Tag Archives: Karl Ove Knausgaard

“He was committing the beginner’s error of inserting his own agenda into the poem, instead of drawing elements out of the poem and then cautiously blowing on them until they started to flame.”

This sentence made me stop to wonder if Knausgaard was telling his readers they shouldn’t come to his novel with an agenda for what it should be like. If so, that’s a good start. I would go further, though, and … Continue reading

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“But what is the truth of our social existence?”

Why would anyone invest a large percentage of their reading time in Knausgaard’s 3600-page novel? Is it worth it? I started reading it because I was curious about this Norwegian writer’s experiment with a new form of writing, which emphasizes … Continue reading

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“To live the complete human catastrophe is terrible indeed, but to write about it?”

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian writer who conducted a public experiment.  He wanted to see what would happen if he wrote honestly about his life, aiming to “penetrate that whole series of conceptions and ideas and images that hang … Continue reading

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“I want to show you the world, as it is all around us, all the time.”

How does Karl Ove Knausgaard’s collection of letters for his unborn daughter compare to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me? All three are beautiful explorations of ideas; all are meant to guide, … Continue reading

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“What was consciousness other than the surface of the soul’s ocean?”

In a Paris Review interview, Jesse Barron observes that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work is “so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary.” What makes it revolutionary is Knausgaard’s goal to write “as close to life as possible” even if it means … Continue reading

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“. . . autumn was wrapping its hand around the world, and I loved it. The darkness, the rain, the sudden cracks in the past that opened up…”

It defies the imagine: Karl Ove Knausgaard, a writer from Norway, has caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal. An article in the WSJ’s magazine named him the “2015 Literary Innovator,” declaring that he was “quite probably in line … Continue reading

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“The problem is not so much that the world limits your imagination, as your imagination limits the world.”

This is the third of six volumes of memoir about the world and the imagination of Karl Ove Knausgaard.  It’s a new kind of writing that defies categorization and is driven be the desire to explore the truth. For Knausgaard, … Continue reading

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“…I lived in a series of all-decisive moments, and the intensity was so great that sometimes life felt almost unlivable….”

This is not a book for readers who hate getting lost when a scene on page 105 doesn’t get resolved until page 340. It is for readers who would like to see how a literary genius describes the challenges and boredom … Continue reading

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“Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows.”

The passage continues: “That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself.”  This book, the autobiography of Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, reminds me of Proust.  He describes … Continue reading

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