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).
By Kwame Anthony Appiah (2018)
This is wonderful, just so clear and wholesome in a discussion of a subject – identity – which can of course be pretty fraught.
It belongs to that rare class of writing where the language is so crisp and readable, you barely notice you’re being lead to some really philosophically interesting places. I particularly like his take on meritocracy, which is an idea that exercises me a lot. He does talk quite a lot about himself – but then he’s had such an interesting life and background, I hardly blame him.
The Scramble For Africa by Thomas Pakenham (1990) & The State of Africa by Martin Meredith (2005)
The Scramble For Africa. This is just fascinating – surely one of the strangest few decades in history. Other than the pretty horrific behaviour of the colonists – who, perhaps Brazza excepted, were tremendously low-rent graspers and cheats (as well as plain brutal) – what most strikes me is how shoestring the whole business was. Regions the size of France “claimed” by a few dozen troops, etc. I’ve actually read this before – but the weird format (it’s all chronological, rather than by area) meant I struggled to piece together the whole arc of regions like the Congo. So I only read the central Africa sections in sequence this time, about half the book.
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.
(an affectionate pastiche)
So did I tell you about the time when I was a teenager and me and my friend, Jan Vidar, tried to go to a party in Kristiansand on new year’s eve? His friend, Tom, said he would buy the beer for him, and dropped the bottles off in his car. But Jan Vidar’s brother found it and made him return it and swap it back for the money. Tom winked at us, and later we went and got it back. I had to hide it in the woods outside my house before evening. I was wary of my father, but his mood always changed whenever our grandparents were coming, and he said alright we could go to town until 2 in the morning. They think we’ll be going to a friend’s house, so we’ll need to hitchhike and then take a bus. So I said goodbye to my grandma and started the walk through the snow to Jan Vidar’s house after collecting the beer. The snow had settled on the dark bottles, and the sky was luminous and open. Every time a car comes by, I think it’s my uncle Gunnar, so I have to hide the beer in the ditch and walk on, but it’s not him so I go back and collect it. Past the parquet factory, where all the kids work in the evenings, assembling palettes. It was piecework, and they were country kids, never realised that the tally could be cheated. For a while I was worldly and a curiosity, the local girls used to cycle ten kilometres just to take a look at me, but there was nothing interesting in them to me. Past the frozen waterfall and the ravine where it was never warm even in summer. At the top there was Pal’s house, he was slow on the uptake and we could tease him, his mother was always angry with red eyes. I was rude to her once, and laughed about it with Jan Vidar afterwards, and now she always looks at me with hatred. His house is a mess, broken machinery all over the lawns, why do people want to live like that? I thought, or do they think it’s normal?. His father was always quiet and kind, and would let us in to play anyway.
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.
By Peter Godfrey-Smith (2016)
This really is excellent! Learnt loads on this (pretty fascinating) subject (intelligence and cognition in octopuses and cuttlefish). To my surprise it also includes a short account of the theory of ageing – which I had a chapter of my PhD on. Usually you see the cracks when an author moves onto something you’re very familiar with, but I have to say he pretty much nails it. It actually sent me back to my thesis (for the first time in 8 years) to refresh myself on the background.
Genuine sense of affection and pathos for these wonderful animals. Was quite cut-up at the inevitable death of the short-lived intelligent giant cuttlefish.
Labyrinths Borges (1962), Personal Anthology Borges (1965), Nine Stories by JD Salinger (1953)
More Borges short stories. He was really quality over quantity, there just isn’t that much (published, translated) out there. Ficciones was so good I’ve raided Labyrinths (from the 60s and by a bunch of different translators) and Personal Anthology (there’s a lot of overlap of stories so it’s not really reading three books).
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) and Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe (1974).
A Confederacy of Dunces. This really is an incredible book, even funnier than I remembered it, and a bit sadder too. Ignatius is such an amazing invention … grotesque in every way and a total tool, but somehow heroic. It could be dated given the setting (1960s New Orleans) but holds up remarkably well.
Porterhouse Blue is a bit more dated – but in recompense has some fantastically funny lines, and will be all-too-familiar to anyone who’s spent any time in a Cambridge/Oxford college.
As I said to my friend and pupil Pancetti, as we walked on the Via Corso, Rome is the only place a true artist and human can think clearly. Pancetti, firstly my friend, and only then my pupil. My pupils could only become so after first being my friend. Or rather, my pupils would only accept me as their tutor after they accepted me as their friend. And that would only be possible in Rome, the only place a true artist and human can think clearly. Pancetti smiled and agreed. I can think clearly here, in Rome, on the Via Corso, unlike in Austria, that base land of the petite bourgeois. Petite bourgeois Austria, that land of the self-satisfied yeoman, satisfied in all their base passtimes. Lower Austria is the place where all that is high minded goes to stultify and die. No, I will never leave Rome again, I told Pancetti, I will never go from where I can think clearly as an artist and a human and return to self-satisfied Austia, petite bourgeois Lower Austria. Pancetti only smiled and continued to walk on his perfectly polished loafers, bought only from the most expensive shops in the Via Corso. He is so excellently cultured, the very finest human in the world – a human like him could only exist in Rome, never could have arisen in base Lower Austria, to which I shall never go back. I walked down the Via Corso…
Repeat for three hundred pages, and then you get a new paragraph