Immagine dell'autore.

Karl Ove Knausgård

Autore di La mia lotta (1)

42+ opere 9,710 membri 352 recensioni 28 preferito

Sull'Autore

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian author known for his six autobiographical novels called "My Struggle". His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics Prize and his A Time for Everything was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. My Struggle: Book One was a New Yorker Book of the mostra altro Year and Book Two was listed among the Wall Street Journal's 2013 Books of the Year. In 2014, Book Three was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His new autobiographical quartet is based on the four seasons. Autumn was relased in August 2017. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra meno

Serie

Opere di Karl Ove Knausgård

La mia lotta (1) (2009) 2,817 copie
La mia lotta (2) (2013) 1,306 copie
L'isola dell'infanzia (2014) 972 copie
My Struggle: Book Four (2010) 804 copie
La pioggia deve cadere (2015) 674 copie
in Autunno (2015) 447 copie
My Struggle: Book Six (2011) 446 copie
The Morning Star (2020) 389 copie
A Time for Everything (2004) 383 copie
in Inverno (2015) 250 copie
in Primavera (2016) 235 copie
in Estate (2016) 200 copie
Out of the world (1998) 132 copie
The Wolves of Eternity (2021) 111 copie

Opere correlate

A Scandinavian Christmas: Festive Tales for a Nordic Noël (2021) — Collaboratore — 21 copie
Martin Kellermans Rocky : samlade serier 2008-2013 (2013) — Prefazione, alcune edizioni10 copie
Untitled Horrors (2013) — Autore — 8 copie

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Recensioni

Not sure Knausgaard is entirely ready to claim the mantle of Norway’s premier intellectual. Good on Flaubert ( unsurprisingly) , unconvinced by his meditations on art & existential angst
 
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P1g5purt | 2 altre recensioni | Mar 26, 2024 |
Frequently a struggle to read...
 
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P1g5purt | 111 altre recensioni | Mar 26, 2024 |
This is my 8th Knausgaard tome, and I've commented on previous reviews that somehow his writing bewitches me to the extent that he can make loading a dishwasher spellbinding (which is helpful, as often his writing contains plenty of domestic chores). However, like all good crushes, there comes a point when the shine wears off, when the things that originally made you see stars become the very points that start to grate on you. I fear I've reached that point with Knausgaard.

I don't know what changed for me with this novel compared to his previous, but the fairy dust was missing. Rather than my literary crush looking a bit less handsome close up, I hope it's simply that he missed the mark a bit with this one. Knausgaard's 'My Struggle' series focused on his and his family's day-to-day lives, but there was sparkle about him, a toe-curling honesty that was a bit like how reality TV draws you in despite your best intentions.

The first half of this book focuses on the character Syvert mostly, who has returned to his family home in Norway aimless and jobless after completing his military service. He (eventually) stumbles upon a secret his late father had been hiding, but you've got to grind through 200 pages of utter dullness which borders on depressiveness to get there. Once I was eventually on the hook, after another 200 pages the story changes to Russia and a completely new set of characters, and it was like starting all over again, taking another 200 pages to get into that. Eventually the two would become connected, but I think this would have worked better in an alternating chapter format as it was like starting a new book halfway in. The Russian section had long story digressions bearing little importance to how the stories would connect, with pages upon pages devoted to the character's musings about potential theses for her PhD. Not being remotely scientifically wired, I glazed over heavily after a while of this.

In true Knausgaard style, before the two key character's stories finally intertwine there's a random segue into an excerpt from a minor character's book called 'The Wolves of Eternity' which examines principally the theories of Russian librarian Fyodorovich Fyodorov, who believed in the complete resurrection of the dead - not to an eternal life in heaven but with the dead resuming their previous lives eternally on earth. Reading this, I felt how I did when he went into his massive tangent in Book 6 of My Struggle on Hitler - irritated on the one hand, but yet begrudgingly interested in the topic and admiring of his philosophising (despite it feeling rather tinged with a little self-importance - I have these ideas I want you to know I have, despite how tenuous the link to what you're currently reading).

When finally the two main characters lives intertwine (with a 20 plus year gap from where Syvert's previous story had finished up), it was fairly underwhelming, but by that stage I just wanted to get finished anyway. Often I've breezed through Knausgaard's doorstoppers not wanting them to end, but I felt I worked hard with my attention and interest for a lot of this beast of almost 800 pages.

3 stars - still musing on whether it's me or him. Perhaps I've just grown out of my crush. But here I am still thinking about the book a little. Damn that man...
… (altro)
2 vota
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AlisonY | 3 altre recensioni | Mar 13, 2024 |
"When called a vanity project, you can only admire the man vain enough to make it." So wrote Roger Ebert once about a film I love. It is a judgement that could be similarly applied to Knausgård's recent six volume literary project, challengingly titled 'Min Kamp', that blurs the border between autobiographical fiction and memoir. Having been read and acclaimed, we are told, by half the population of that most literate of nations, Norway, the first three volumes have now appeared in English and created a fair bit of tumult amongst our own nation's tiny literary elite. Proustian and vital, declare its supporters. A pointless and numbing slog, claim its detractors. The aura of attraction is only enhanced by the author claiming he never imagined it would be of interest to anyone much beyond himself; it was just something he had to write. What, then, could have forced its way out of Knausgård to be met with such a reception?

Volume one opens with a several page philosophical and sociological discourse on death and contemporary society's relationship to it. It's interesting, sets the intellectual tone, and has some insights that had not occurred to me:
No less conspicuous than our hiding the corpses is the fact that we always lower them to ground level as fast as possible. A hospital that transports its bodies upward, that sites its cold chambers on the upper floors is practically inconceivable. The dead are stored as close to the ground as possible. And the same principle applies to the agencies that attend them; an insurance company may well have its offices on the eighth floor, but not a funeral parlor. All funeral parlors have their offices as close to street level as possible. Why this should be so is hard to say; one might be tempted to believe that it was based on some ancient convention that originally had a practical purpose, such as a cellar being cold and therefore best suited to storing corpses, and that this principle has been retained in our era of refrigerators and cold-storage rooms, had it not been for the notion that transporting bodies upward in buildings seems contrary to the laws of nature, as though height and death are mutually incompatible. As though we possessed some kind of chthonic instinct, something deep within us that urges us to move death down to the earth whence we came.
This line merges smoothly into a memory of the young Karl Ove at home with his parents, and Part 1 is then mostly occupied with minutely detailed scenes from Karl Ove's adolescence. Part 2 picks up the theme of death again, detailing his reaction to his father's death and the practicalities of attending to the mess that was left behind. As before, the reader gets very minutely observed scenes, down to specific lists of cleaning supplies, or the different shades of color splayed among the cloudscape when Karl Ove looks out of the car window up at the sky at a certain moment.

What is it that Knausgård is attempting to do here? One answer, I think, comes from his wrestling, his "struggle", with this question, from one of many such "plotless" sections of the novel:
Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?
He's not simply writing a memoir, telling the reader Event A happened, followed by Event B and so forth. No, he's trying to recreate the very essence of past moments, such that the reader is not merely reading about a memory, but experiences that very memory, feels those very emotions, knows what he who experienced those moments knows. It's an attempt at something more intimate than memoir or autobiographical fiction.

For me, Knausgård in large part succeeds. This may well be helped by the fact that I, and probably many of its critical supporters, identify with the author in important respects, both demographic - white, male, middle aged, married, parents - and temperamental - introverted, intellectual, sensitive, a bit socially awkward perhaps. We get a passage like this, describing the adolescent Karl Ove's reaction to seeing a girl he liked in the presence of a boy she liked:
What had gone on? Hanne, blond, beautiful, playful, happy, always with a bemused, often also naive, question on her lips, what had she changed into? What was it that I had witnessed? A dark, deep, perhaps also passionate side, was that her? She had responded, it was only a glimpse, but nonetheless. Then, at that moment, I was nobody. I was crushed. I, with all the notes I had sent her, all the discussions I'd had with her, all my simple hopes and childish desires, I was nothing, a shout on the playground, a rock in scree, the hooting of a car horn.
Could I do this to her? Could I have this effect on her?
Could I have this effect on anyone?
No.
But then how can one not, whatever personal background comes into play, feel a tear rising up when reading Knausgård describing the loss of rich and immense meaning that attached itself to all sorts of objects when one was a child:
You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings and Koflach boots. The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child's reality and an adult's, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn't, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.
I hope to find in subsequent volumes if Knausgård finds an answer for himself to this creeping nihilism of adulthood that he identifies. He didn't find it in this volume, complaining that in post-modern, post-Christian Europe,
Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not anymore. Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it.
… (altro)
 
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lelandleslie | 111 altre recensioni | Feb 24, 2024 |

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Statistiche

Opere
42
Opere correlate
5
Utenti
9,710
Popolarità
#2,460
Voto
4.0
Recensioni
352
ISBN
615
Lingue
28
Preferito da
28

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