By Linda Boström Knausgaard (2021)
Saw it in the bookshop and I know I can only survive on Knausgaard blood.
Dreamlike account of the obliteration of Linda’s memories through an extended course of ECT in a mental institution, in a sort of fugue through mental states between unconsciousness, memory, dreaming, and awakening.
Now reading Knausgaard #6. I think I’ve got a problem…
I have continued to enjoy them, but there’s definitely an aspect of comfort reading even in the boringness (not to mention Karl Ove’s amazing failures of judgement that make me feel a lot better about all my decisions).
A Man in Love By Karl Ove Knausgaard (2013)
I’m still really liking this, the mixture between the boring day-to-day and unexpected intensity is if anything even more pronounced and is still doing it for me.
I do feel like I need a bit of break from Karl Ove though – there is one heck of a lot of childminding in this one.
A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009)
I’ve been really blindsided by how strong a reaction I had to A Death in the Family.
There’s a lot of fiction, Nabokov obviously, but also the Borges or Kafka or lots of other stuff, where I can just look at it and go “fair enough, I couldn’t do that, that’s incredible”.
But the Knausgaard is just thoroughgoingly ordinary – pages of unflashy prose from a pretty nice Norwegian man describing his sometimes comfortable, sometimes troubled childhood and his difficult relationship with his father and alcohol in the most straightforward, least romantic way he can. One reviewer described him as a “chatterbox” – the whole book is just digression after digression, all the kids at his school, what dinner tasted like when he was 8 years old. Someone else said “it’s boring, but I can’t stop reading it”.
I have literally been dreaming about the life of Karl Ove for the last week.