Karl Ove Knausgård - Min kamp

halfway through vol. 1.

a very interesting Macrocosm and a very boring microcosm. the contradiction between those two is what makes the novel remarkable, after all.

anyone else read it?

or: the most readable experimental novel ever written?

Not sure what you're getting at with that macro/microcosm distinction. I've read Vol. 1. Reposting my thoughts from one of the "currently reading" threads: "First half is about his high-school years, second half deals with his dad's death from alcoholism. Both halves pretty great. His ersatz-Proustian tic of recounting mundane activities in minute detail sometimes seems almost OCD, but the fastidious style pays dividends by capturing subtle emotional nuances in its fine mesh."

i think he is anti-proust:
where proust dig as deep as possible, Knausgård stays on the surface.

interesting macrocosm because of the the simple yet original idea of describing the banal everyday life as they are (the boring microcosm), without any decoration or technique whatsoever, as simple as possible. like modern art - everyone can do it,yes, but only he did.

When is this going to be on HBO?

never. too anti dramatic

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 mean, will someone give this guy a medal?

I'll wait till he is dead. Might turn into a masterpiece then.

funny, because it's not as provocative as he think it is.

I read the first, have just started the second. I still can't tell whether he has such an eye for the telling detail that he can identify way more of them than anyone else, or whether that means he has no eye for the telling detail whatsoever. So many things are mentioned or half-described in passing, and then disappear having had no consequence. Maybe I'm missing it, or maybe they'll all be knitted together in volume six.

The first book *is* great though. It's not quite a two-halves book either, there are long digressions on e.g. life in Stockholm which don't seem to belong to either half. They're the most boring bits. The second book starts with one of these, a boring though still perceptive episode of parenthood. It makes for an unpromising opening though, it's going to take an effort to heave myself into this volume.

So much great stuff on being an adolescent. His band playing its first gig at the shopping mall is delightfully embarrassing.

still, it's like a study on detachment: everything has the feeling of indifferent, and it seems like he wasn't a "thinker" till after his teenage years, when he and everything around him is either shallow or very repressed. or is it just the Norwegian way of living?

Might be a Norwegian thing. Repression is kind of what we're about. We make up for it by getting far too drunk.

Re: seeing himself as provocative. When reading recent interviews, you probably have to keep in mind that his books were a HUGE deal here, with lots of discussion about whether writing them was immoral etc. Some of the people he wrote about didn't appreciate it. I cannot go into details, because I avoided those discussion and articles.

'it seems like he wasn't a "thinker" till after his teenage years'

hm.

got the first one of these for a pound at the weekend. that's all i have to add, unfortunately.

I've almost finished the second volume. Still can't quite articulate what I find so great about it. There is something bracing about the relentless, horrific mundanity of, eg, cleaning the dad's house in book I. As IK sez, book II opens with the most stupefyingly detailed account of a children's party imaginable, yet I found it engrossing. Suppose I don't find it very hard to identify with a guy who grew up in the 80s trying to make his hair look like Ian McCulloch's and discussing ideal LFC back 4s. Or the 30-something househusbandry. Wonder if I would find it quite so acute if it were written by some guy in Hackney.

How does it compare to Javier Mariás in terms of, idk what to call it, hyper-extension of event and time?

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

I'm somewhat biased by being friends with two of the writers, but I've been enjoying this series of letters on My Struggle, which has covered the first volume so far, and will continue through book 5 by the end of the summer: http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/06/the-slow-burn-volume-2-an-introduction/

i still have uh a ways to go w/ karl's struggle and the gradual slumping of his press has been giving me the slightest of misgivings

so i found this reassuring even if it does imply that the middle books would still be kinda meh

http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-struggle-against-language

started the second one recently, a year or more since finishing the first. i am generally enjoying the mixture of feelings i have towards him, as i go on. in book 1 i often thought "what an idiot" and occasionally enjoyed the long, tedious descriptions of things. it felt sort of sub-musil or like a trashy airport novel for people who enjoy literature. in book 2 after 100 pages or so i'm finding myself laughing at his juvenile, petty, pretentious anger, about his kids or swedish parents or his life, but not to the point that it makes me ridicule him. it's like a mixture of boorishness, sensitivity, sexism, and alternative thinking. as a writer he's almost impossible to pin down. there are so many feelings at war with each other - it can be trite or bad-tempered one second, and profound the next.

overall good page-turners, but still feel like airport or holiday reading.

the stuff about him being a parent in this liberal swedish milieu and being a small c conservative and basically finding it awful but having no choice but to be around because of his kids is the funniest stuff in the books so far for me and I've read the first 3. there's this really funny bit - well for some reason it jumped out at me as particularly funny - where people are talking about immigration and he intentionally says nothing because one of the guys there works in refugee settlement and his views on immigration have previously made people think he's a racist

also his view of childrearing - he is a house husband because he can't justify not being one - his wife needs to go out to work, he's a writer and can work from home - but basically finds it unfulfilling and emasculating because he is really, despite his extreme sensitivity, someone who prescribes to traditional gender roles

the mixture of profundity and basic misanthropy makes for a fairly amusing read. p sexist tho throughout.

As far as I know, I own all of this dude’s works that’ve been published in book form in English. If you’re a My Struggle superfan, check out A Time for Everything, which is different from My Struggle, but there’s a connection there that might be interesting to you.

Here’s a link: https://archipelagobooks.org/book/a-time-for-everything/

There’s also some more books of his coming out in the future listed on that website here: https://archipelagobooks.org/book_author/knausgaard-karl/

the mixture of profundity and basic misanthropy makes for a fairly amusing read. p sexist tho throughout.

― Bein' Sean Bean (LocalGarda), Friday, May 12, 2017 4:57 AM (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh it's very sexist. i mean, it's very candid, so, i think most men being extremely candid would come across somewhat sexist. but he really takes the cake, i feel completely chaste compared to his constant lechery.

the saving grace for me is that in writing this autobiographical account of being a drunk, sometimes pretentious, chauvinistic, male writer he doesn't ever really try to do the male writer thing and elevate himself by romanticizing himself as a struggling artist, or charming rogue, or whatever. his frailty, banality, and weakness is constantly apparent. you're often laughing at him and rarely with him.

I got tired of the guy 3/4 of the way through Book 1. Not really interested in checking out more by him tbh

his frailty, banality, and weakness is constantly apparent. you're often laughing at him and rarely with him.

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Friday, May 12, 2017 5:08 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

do you think this is a central part of the project? like, is the book a masochistic deconstruction of the heroic male author archetype?

i think knausgaard would have no interest in that in the abstract, or like from a point of principle. but it is that in effect.

the central conceit is his relationship with his abusive father and his desire to not be like him and perhaps part of that is the openness and nakedness of this book. contrasts greatly with his father who remains an enigma throughout.

I got tired of the guy 3/4 of the way through Book 1. Not really interested in checking out more by him tbh

i found book one sporadically engaging, mostly a bit bemusing, even with the melancholy. book 2 has a lot more intellectual heft. both are page-turners imo. maybe his approach is building through me as i go too.

the scene in book 2 where his wife gives birth was incredibly powerful imo, don't think i've ever read somebody detail childbirth from a viewer's perspective like that, it was extremely moving.

book 2 is so much better than the first one. he does like some shit indie music tho.

he does like some shit indie music tho.

the cardigans just emerged in book 2. and i mean, i guess damon albarn's mali album might not be shit, idk, but just seems the kind of lame thoughtless indie-fan purchase of the time. i realise he does like some good things as well, i think, based on his interviews.

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