Saturday, May 30, 2015

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgaard is the Norwegian author of the six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle.

From his 2014 interview with Kyle Buckley:

Do you think of the six volumes of My Struggle as one book? I’ve seen you refer to it as “the novel.”

Karl Ove Knausgaard: For me it is definitely one book, and is written like one long movement from the first to the last sentence.

When I wrote the first 100 pages I thought it was just one novel, and then we made a plan that we should publish it as six. Novels three, four, five, six are structured like independent novels in a way.

There’s been a lot made of the overall effect the books have had on your life. Does it occur to you when everyone talks about how much they know about you, or about how much of you has been exposed, that of course it’s never everything? That there’s still so much more you could have divulged?

Yeah. It’s like my friend—he knows me really well and he knows everything in my life very well, and he says everything that’s happened is much, much worse and much, much better. And it’s like, the book is really about what’s in the middle, that’s the only thing you can ...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue