You’ve read the major works of Karl Ove Knausgaard (the complete six-volume My Struggle series and A Time For Everything, maybe even The Seasons Quartet and The Morning Star) yet still want more? For a writer who ended My Struggle declaring he was no longer a writer, our ornery Nordic friend has clearly been getting some writing done, publishing four additional titles between 2017 and 2021. You’ll get to them all in time, sure, but for now, for whosoever deems themselves daunted by an ever-growing stack of “Lesser Knausgaard,” to ease your selection of the one to read next, I hereby compile and present below, in descending order of recommendation, superficial yet potentially helpful impressions.
In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays (Archipelago, 2021)
This one deserves consideration as your first stop. It revisits the focus on Kiefer, Hamsun, and Stephen Gill from the Munch book (see below), and reminded me of My Struggle Book Four (teaching up north), as well as Book Five (becoming a writer and friends with young influential writer guys named Tore and/or Geir), and for the most part is a welcome extension throughout of familiar dimensions.
It’s sequenced well, opening with essays on photographers and artists before moving on to Houllebecq‘s Submission, Hamsun, an essay at one point on one page comparing War and Peace, Ulysses, and 2666, an excellent short piece on Madame Bovary, the title essay about being called a Nazi rapist pedophile by a Swedish feminist professor easily the most charged with emotion, all with familiar glimpses into domestic life in southeastern Sweden and growing up in Norway.
As in The Seasons Quartet, thematic emphasis is on inner and outer, horizontal and the vertical, but also a new register or dynamic in this: the inside of the internal, the world inside the world — escape from reality deeper into reality to its core. Best when writing about writing, editing, writers, and daily life, more so than when describing photographs and paintings.
Excellent when considering his work’s relation to politics, especially in Beirut but also, again, the title essay.
Sometimes felt a little rote, especially toward the end of essays, like he defaults to the same topics and themes (inner/outer, creating art that’s free), trying to tie things up, undermining in a way his emphasis on writing in the direction of the unknown.
Two tasty quotations:
“We live in a culture that cultivates youth, cultivates simplicity, cultivates the puerile . . . A novel is the opposite: it seeks complexity, it seeks diversity of meaning, it seeks truth in places apart from where truth is sloganized or kept in a frame where it’s held and unable to move, rigid and immutable. Even a novel that deals with simplicity and regression is complex and expansive, and this is so by virtue of it being a novel — otherwise it’s something else.”
“The situations in which creative writing takes place are often complicated, to put it mildly — anyone even slightly familiar with the writing profession, as we so grandly refer to it, knows that is one great big entanglement of neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination — and working with writing in that kind of context means that a concept such as quality is a poor standard indeed, at least if we think of quality as an objective form. In literary editing, quality is a dynamic entity, more a process than a grade, and one that will vary according to the individual writer and editor.”
Added these to my to-read list thanks to KOK’s recommendations: Njal’s Saga, Dollar Road, The Best Intentions, Only Human.
Highly recommended if you’re a fan — not just for completists. Not a recommended starting point, unless you only read essays, in which case this won’t disappoint. Ultimately, I wanted to read it when I wasn’t reading it and it made me want to write. Finished on Election Day 2020, at times almost forgetting what was at stake.
Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game, with Fredrik Ekelund (FSG, 2017)
I was a little bummed when I saw that My Struggle: Book Six wouldn’t be published in English until 2018, meaning the annual tradition of a new installment would be put on hold for a year, but this nicely subs-in and fulfills the 2017 Knausgaard need. In many ways I loved this, loved hunkering down with it now that winter has reappeared in mid-March (writing this in 2017 as sleety snow taps the bedroom windows) after that premature spring/summer we experienced in February, and like that string of seventy-degree days in February, I can’t really think of something like it — the best I can do is the exchange of letters between Henry Miller and another writer about Hamlet (the famous writer hasn’t read Hamlet in twenty years and the other writer is an expert who read it more recently). It seems like such a natural idea for a book but I can’t think of something else like it.
What makes this work so well also is the time constraint — ie, they’re only writing each other during the 2014 World Cup tournament in Brazil — so it has natural rising drama as the footie storylines emerge and teams are eliminated, all of it leading to the semi-finals and an ultimate winner. I think my reading experience may have been helped along a bit since I couldn’t remember who won the World Cup, let alone individual games, although I did remember that one player bit another. Generally, obviously, I’m not much of a soccer fan. I watched one or two games during the summer of 2014 — one game in particular I watched with a significant afternoon crowd at a bar as the bearded American goalkeeper made a ton of great saves but the US lost. I played soccer when I was a kid but there were too many practices and too much running for me so I quit the traveling “all-star” team in sixth grade and have never really regretted it. Anyway, I have some knowledge of the sport, but I don’t even know the famous players. I’ve heard of Messi but I wouldn’t recognize him if he walked into the room where I’m writing this (which would be weird since I’m writing this in the bedroom).
My point is just that you don’t need to know much about soccer/football to enjoy this — and it was definitely enjoyable to search, for example, for an English player with a face described as “petulant” and then in an instant see hundreds of examples, or quickly search YouTube for highlights of games and players described. The two writers discuss the games and players but it’s always easy enough to follow, and discussion always evolves to address larger themes in writing and in life.
If you’re a fan of any sport, you can also transfer your knowledge and spectator experience from, say, the NBA in my case to soccer: do teams play together or do players play on their own? Can a player be a genius defender? Why are some players likeable and others not so much? What’s it like to watch a player who’s playing in the flow? Knausgaard at one point observes that the players on the field are always older than him, since when we watch sports we are always twelve years old, an observation I absolutely recognize.
What also makes this work well is that the older (in his sixties), more knowledgeable, better soccer player is in Brazil, hanging with locals, speaking Portuguese, attending some games, playing soccer on the beach and on musician Chico Buarque’s private pitch, totally immersed in the World Cup environment, whereas the more famous younger (45) writer is in Sweden at home with four kids and his wife and their new trampoline, totally immersed in domestic summer life, heading to beaches and pools, smoking two packs a day and trying to write an essay on fate and handle other administrative duties for his publishing company and then at night settle down and watch the games, often dozing off. The back and forth is wonderful, the rhythm of it, the different settings (at one point, Knausgaard says that in writing what matters most is difference), also the flexibility to essentially go off on quick little improvised essays about whatever.
KOK in particular digresses about the rising tide of nationalism and anti-immigration sentiments (hmm, still relevant in 2017), Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (one of our — me and Karl Ove’s — favorites), writing of course, the reception of My Struggle, how he breaks out of a period of extreme physical and existential lethargy (spoiler: he takes up painting for a few weeks), and most surprisingly/engagingly he defends himself against hyper-feminist critique, citing examples of visits to universities where he felt like the interviewer and the students were all united in saying that what he experienced and wrote about was “wrong.” Although Karl Ove supports Argentina and Fredrik supports Brazil, both writers are primarily on the side of literature, ultimately, which values complexity and diversity and inter-relationships over cut/dry us-versus-them-type oppositional dualities.
All in all, if you’re a Knausgaard fan, this is a must — it’s very much like the “My Struggle” series in many ways, with the same setting and characters (Linda, Yngve, Geir, et al.) — and Ekelund more than holds his own as a guide through the games and the World Cup in Rio. It’s ultimately a book filled with life, lightly structured to keep its squirming vitality in place, which is something I most tend to like.
Translated by Don Bartlett and Sean Kinsella.
Inadvertent (Yale University Press, 2018)
Reads almost like a re-mixed excerpt from My Struggle Book Five’s parts about writing. A typo on page 7 (“than” instead of “that”) on a page about trust made me distrust this one’s publication at first, thinking it a little money-grubby, but that slight initial sense fell away as the old familiar voice and progress through internal and external worlds established themselves.
No one mentions KOK in the same breath as Kerouac, even if both were deeply inspired by Proust and KOK’s “inadvertent” method echoes Kerouac’s essentials of spontaneous prose. KOK also doesn’t acknowledge that under-prestigious author with the tripthong surname — he talks about canonical biggies Hamsun, Tolstoy, Borges, Cervantes, Joyce. Large print, 92 pages, a nice little red hardback if you take the dust jacket off.
Interesting how effective even the slightest formal restraint is for him. What he writes is the inadvertent intuitive result of the form he imposes from the beginning. The form reveals the content instead of being something he reveals.
Mostly worth it for completists, probably, although also maybe the best introduction to his thought processes, style, approach? I also liked that he reveres W&P, which I took a day’s break from to read this. And I like how he talked about books as places where readers can go. Which reminds me of Frank Conroy banging the table, saying something like “we don’t care about ideas or situations — listen, this is coming from a lifetime of reading — we care about worlds!”
And furthermore I liked reading about KOK’s failures, not only his early failed attempts, the novel his friend told him that wasn’t good enough, but also the failed attempts (800 pages) of writing about his father’s death, among other projects that he ultimately decided were not working. In all cases, when it does work for him, it’s effortless, in that it’s immersive and intuitive, more like reading, like he’s following what he’s creating.
So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch (Penguin, 2019)
Started this during the summer (2019) but put it down thanks to zoning out whenever KOK described paintings. Just could not engage or care. Returned to it recently (January 2020), zoned out again at the same passages 15-20 pages into it, but this time googled the paintings that weren’t reproduced in glossy color in the book, which helped, and made it through to personal talk about artistic creation and Hamsun and Deleuze, a visit with Anselm Kiefer, and later an interview and some scenes with the director of Oslo August 31, which I saw a few years ago on Netflix, knowing nothing about it, and loved and think about often (a puff of smoke from a fire extinguisher shot from a receding moped at early summer dawn after a wild night).
Worth it for the intermittent emergence of the first-person roving textual experience we know and love — and for how what he writes about Munch applies to his own writing. But the sections about Munch and his paintings I found myself skimming, particularly the descriptions, which I always zoned out on.
Also felt like it was out of sequence, or that it could have been more engaging if the parts at the end were upfront, starting with outbidding someone online for the Munch piece, about Hamsun and Munch first as people and then as Norway’s Greatest Artists, about the persistence of twenty-year-old Knausgaard’s fantasy of the artist, free to travel, write, debauch, and drink, drink, drink, followed by curating the Munch show, the visit to Munch’s house, and then ending with visits/interviews with the artists, with the biographics and painting descriptions integrated throughout.
I guess it’s an attempt at iconoclasm, an exploded biography, like one of those Emmanuel Carrère books (like Limonov), but in the end I found a third to a half of it not engaging, other than a few pages of primo exposition about art (~pgs 87-90, eg) that seemed worth the sticker price alone.
Glad I spent a few days with it but would recommend “for completists only.” On my Knausgaard hierarchical reading experience continuum, all our base belongs to this (that is, this is in my estimation his “worst book,” albeit still probably more in line with my preferences than most of what’s out there by other writers).
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).