Karl Ove Knausgård - Min kamp

was just thinking about this again and how I'm not going to read it

Yet another recent essay, this one on fame and the childish desire to be seen: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/karl-ove-knausgaard-on-fame-my-struggle/

xyzzzz: yeah, too much hype made it all very tiring, and I wanted some distance to find out if people still thought highly of it once things have settled down. Apparently the last two or three volumes sold a lot less than the first lot, but I guess that's not too surprising, considering just how many copies were sold of the first few.

licorice: ha, yeah, I feel kinda ridiculous, but stores here have been flooded with the books, so with a little patience I could get them all for next to nothing. Figured I might as well pick them up, since I am pretty curious about them. They're far less intimidating than, say, The Tale of Genji.

my mind still boggles as to how volume 1 could become a bestseller

http://observer.com/2014/06/actually-hes-doing-pretty-o-k-karl-ove-knausgaard-arrives-in-new-york/

because it's Proust as if written for the masses. for better and worse.
xpost

I've nothing on Knausgaard-as-book (read a few pages, may read more but life is short), but thought this was interesting on his being a bestseller – basically, he isn't in the anglophone world:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jul/19/raise-your-hand-if-youve-read-knausgaard/
It's a bit off in that it doesn't address Europe at all (except for Denmark, where he's incontestably a bestseller, right?) but I was interested to see the US/UK stats.

You mean Norway?

genre authors like John Le Carré or Isaac Asimov were justly noted for their literary qualities

Is this true at all, in Asimov's case? I always thought that even his fans admitted he was a pretty horrible prose stylist

I think the Norway figures are remarkable - Parks is really good on these issues, but here it is off to give short shrift because Norway is a small country. In terms of proportion this is staggering.

For something 'literary' to actually have any wider cultural impact anywhere in Europe is amazing. Nothing in the UK in the last 25 years (or more) has that and the likelihood of that ever happening again is next to nil. Zadie Smith, Ian McWean etc. sounds like a smaller level of conversation.

And then to use the impact on another country (and the parochial English do not care about Norway) to push a translation too. Again, it would've taken 20 years for this kind of work to be fully translated if it hadn't generated the conversation in the first place.

25 years is about right - The Satanic Verses had quite an impact, and I doubt anyone's got the guts to try that again any time soon.

I'll be finishing volume 3 tonight. Volume 4's not out until March :o( I've been careful in looking it up, for fear of spoilers, but even so I'm surprised not to be able to find out even when it's set. I don't know if I could take another round of thirtysomething petty domesticity.

Oh yeah, Norway, sorry (to both Norway and Denmark), hasty and not quite awake.

I'm old enough to remember when Milan Kundera was the talk of the town

I think the Norway figures are remarkable - Parks is really good on these issues, but here it is off to give short shrift because Norway is a small country. In terms of proportion this is staggering.

Yes – and I'd make a blind guess that there'd be impressive figures across Scandinavia (that's not an attempt to excuse my earlier confusion…), then maybe into Germany (though ok the overall title might put them off).

FWIW, Knausgard's appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August sold out pretty quickly

https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/karl-ove-knausgaard

Nothing in the UK in the last 25 years (or more) has that and the likelihood of that ever happening again is next to nil.

tbh I wouldn't write it off – UK is definitely not where the literary action is, but if we fluked up a talent or two, and they hit the right fault-line, then things could kick up to the level of international discussion.

(But ok this is basically some 'winning the world cup' idle speculation & probably ignores institutional structures and cultures that make the UK so 2nd division)

not that satanic verses = winning the world cup.

26 years of hurt.

woof dissing Norway like Gazza

Yeah, Knausgård is a star in Denmark, and I asume in Sweden as well. My Swedish uncle was reading part six last time we visited. The toppoint of hysteria was a reviewer in Danish newspaper Politiken writing that My Struggle would mean as much for the youth of today as The Sufferings of Young Werther did back in the day. Which is absolutely ridiculous and wrong.

actually realised that I'm stupidly parochial so I don't really have the perspective to see UK lit in an international perspective & that in my head I've put Knausgaard in the 'one non-Anglophone author that serious people talk about for a bit' category.

This is not like the world cup because the tournament is held every 6-8 years (Knausgaard '13 - Bolano '07 - Murakami '00 - 1994 championship cancelled due to Britpop - Kundera/Marquez shared title '86)

There was a 1994 tourney - Jostein Gaarder should've won, but Louis de Bernieres sneaked in and snatched it with his funny-sounding name.

that's the separate and more regular 'everyone is reading this slightly literary book' tournament! Open to anglophones, doesn't generate much critical discussion.

everyone is reading this slightly literary book tournament!

New board description!

Irvine Welsh seemed like a big deal for a while there?

Yeah – I was trying to remember what was going on then – as an undergrad I was in a studenty bubble so 94-6 did seem to be a lot of people reading Trainspotting.

I cannot remember if there was an ISO Serious Author Worth Discussing for that period. Saramago, Sebald, Murakami, Houellebecq all break a bit later iirc.

94-01 seemed like a lot of people reading trainspotting tbf

haha i just don't know if i trust the figures in the nyrb article, though i guess that's one of those 'but i've read it ... and two people i know have read it ...' arguments

bought the first volume, but haven't cracked it open yet

But Freedom did sell, 68,236 in hardback in the UK, rather fewer in paperback, about half of what The Corrections sold. Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, a memoir telling of his years in hiding after the fatwa, commanded enormous column space in the press, understandably given the subject matter, but UK sales were just 7,521 in hardback and only 1,896 in paperback. However in these cases, as soon as the wave doesn’t happen the critical buzz quickly subsides.

kind of amazed, cheered at how few people read freedom though

I finished no.3 earlier, now to sit on my hands for eight months.

The last dozen or so pages were some unpleasant, uncomfortable reading - I shan't give details, not that it's a spoiler as such anyway and in any case it's not as significant as it'll sound, but it feels like between that era and this there's been a shift in morality which actually left me feeling a little: 'this not okay, he shouldn't be writing this'. Which isn't a good thing. For several reasons, not least because we'd be talking about a morality shift almost within my own life experience, and I haven't really had to face that before.

I guess what I really want to do is lay a question for Øystein, should he ever reach those pages himself - is this remotely plausible as an account of how it is/was at that particular point of adolescence in Norway?

man now i wish i'd not given up on that volume. pm me?

I've emailed you. It's not earth-shattering, sorry it came across that way. It's more just topical.

thank you. yeah, that all seems like it kind of fits from the attitude he takes towards Being A Man and suchlike throughout, i don't know

certainly some books are quite popular, in various places, but the blog article was, I think, more about suggesting that books that sounded very very popular (in US or perhaps UK) hadn't really sold that many in US / UK. The figures seemed to bear this out. I quite liked the article.

Ismael: If it's something that can be summed up, feel free to ask directly, as I don't mind knowing what happens in the books before reading them.

If not, well, I'll put a note in my copy to come back here when I've read it. But that might not happen for a long time yet.

Here's one response to Parks' blog post: http://conversationalreading.com/yes-virginia-my-struggle-is-a-bestseller/

Okay I'll delete this in a while. Basically: it's a series of descriptions of mid-level sexual assaults carried by adolescent boys, including the narrator, on adolescent girls, which the girls protest but really consent to by the glint in their eyes. e.g. a couple of boys will spot a girl alone, pounce on her, whip up her top, have a grope, then all go their separate ways.

It made me uncomfortable for several reasons, but principally because I grew up in a place, time and class not far removed from what Knausgaard is describing, and afaic remember there was nothing like this, everyone knew better. It doesn't fit with my understanding of Norway - it's all very caveman - and I find it hard to accept as a normal growing-up thing, which is how it's presented.

Maybe that last bit isn't right. Maybe I was a somewhat sheltered kid and this actually was common in most adolescences, in the UK too - instinctively I rail against the characterisations of rape culture that you see here & there, because it doesn't fit at all with my experience. Maybe that's what makes me uncomfortable - the idea that the world is and has always been like that, and I missed it. Maybe it's nothing to do with Norway.

Ok, I found one of those scenes. It doesn't sound implausible to me, though I can't say I knew any groups doing shit like that where I grew up in the early/mid 90s. There were individual pushy kids, however, who would always try to see how far they could go — I imagine there are people like that everywhere.

They sound a bit too old to really get away with acting like that, but I imagine most groups of kids would experiment with how far they could go with one another, and different groups would stop one another at different points. These girls were sorta part of their "gang", right?
I might be the worst person to answer this, simply because I was such a shy kid that I was always uncomfortable and afraid of making other people equally uncomfortable, so this would've been unthinkable.

Thanks, that's much the same position as I'm in. It's also more-or-less the same position I'd imagined the narrator to be in - so to either have him turn unreliable in the closing stretch, or to have misunderstood him or the society he's been describing, was horribly disorientating. Which isn't a trick I thought Knausgaard was going to play.

Oh, I can't delete it after all. So much for mod superpowers. I'll just leave it up i think, it's not really a spoiler as such.

I didn't know Ismael Klata was from Norway.

Like others, I have never encountered any behaviour like what he describes.

This reminds me of the way that people think everyone is into drugs but I have virtually never seen any. When I was at school most of the things that schoolchildren now are supposedly controversially into, like sex and drugs, were mainly nonexistent. One could hear of them in the media, but they did not happen in real life.

A new essay on Peter Handke, "Handke and Singularity"--I'm curious whether this overlaps with the passages on Paul Celan in the last volume, though that at the current rate that won't be out in English before 2017: http://archipelagobooks.org/read-karl-ove-knausgaards-essay-on-international-ibsen-award-winner-peter-handke/

"though at the current rate," I mean

Thanks for linking that: first time I really feel like reading Handke...has anyone seen a staging of Kaspar?

interesting - I spent my late teens obsessed with Handke (only to progressively admit to myself that most of the time his stuff would bore me senseless). I still see his influence in my tastes and what I'm drawn to. I would never have spotted the connection with Knausgard but now it makes perfect sense.

Yes, looking at a Sorrow Beyond Dreams and then turning to K's description of his father's death in vol.1..

Had to google that title to realise that book had a very different title in French (approx. "the indifferent sorrow"). Funny you bring it up since I recently put it my pile of books to read: re-read in this case, 15 years after the first time. It made a strong impression on me as a melancholy early 20sth, can't imagine how it'll hit me now, in the midst of struggling with my mother's mental illness and depression .

Sorry to hear it.

Went onto this Amazon review, accuses it of being "heartless", attacking it for the same reasons that Knausgaard praises it.

Original German title is also different - Wunchloses Unglück is a play on "wunchloses glücklich," usually translated as "perfectly happy" - so happy you don't have a wish! So literal translation of title would have been "perfectly unhappy," you can see why it got modified in translation. Definitely one of his more accessible books, although some of his shorter novels about writers or his diary excerpts are also easy to deal with, but don't pack that same emotional punch.

Wonder if that Amazon review was written by John Gardner.