Update: 5 March 2016
A Debate Over Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle’ - NYTimes.com:
His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his A Time for Everything (Archipelago) was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize.
For My Struggle, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009 (for Book One), the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners’ Prize. My Struggle has been translated into more than fifteen languages.
Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and three children.
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is a hard sell: a 3,600-page work published in six volumes, without a plot to speak of.
The six books were published in Norway between 2009 and 2011.
Knausgaard and the narrator of My Struggle share the same name, relatives, friends and ideas, but the work can’t really be called non-fiction. “I remember rooms and landscapes,” Knausgaard has said. “What I do not remember [is] what the people in these rooms were telling me.”
- A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett, Vintage RRP£8.99, 416 pages ( the narrator’s relationship with his overbearing, intimidating father.)
- A Man in Love: My Struggle Book 2, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett, Vintage RRP£8.99, 544 pages (...describes meeting Linda, his second wife: “The sun rose in my life,” he writes.)
- Boyhood Island: My Struggle Book 3, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett, Harvill Secker RRP£12.99, 496 pages, (Boyhood Island is set almost entirely in Karl Ove’s childhood;
- Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle: Book 4, by Karl Ove Knausgaard translated by Don Bartlett, Harvill Secker, RRP£17.99, 560 pages ( is a fairly straightforward Bildungsroman: "novel of formation, education, culture" from youth to adulthood-coming of age.)
- Some Rain Must Fall: My Struggle Book 5, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Harvill Secker, RRP£17.99, 672 pages (The fifth book of the cycle, returns briefly to this haunted house from A Death in the Family - return to the father’s death, encodes death into microstructure of Karl Ove’s 14-year residence in the provincial town of Bergen, where he pursues various studies and jobs, takes summer breaks, drinks heavily, falls in and out of love and, most crucially, turns himself into a writer.
Some Rain Must Fall has exchanged novelistic plotting for the relative formlessness of life, where the causes of our effects are often hidden.)
Published in the US by Archipelago as My Struggle.
- Meet the Man Who Translates Karl Ove Knausgaard
Anecdotally, people are also always asking which book is the “best,” or if they have to start from the beginning.
Personally, I think Book Two is the best. I have suggested to people that they should start at the beginning, but I also know Book One has put some readers off. I think some readers check out very quickly because of the theme of death and the focus on self. By contrast, Book Three, for example, would probably not put people off in the same way. There is a change of style after the first two books, with Three, Four, and Five being more accessible. So now I would recommend readers dip in wherever. As to the critics, it feels right to me to review each book as it comes out. One a year is slow for those addicted to the series, I know— apologies for that. Considering everything, I guess a series retrospective at the end would make a lot of sense.
"My Struggle provides the reader with a portrait of an artist whose sometimes-quixotic-seeming-endeavor to narrate his struggles with life and art in their entirety consumes, possesses, captivates him, in that last verb’s literal sense, and thereby sets him free.
When Knausgaard tells his wife he must leave her at home to care for their recently born daughter, must write; when he won’t compromise even after she threatens to leave him, take the kid with her, then does; and when he furthermore dispenses with every last aesthetic consideration aside from this scribomaniacal need to write, he is both chronicling and dramatizing his own refusal to abandon the pursuit…and it’s this monstrously intact integrity with which he undertakes and then completes his masterwork that answers any question about the madness of a project that, like a rocket fired straight up into the sky, takes aim at its creator and terminates in the obliteration of his authorship, his hunger to create.
It’s Knausgaard’s consummation, a triumph that emancipates the husband, father, son, and friend: the author is dead, leaving what’s left of the man free to walk away from his leviathan — preserved forever now in art’s time-cheating formaldehyde — freed from the echo chamber of thwarted intent, in order to emerge, maybe for the first time, into life."
More:
- Why Karl Ove Knausgaard Can’t Stop Writing - WSJ
“There is a lot more love expressed in my family now than there was in my family growing up,” he says. “But I have no idea how they are going to perceive their own childhood.” Still, he says, he would prefer they not become writers. “In my world there is something wrong with people who are writers,” he says. “If someone wants to write, that means there is something incomplete in them; if they’re writers, it’s a certain sign of unhappiness.”
Listening to music and reading - Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death In The Family - The best books-and-music pairings | Books | The Guardian
'via Blog this'
No comments:
Post a Comment