Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle

Anyone read this? Usually can't stomach stuff so boring, but his family's reactions intrigued me.

> His wife had agreed to be included
> Having finished it, she called him three times. The first time she said she thought it was OK, but that she didn't like it.
> The second time, she told him that their life could never be romantic again.
> Finally, she called him and wept.

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nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/karl-ove-knausgaard-travels-through-america.html
foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/22/famed-writer-karl-ove-knausgaard-declares-war-on-sweden-land-of-the-cyclops/
translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https://web.archive.org/web/20170216081708/https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/kulturdebatt/karl-ove-knausgards-rasande-attack-pa-sverige/&edit-text=&act=url
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what kind of cuckery is this?

Its actually rather strange, whenever he pontificates and tries to plant meaning in any of his memories its the worst portions of the book, but when he just describes what happened in his life, even if scarcely or in an oblong way, the book really shines through
the shit about his dad got me so fucking bad

and why should I give a crap about him ?

I haven't read it because I'm 90% sure it's shit

is that why no one on Veeky Forums has ever read anything? you all are 90% sure its crap?

thanks for honest reaction. you read the whole thing? worth it?

>is that why no one on Veeky Forums has ever read anything?
Basically, yes. But this book doesn't inspire me any interest, really. I'm sorry.

I read the first four before I prioritized books I'd been waiting years to get a hold of. Apparently in the sixth he talks about the Breivik massacre.

What happened to Karl Ove on Veeky Forums? You fucks were posting him daily like two years ago

well, shit is too expensive for me to be buying now (it should be all over used bookstores in a few years), but i've thought about librarying. Anything you can compare it to?

I know the best answer to all of this is "read it yourself, idiot" - and that's usually my answer. but i have stacks of shit i'm still working through and don't know if i'm in any mood for thousands of pages of intimate confession. but at the same time, been fucking ages since i read a really great novel. USA trilogy clear back in spring was probably the last truly excellent novel i read.

tl;dr read it now or wait a few years when its cheap?

its pretty good. I don't think it will be remembered in a hundred years. "A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven" by him is better. But I wouldn't compare either to Dos Passos. I'd compare it to Remembrance of Things Past in its length and subject matter, but it is almost entirely about mundanity, depression, and humiliation. If you were looking for Norwegian lit I'd never dream of comparing Knausgaard to Ibsen, Hamsun, or Undset. Just buy it all when you find it used

What did he say about his wife?

Does he ever mention Varg Vikernes?

cool. thank you!

I wish I could ramble about my boring life and make tons of money tbqh
Hats off to him

nice trips
everyone knows min kamp is just a ripoff and prefers the original instead

>exposes the private life of his family and friends to the world
>is intrigued when those same people hate him for it
truly perplexing

never read anything by him. Is he a bluepilled libtard like 99% of all authors?

Dude its literally named after Mein Kampf

If she's his wife was she calling him,
Was he in his cuckshed?

>named after Mein Kampf
doesn't mean anything
what do you think how many 'Mein Kampf' books are written in Germany by leftards, commies and cucks? It' a running joke

No, he has conservative leanings. He was defending the concept of nationalism in Norway after the Anders shooting

>Varg Vikernes
this man. in my country. he is nothing

Overall it’s boring shit I pretend to like for the social cachet...some of it is enjoyable, though. His description of his drunk father’s house is good, for example. Just read the first one bro

Lol. Not blue pilled at all but I don’t remember any references to Chad or Stacy so you might need to fight the urge to screech “cuck” every five pages or so.

>His description of his drunk father’s house is good, for example.

I gave the first book to my best friend as a gift (his father is an old alcoholic with many health issues). He said that the description in the book was exactly like life in his house was.

The value of the My Struggle series is that Knausgaard is very good at describing everyday life and what it's like. He is able to put words to all those things that most people experience, so there's a kind of familiarity in reading his books. This is why he's so popular. He basically wrote the series of books about his life that each of us wish we could write about our own lives. His life isn't that dissimilar from a normal person's life, and it's not really that noteworthy. You might say that the tragedy of the story makes it noteworthy, but show me the person who hasn't brushed up against tragedy; most of us life with more than one.

>He was defending the concept of nationalism in Norway after the Anders shooting

Sort of. The kind of nationalism he was talking about in that essay was about how Norway is such a close-knit country that when something bad happens it affects a lot of people, and that Anders' actions were selfish in that it hurt so many Norwegians. Of course, Knausgaard never addresses the fact that Anders killed people who were foreigners or who were native Norwegians involved in destroying aspects of Norwegian culture, but then you have to remember who Karl's audience is; viz. probably lots of liberal white people who have the time to read 600 page novels about "living."

If you want to get an idea of what Knausgaard's real feelings on the topic of politics, etc., might be, just look at the passages where he talks about how much he hates Sweden and Swedes. I'd consider that a huge tip-off into postulating what his actual political feelings might be.

his new series based on the seasons that are essentially a bunch of short essays/letters to his unborn daughter are really good, i just finished the first one - "autumn"

>, just look at the passages where he talks about how much he hates Sweden and Swedes
What did he say? I think I read some essay or article or interview he wrote about the swedes, I think I remember him being entirely correct but I'm not sure.

I don't remember very specifically, I think it was in the first book when he spends some time in Sweden and he talks about how the Swedes all just regurgitate the same "safe" yuppie opinions to each other and he talks about how vapid and stupid of a country Sweden is. It's been a couple of years since I've read it so I don't remember it verbatim now. To put it into more trendy parlance, he seemed to take issue with all of the virtue signalling that Swedish people participate in.

He’s quite conservative. One of the best bits is when he takes his child to a singalong at a public library and gets furious when a bald numale sees him as an “equal”.

>Anders killed people who were foreigners or who were native Norwegians involved in destroying aspects of Norwegian culture
holy cow you poltards get more retarded by the hour

He wrote an editorial where he called Sweden ''the land of the cyclops'', saying Swedes suffer from extreme tunnel vision. There's a very narrow spectrum of acceptable opinion, and things which wouldn't be deemed the least controversial in countries otherwise very culturally similar like Denmark or Norway, will raise the ire of Swedes eager to profess themselves as crusaders of *insert topical buzzword here*. They're unable to deal with ambivalence as it conflicts with their manichean world view, and this scares them, and driven by fear they erase any nuance because like cyclops they have no depth perception. That's the gist of it. Also that the cultural establishment in Sweden is fundamentally hostile to literature and that they reflexively label and denounce that which they irrationally fear as ''nazism'', because they can't or won't see the difference between waving your country's flag on its national holiday and wanting to invade Poland.

Needless to say it raised a lot of controversy, at least among the cultural elite. Though I'd say most rational, down to earth people totally agreed with him.

That was because he had Vice interview that everybody on here watched

Ah thanks, almost forgot about that essay. Pretty sure it was posted on here a while back when it came out (what maybe two years ago?). If I remember correctly it was basically a response to what some trollish looking Swede writer/critic had said about Karl's work. I should re-read it, I remember it being pretty decent.

Cry about it.

...

Can someone post the essay?

I thought I had it bookmarked but it doesn't look like it. I don't think it was ever officially published in English (I think the version that I read was probably translated by some random person). Maybe the other user can find it and post it; wouldn't mind reading it again. Too busy to go searching for it right now unfortunately.

>Knausgaard never addresses the fact that Anders killed people who were foreigners or who were native Norwegians involved in destroying aspects of Norwegian culture
Do you live in Norway?
In would say AUF is 98% a completely inconsequential pass-time activity, the rest are hot shots paving way for their political career.
I don't agree with ABB at all, but at least his bombing made sense. The shootings were just some perverse idea of revenge.

Wanted to read his books after reading this article a few years ago.

nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/karl-ove-knausgaard-travels-through-america.html

I enjoy the way he describes things, and liked his analysis of the states.

First and second book are worth reading. You can skip three entirely. Skip 4. If you want to hate him read 5. Wait a year for 6.

>If you want to hate him read 5
why?

i have only read 1-4, and i got really bored of reading about him trying to fuck some girl

Sorry, don't have any full translation of it. But here's a pretty good summation of the critique and google's translation of it.

foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/22/famed-writer-karl-ove-knausgaard-declares-war-on-sweden-land-of-the-cyclops/

translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https://web.archive.org/web/20170216081708/https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/kulturdebatt/karl-ove-knausgards-rasande-attack-pa-sverige/&edit-text=&act=url

I haven't read Knausgaard but an acquaintance of mine who reads him said (to paraphrase)
>"He can be fascinating but I suspect that he's a charlatan. He educates himself by browsing haphazardly in used bookstores - he seems completely unaware of the tradition of the memoir, so you have the sense that you're watching him try to reinvent it by himself"

i wonder what you think of this characterization of his writing.

"tradition of the memoir" what the fuck is that nonsense

ionno, montaigne? de quincey? xenophon? julius caesar? goethe? rousseau?

>"He can be fascinating but I suspect that he's a charlatan."

As in that he's not as literary as he lets on? Maybe, but I'm not sure whether that matters in evaluating his work. He did write other books before the memoirs, that's probably how he got the leverage to get them published and (I'm assuming) advertised in literary circles.

>"he seems completely unaware of the tradition of the memoir, so you have the sense that you're watching him try to reinvent it by himself"

Sure. I think the idea that his books are Proustian was pushed on him by other people. In interviews he says that he was aware of Proust, but I'm not sure that he was familiar with Proust's books in any meaningful way. It's entirely possible that, having published some books before My Struggle (I think they were all novels), he didn't have any inspiration or material for another novel, so maybe someone suggested that he just write about everyday life—his life. He does a fine job at it (explaining ordinary events in the sort of interior dialogue that an individual has while living everyday life), and that's what makes it identifiable to people. It's basically the book we would all write about our own not-extraordinary lives if we were capable of slightly more romantic prose than the average person.

The only other way I could think of him being a 'fake' in any way is that it has to be fairly impossible to remember all events in the manner that he 'recalls' them; e.g. remember what shirt some other kid was wearing on some random day 20 years prior. (The books are marketed as "fiction" however.) I think this is forgivable though, since any time anyone writes a memoir it's essentially "this is more or less how I remember it," he just makes it read more like a novel by (probably) embellishing things.

>Knausgaard never addresses the fact that Anders killed people who were foreigners or who were native Norwegians involved in destroying aspects of Norwegian culture
oh fuck off

Cry about it.

He's a Nazi sympathiser.

Lol. That's enough internet for you for one night young man.

He is. Deny it all you want, and so would he probably.