notes, "Women were not supposed to have a life of their own, and so his mother is emotionally "starved" as fifties women were, as the adolescent protagonists of Euginides' "Virgin Suicides" indeed were. In her misery Handke's mother aborts herself and subsequently becomes sexless. She had a "miserable life," Handke affirms. "She became nothing." His unspoken sorrow is just that. Even such a positive woman would in the end submit to the tyranny of the times.

Nor was she the only family member who suffered during those hard years. Her husband endured TB; her son had paralyzing headaches as he detached himself emotionally from his mother in order to survive. In those days, people didn't consider the possibility of mental illness in a peculiarly acting female. A woman wasn't allowed to be spontaneous in her behavior. Rigid social norms controlled her every move. Although his mother believed in happiness and earnestly sought it, Handke points out "happiness was not for her." She took to smoking because it was frivolous and wasn't condoned by the rigid moral code. She forged on, giving for Christmas presents only the barest of necessities because that was all the family could afford. She ate the last scrap of food left after a meal, delicately, as if that was enough to sustain her. In every way, she sacrificed her own needs to the demands of a tyrannical social order until she could do it no more. Her husband spent money on drink and a girlfriend, but such options were not hers. Instead she drank coffee at the local pub and endured his beatings. In all her efforts, she kept up appearances. She "adopted the penance of a united family," ignoring her red, chafed hands, her hunger, her physical pain. She cried quietly and in private until she discovered the outlet of reading which came to define her and legitimized her as well. She became a socialist. In the end, she had repressed her feelings so long that she had nothing to say. She had been silenced.

When at last debilitating headaches kept her captive to a dark room, she claimed "I'm not human anymore." Reduced to an automaton, she acknowledges "the idiocy of her life." Every sight becomes a torment; she loses all sense of time and place. At the last she can't even talk. "I can't talk; don't torture me," she tells her son. Handke observes, "Mere existence had become a torture to her."

The crushing defeat of not being able to express oneself fully and honestly is the worst experience of all. It denies a woman her very identity and the cathartic release of emotion. That her joyful, unbridled, naïve enthusiasm should be derided and quelled was the biggest injustice of all, for what it did was to devalue exuberance and optimism, the very coping mechanisms one needs to endure suffering, thereby forcing her into premature dementia. To be quelled in one's self-expression is to be marginalized, to be vulnerable, alas to be female in those unforgiving times. Seeing the Jews herded into lorries must have seemed analogous to the victim-hood she realized she would eventually endure. As Handke notes, the gymnasium was the last meaningful experience of females before they were mired in domestic rituals that were stultifying and dehumanizing.

It is obvious why Euginides championed this book; it has many thematic similarities to his own. However, Handke's prose is not melodic; his approach is not fluid, but disjointed. His objective and seemingly heartless discussion of his mother begs the question as to why he wrote the book. Perhaps he felt expunged of guilt for her death by addressing his mother's pathetic situation, her marginalized, psychotic existence. Perhaps he felt the need to justify his own detachment in the face of her suffering by chronicling the dispassionate nature of the times. Whatever his purpose, the book is not on the same level as Euginides' novel and as such reveals more about the author and the times than it does about the woman herself. The son's feelings for his mother lacked a true appreciation of her dilemma as well as a corresponding compassion for the downtrodden under whatever guise. Understated? Yes, but compassionate? I don't think so.

Marjorie Meyerle
Colorado Writer
Author of "Bread of Shame"

Whoa.

This is basically a variant of this

In any case, Handke is trying to understand something, to find a way to approach understanding and write about it, he is not trying to "be understanding" and come away with a teachable moment talk show best seller.

yeah talk about missing the point

hmmm, jumping aroudn Handke reviews on Goodreads has made me wanna check him out again. My fave, "The Left Handed Woman", also seems an influence on "Min Kamp"

Big row in Norway in the aftermath of that Ibsen award, Knausgård heavily involved in a pretty hostile debate over the debate over Handke winning and his supposed politics.

Wiki sez:

In 2014, the prize was awarded to the controversial playwright and historical revisionist Peter Handke, who is noted for denying the Srebrenica genocide and for his support of Slobodan Milošević.[2] The award led to calls for the jury to resign.[3] A large number of people protested against him as he arrived to receive the prize, shouting "fascist, fascist" repeatedly and calling him a "genocide denier."[4] The award was condemned by PEN Norway.[5] Bernt Hagtvet, an expert on totalitarianism, called the award an "unprecedented scandal," stating that "awarding Handke the Ibsen Prize is comparable to awarding the Immanuel Kant Prize to Goebbels."[5]