Karl Ove Knausgård - Min kamp

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