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?
― mark s, Friday, 2 November 2018 11:50 (five years ago) link
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.
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 11 November 2018 10:18 (five years ago) link
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.
― lukas, Thursday, 9 April 2020 19:20 (four years ago) link
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.
― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Thursday, 9 April 2020 19:44 (four years ago) link
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.
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 24 May 2020 13:09 (three years ago) link
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
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 2 September 2020 09:28 (three years ago) link
I file him with Tao Lin under "fad authors I will never read".
― wasdnous (abanana), Thursday, 10 September 2020 23:05 (three years ago) link
pffft
tao lin could never
― rascal clobber (jim in vancouver), Thursday, 10 September 2020 23:27 (three years ago) link
mini kampyhttps://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=77&threadid=110847#unread
― dow, Friday, 11 September 2020 01:28 (three years ago) link
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/
― k3vin k., Saturday, 12 September 2020 16:41 (three years ago) link
thanks so much for posting that! one of the more thought provoking essays i've read in quite a while, i loved it
― Karl Malone, Saturday, 12 September 2020 21:20 (three years ago) link
also, i spotted a typo in the essay.
feels good man
― Karl Malone, Saturday, 12 September 2020 21:22 (three years ago) link
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
― sound of scampo talk to me (El Tomboto), Saturday, 12 September 2020 21:27 (three years ago) link
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
― Karl Malone, Saturday, 12 September 2020 21:41 (three years ago) link
Lots of mistakes. Refers to Jägerstätter as German
― rascal clobber (jim in vancouver), Saturday, 12 September 2020 23:57 (three years ago) link