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Min kamp #3
My Struggle: Book Three
A family of four--mother, father and two boys--move to the South Coast of Norway to a new house on a newly developed site. It is the early 1970s and the family's trajectory, upwardly mobile: the future seems limitless. In painstaking, sometimes self-lacerating detail, Knausgaard paints a world familiar to anyone who can recall the intensity and novelty of childhood experience, one in which children and adults lead parallel lives that never meet. Perhaps the most Proustian in the series, Book Three gives us Knausgaard's vivid, technicolor recollections of childhood, his emerging self-understanding, and the multilayered nature of time's passing, memory, and existence.
"Of course, I remember nothing from this time. It is completely impossible to identify with the infant my parents photographed; this is in fact so difficult it almost seems wrong to use the word 'I' when referring to it, lying in the baby bath, for instance, its skin unnaturally red, its arms and legs sprawling, and its face distorted in a scream no one remembers the reason for anymore ... Is that creature the same as the one sitting here in Malmö, writing this?"
--from Book Three of My Struggle
"Of course, I remember nothing from this time. It is completely impossible to identify with the infant my parents photographed; this is in fact so difficult it almost seems wrong to use the word 'I' when referring to it, lying in the baby bath, for instance, its skin unnaturally red, its arms and legs sprawling, and its face distorted in a scream no one remembers the reason for anymore ... Is that creature the same as the one sitting here in Malmö, writing this?"
--from Book Three of My Struggle
432 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
About the author
Karl Ove Knausgård
73 books6,356 followersNominated to the 2004 Nordic Council’s Literature Prize & awarded the 2004 Norwegian Critics’ Prize.
Karl Ove Knausgård (b. 1968) made his literary debut in 1998 with the widely acclaimed novel Out of the World, which was a great critical and commercial success and won him, as the first debut novel ever, The Norwegian Critics' Prize. He then went on to write six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle (Min Kamp), which have become a publication phenomenon in his native Norway as well as the world over.
Karl Ove Knausgård (b. 1968) made his literary debut in 1998 with the widely acclaimed novel Out of the World, which was a great critical and commercial success and won him, as the first debut novel ever, The Norwegian Critics' Prize. He then went on to write six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle (Min Kamp), which have become a publication phenomenon in his native Norway as well as the world over.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,085 reviews
October 24, 2015
[from Min kamp 2]
Having now reached the halfway point in this controversial novel, I can't resist the temptation to speculate a little on the subject of what it's actually about. Contrary to what some people think, it is clearly about something: it's not a blog, or 3500 pages of free association. There's a definite structure, even if it is oddly difficult to say just what that structure is.
[to Min kamp 4]
Having now reached the halfway point in this controversial novel, I can't resist the temptation to speculate a little on the subject of what it's actually about. Contrary to what some people think, it is clearly about something: it's not a blog, or 3500 pages of free association. There's a definite structure, even if it is oddly difficult to say just what that structure is.
[to Min kamp 4]
September 29, 2014
I am grateful that I mistrust my own opinions. Even with the first two volumes of My Struggle under my belt, I would have quickly abandoned volume three if I trusted my first impressions. Not that three is fundamentally different than one and two, but Knausgaard’s prose in these books is simply like nothing else I read, and as it had been a while since I read him I reacted too quickly to his difference without allowing my reading self to settle into it. His prose can read as flat and uninspired, and can seem boring and pointless and generic, and does go on and on, none of which typically inspires me to continue… but Knausgaard is simply and fundamentally different. I do not yet know exactly how he is different, nor do I know if I want to know – directly experiencing the uncanny hypnotic quality of his prose is enough for me.
This volume covers his childhood from roughly age 6 to age 14 or so. His childhood was like almost anyone’s childhood, with only a few experiences falling outside what I would consider the norm. I never played shitting games with my friends, for instance, nor did other current friends I’ve asked. I also never got my dick caught in a coke bottle where it got bitten by a beetle. But the obsessions with girls, the fear of the father, the untamed woodsy play, the feeling of the bedroom as haven, the awkwardness, the forced groping of girls, the obsessive excitement over new sneakers, etc. all were immediately translated into memories of my own childhood. And that is one reason he is so powerful – while writing about deeply personal experiences, his prose maintains a universal (generic?) quality that instead of drawing the reader deeper and deeper into Knausgaard’s world draws the reader deeper and deeper into his or her own world. There is a freedom here for the reader, and an exhilaration, as buried worlds within the memory resurface and he or she floats along with the prose about someone else’s life, while reliving his or her own.
This experience was particularly acute in this volume as nearly all of it was uninterrupted memory recall, relayed as if present, with very little adult commentary. I could feel these memories opening up to Knausgaard as he wrote, as the very writing uncovered more and more. The experience was one of reading memory direct, as a present experience unfolding as it occurred. Without even apparently trying to, Knausgaard created the closest thing to an experience of childhood from the inside that an adult can hope to experience. And this in turn, while being tremendously enjoyable, is also very useful to adults with young children as it’s a reminder how sensitive and perceptive children can be, and how even the most throwaway and generic experiences (from an adult perspective) are intensely significant to children as they live them for the first time.
This volume covers his childhood from roughly age 6 to age 14 or so. His childhood was like almost anyone’s childhood, with only a few experiences falling outside what I would consider the norm. I never played shitting games with my friends, for instance, nor did other current friends I’ve asked. I also never got my dick caught in a coke bottle where it got bitten by a beetle. But the obsessions with girls, the fear of the father, the untamed woodsy play, the feeling of the bedroom as haven, the awkwardness, the forced groping of girls, the obsessive excitement over new sneakers, etc. all were immediately translated into memories of my own childhood. And that is one reason he is so powerful – while writing about deeply personal experiences, his prose maintains a universal (generic?) quality that instead of drawing the reader deeper and deeper into Knausgaard’s world draws the reader deeper and deeper into his or her own world. There is a freedom here for the reader, and an exhilaration, as buried worlds within the memory resurface and he or she floats along with the prose about someone else’s life, while reliving his or her own.
This experience was particularly acute in this volume as nearly all of it was uninterrupted memory recall, relayed as if present, with very little adult commentary. I could feel these memories opening up to Knausgaard as he wrote, as the very writing uncovered more and more. The experience was one of reading memory direct, as a present experience unfolding as it occurred. Without even apparently trying to, Knausgaard created the closest thing to an experience of childhood from the inside that an adult can hope to experience. And this in turn, while being tremendously enjoyable, is also very useful to adults with young children as it’s a reminder how sensitive and perceptive children can be, and how even the most throwaway and generic experiences (from an adult perspective) are intensely significant to children as they live them for the first time.
June 3, 2019
This is a far more linear experience (there are only two contemporary interjections) than the first two volumes, and the structure is more conventional. This, I think, is because we are dealing here nearly exclusively with early childhood, and there is a great amount of generalization associated with that time. The feeling of that age is echoed in the writing, which takes on a different tenor here (abrupt sentences, heightened sensory description). K.O.K.'s father is as menacing as any father in literature, and the absence of the mother in the text is turned on its head about halfway through.
The best moments of all are the ones that anticipate what we have already read. The unforgettable post-alcoholism sequence in the grandmother's house in volume 1 returns vividly here when we see her house in perfect order and smelling wonderful. It will be fascinating to go back and read all of these again.
I interviewed Knausgaard for Publisher's Weekly last year - one thing that he said that didn't make it into the piece is that the landscapes here are the same as in his great novel, A TIME FOR EVERYTHING. This is because there is something archetypal, biblical, about early childhood. Something to keep in mind, if the universality of this volume bothers you.
Oddly enough, I think the book has almost as much in common with A Time For Everything. This will be essay fodder.
It is my least favorite of the 3 volumes so far, but it still is wonderful. If I had read it on its own it would have been a strong 4 star rating, but as part of a whole, it's remarkable.
The best moments of all are the ones that anticipate what we have already read. The unforgettable post-alcoholism sequence in the grandmother's house in volume 1 returns vividly here when we see her house in perfect order and smelling wonderful. It will be fascinating to go back and read all of these again.
I interviewed Knausgaard for Publisher's Weekly last year - one thing that he said that didn't make it into the piece is that the landscapes here are the same as in his great novel, A TIME FOR EVERYTHING. This is because there is something archetypal, biblical, about early childhood. Something to keep in mind, if the universality of this volume bothers you.
Oddly enough, I think the book has almost as much in common with A Time For Everything. This will be essay fodder.
It is my least favorite of the 3 volumes so far, but it still is wonderful. If I had read it on its own it would have been a strong 4 star rating, but as part of a whole, it's remarkable.
April 28, 2016
Move over robins, tulips, pastels, and jelly beans, the appearance of a fresh volume of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard now marks the coming of spring and will continue do so in 2015, 2016, and 2017 as the final three books in the series appear in English in the United States, translated from the Norwegian by Donald Bartlett, published by Archipelago Books in signature squarish hard covers. Quick recap: My Struggle is a six-volume literary autobiography. Comparisons to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—thanks to size and spirit—are inexact and inevitable. On a sentence level, My Struggle is easier reading than the Search. Scene-wise, the former includes no interminable stretches (i.e., hundreds of consecutive pages) in which haute bourgeois folks, gently derided by the narrator, chat about the Dreyfus Affair. There are similarities, sure: Marcel is a tad fey and Karl Ove is called out for being a bit of a nancy boy (a “jessie” in Norwegian slang); both narrators tend to wax ecstatically about unexpected encounters with the sublime (the “little phrase” in Vinteuil’s violin sonata in Swann’s Way; Roxy Music’s “More Than This” in Book Three); and there’s the commonality of fulfilled ambition on the part of both writers to produce elevated literary art by tracing in text their wandering paths en route to life’s core. Proust’s highest highs (for me, in Sodom and Gomorrah, the central pages describing Marcel’s Grandmother’s death and Marcel’s first sight of an airplane) may be higher than those in My Struggle, but overall, as a child of the 1970s and 1980s, I find myself relating more to Karl Ove than to Marcel.
My Struggle: Book One began with the narrator/author’s current state as a father of a few kids, backtracked to his own childhood, spent much time dramatizing a postadolescent search for alcohol on New Year’s Eve, focused a bit on the author’s terrible teenage rock band, before committing to a heartbreaking, detailed description of cleaning up the literal and figurative mess after his alcoholic father’s death. Last spring for the Philadelphia Review of Books I contributed around 4,000 words about My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love. It’s more about the quotidian details of raising a family while trying to write (specifically, it covers the time the author wrote A Time for Everything, an extraordinary retelling of the Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah stories and others, but set in Norway, focused on the interaction between humans and angels on Earth, a novel that wonderfully complements Book Two since both books share details and scenes heavily fictionalized in one yet not at all in the other). Book Two offers some shocking scenes and plentiful straightforward insight into living, writing, and art. More than Book One, which seemed to wobble a bit through its first half until it detailed the father’s dissolution and death, Book Two seems to me an absolute masterpiece. The current Book Three, “Boyhood,” is the prequel to Book One, and it too is masterly, albeit in a quieter way than Book Two.
The first two volumes begin with description of life as a parent of young children before diving into the waters of the past, which in Knausgaard’s hands are clear and refreshingly chilly. Despite often moving associatively instead of linearly, things never get murky. The point of view is always solid. We’re situated in a scene or an image that’s explored and developed and then we move on, often crossing dozens of years in a centimeter-sized space break. Book Three maintains this steady episodic associative structure. It’s all over the place at the pace of youth. But not once does the narrator discuss his wife or three children or his writing career. This is 99% immersion in the activities of daily living of a sensitive kid growing up in the ‘70s, a mama’s boy who lives under the shadow of a father who’s always grabbing young Karl Ove by the ear or the arm and punishing him for the slightest thing. We know this father from the first book. We’ve seen his sons clean up his mess. But now the father is a lean handsome bearded teacher at the high school; he’s about thirty years old and drives fast; he’s involved in local politics, and he’s a footie fan who forces his youngest son to watch with him and his older brother Yngve — and punishes Karl Ove for refusing to consume the ritual soccer-watching treats. The alcoholism that will do the father in is still on the horizon, but mostly he’s a dreadful presence in Book Three who never fails to trigger Karl Ove’s tears.
If I had a digital copy of Book Three I’d search for and count the appearance of the words “cry” or “tears” since it seems that every few pages he’s crying again. That’s the number one lingering image of Book Three: at times it felt like an erotic novel in which climaxes are replaced by tears. They come at the least insult to his fragile yet estimable conception of self. Previous volumes I’ve described as flinty, but youth is fluid, conceptions of self, friendships, the emerging ego, physicality, and desire are fluid, and more often than not, this fluidity emerges from our narrator’s eyes.
The kids call him a “Jessie.” A femme boy. He must be a cute kid since the preadolescent lasses he describes as objectively beautiful are attracted to him, and he takes an interest in clothes because he realizes doing so can help him talk to girls. But his primary interests are dreaming about girls, playing soccer, listening to music, riding bikes, setting fires, swimming, skiing, reading as much as he can (I loved the dense lists of what he read as a child)—the unremarkable activities and attractions of a young boy. Like a magic trick that astounds thanks to a lack of gimmicks and props, sincere detailed divulgence makes these mundanities compelling. Embarrassment lurks around every corner. Arrogance and humility are in constant conflict. The waterworks are always ready to flow. And all the while there’s the slightest awareness that the adult author is gathering early evidence of his mature conceptions of self, family, society, and art.
One of the few times in the novel the narrator comes up out of the past and emerges into the present, he says:
I was so frightened of [my father] that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close.
His footsteps on the stairs – was he coming to see me?
The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth. The lips that parted involuntarily. And then his voice.
Sitting here now, hearing it in my inner ear, I almost start crying.
His fury struck like a wave, it washed through the rooms, lashed at me, lashed and lashed and lashed at me, and then it retreated. Then it could be quiet for several weeks. However, it wasn’t quiet, for it could just as easily come in two minutes as two days. There was no warning. Suddenly, there he was, furious.
It would be unfair to characterize this as the memoir of a man in his 40s looking back at his traumatized youth. Paternal terror is part of it, sure, but more so it’s a dramatized compendium of small memories, the sensations of youth, that can’t help but resonate with most readers, since—regardless of sex, nationality, or age—all readers were once children who at one point, for example, heard their parents piss. Knausgaard compares his mother’s hissing urination with his father’s strong stream. He describes having to wipe the floor after he pees. He talks about shitting in the woods, standing up and letting one go and then analyzing it. He has some money to buy some candy, is super-psyched for his Lox and Nox, but on the way home two older girls take his candy and he cries forever. He needs a cap for swimming class and the one his mother hands him is adorned with a little plastic flower. He and friends throw large stones off overpasses at passing cars. He votes for himself during a classroom election. A little older, essentially serving as the climax in terms of its placement about two-thirds of the way through Book Three, he works his penis into a bottle found in the woods and feels like something is slicing into him. Turns out it’s a black beetle with huge pincers!
I don’t remember voting for myself in a classroom election, I certainly never forced my penis into a bottle, and I didn’t have a domineering father, but for the most part I found myself thinking about relatability as I read. I don’t love the word all that much—finding a novel “relatable” seems like the critical hallmark of weak students in undergrad English Lit classes. But Knausgaard’s extremely relatable material evoked my memories to the point of it seeming like pulling the proverbial rabbit from the hat on my head. Karl Ove and a friend start a band they call Blood Clot—and a rush of memories returns about a “band” I started in third grade called Blue Blood in which I played “drums” (Chock Full of Nuts coffee cans, their openings covered in crayon-scrawled construction paper secured by rubber bands, against which I’d improvise idiosyncratic polyrhythms with Magic Markers). Most scenes and details of Book Three serve as Proustian madeleines for the reader. By so effectively immersing himself and the reader in a nearly plotless progression of text that’s nevertheless compelling, he evokes his childhood in a way that evokes that of readers’ too. It’s like Knausgaard gets out of the way of retelling his childhood story, allowing readers room to remember their own stories. That’s a generous and difficult thing to do.
Who I am to them I have no idea, probably a vague memory of someone they once knew in their childhood years, for they have done so much to one another in their lives since then, so much has happened and with such impact that the small incidents that took place in their childhoods have no more gravity than the dust stirred up by a passing car, or the seeds of a withering dandelion dispersed by the breath of a small mouth. And, oh, wasn’t the latter a fine image, of how event after event is dispersed in the air above the little meadow of one’s own history, only to fall between the blades of grass and vanish?
Knausgaard remembers this period of his life because his family moved as he entered the Norwegian equivalent of high school. The kids he grew up with continued to affect each other through all the incidents of their teenage years and beyond. But Karl Ove’s boyhood ends there. It’s contained in time. And it’s contained in Book Three, event after event dispersed in the clean, crisp air of these pages.
The official publication date isn’t until late May, a few weeks from summer. By then, after what’s been one of the coldest, snowiest winters on record in Philadelphia, let’s hope the preadolescent days of the year bring atmospheric refreshment on par with the sweetness and storms of Knausgaard’s childhood.
(If interested, here are my reviews of Books One, Two, Four, and Five.)
My Struggle: Book One began with the narrator/author’s current state as a father of a few kids, backtracked to his own childhood, spent much time dramatizing a postadolescent search for alcohol on New Year’s Eve, focused a bit on the author’s terrible teenage rock band, before committing to a heartbreaking, detailed description of cleaning up the literal and figurative mess after his alcoholic father’s death. Last spring for the Philadelphia Review of Books I contributed around 4,000 words about My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love. It’s more about the quotidian details of raising a family while trying to write (specifically, it covers the time the author wrote A Time for Everything, an extraordinary retelling of the Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah stories and others, but set in Norway, focused on the interaction between humans and angels on Earth, a novel that wonderfully complements Book Two since both books share details and scenes heavily fictionalized in one yet not at all in the other). Book Two offers some shocking scenes and plentiful straightforward insight into living, writing, and art. More than Book One, which seemed to wobble a bit through its first half until it detailed the father’s dissolution and death, Book Two seems to me an absolute masterpiece. The current Book Three, “Boyhood,” is the prequel to Book One, and it too is masterly, albeit in a quieter way than Book Two.
The first two volumes begin with description of life as a parent of young children before diving into the waters of the past, which in Knausgaard’s hands are clear and refreshingly chilly. Despite often moving associatively instead of linearly, things never get murky. The point of view is always solid. We’re situated in a scene or an image that’s explored and developed and then we move on, often crossing dozens of years in a centimeter-sized space break. Book Three maintains this steady episodic associative structure. It’s all over the place at the pace of youth. But not once does the narrator discuss his wife or three children or his writing career. This is 99% immersion in the activities of daily living of a sensitive kid growing up in the ‘70s, a mama’s boy who lives under the shadow of a father who’s always grabbing young Karl Ove by the ear or the arm and punishing him for the slightest thing. We know this father from the first book. We’ve seen his sons clean up his mess. But now the father is a lean handsome bearded teacher at the high school; he’s about thirty years old and drives fast; he’s involved in local politics, and he’s a footie fan who forces his youngest son to watch with him and his older brother Yngve — and punishes Karl Ove for refusing to consume the ritual soccer-watching treats. The alcoholism that will do the father in is still on the horizon, but mostly he’s a dreadful presence in Book Three who never fails to trigger Karl Ove’s tears.
If I had a digital copy of Book Three I’d search for and count the appearance of the words “cry” or “tears” since it seems that every few pages he’s crying again. That’s the number one lingering image of Book Three: at times it felt like an erotic novel in which climaxes are replaced by tears. They come at the least insult to his fragile yet estimable conception of self. Previous volumes I’ve described as flinty, but youth is fluid, conceptions of self, friendships, the emerging ego, physicality, and desire are fluid, and more often than not, this fluidity emerges from our narrator’s eyes.
The kids call him a “Jessie.” A femme boy. He must be a cute kid since the preadolescent lasses he describes as objectively beautiful are attracted to him, and he takes an interest in clothes because he realizes doing so can help him talk to girls. But his primary interests are dreaming about girls, playing soccer, listening to music, riding bikes, setting fires, swimming, skiing, reading as much as he can (I loved the dense lists of what he read as a child)—the unremarkable activities and attractions of a young boy. Like a magic trick that astounds thanks to a lack of gimmicks and props, sincere detailed divulgence makes these mundanities compelling. Embarrassment lurks around every corner. Arrogance and humility are in constant conflict. The waterworks are always ready to flow. And all the while there’s the slightest awareness that the adult author is gathering early evidence of his mature conceptions of self, family, society, and art.
One of the few times in the novel the narrator comes up out of the past and emerges into the present, he says:
I was so frightened of [my father] that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close.
His footsteps on the stairs – was he coming to see me?
The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth. The lips that parted involuntarily. And then his voice.
Sitting here now, hearing it in my inner ear, I almost start crying.
His fury struck like a wave, it washed through the rooms, lashed at me, lashed and lashed and lashed at me, and then it retreated. Then it could be quiet for several weeks. However, it wasn’t quiet, for it could just as easily come in two minutes as two days. There was no warning. Suddenly, there he was, furious.
It would be unfair to characterize this as the memoir of a man in his 40s looking back at his traumatized youth. Paternal terror is part of it, sure, but more so it’s a dramatized compendium of small memories, the sensations of youth, that can’t help but resonate with most readers, since—regardless of sex, nationality, or age—all readers were once children who at one point, for example, heard their parents piss. Knausgaard compares his mother’s hissing urination with his father’s strong stream. He describes having to wipe the floor after he pees. He talks about shitting in the woods, standing up and letting one go and then analyzing it. He has some money to buy some candy, is super-psyched for his Lox and Nox, but on the way home two older girls take his candy and he cries forever. He needs a cap for swimming class and the one his mother hands him is adorned with a little plastic flower. He and friends throw large stones off overpasses at passing cars. He votes for himself during a classroom election. A little older, essentially serving as the climax in terms of its placement about two-thirds of the way through Book Three, he works his penis into a bottle found in the woods and feels like something is slicing into him. Turns out it’s a black beetle with huge pincers!
I don’t remember voting for myself in a classroom election, I certainly never forced my penis into a bottle, and I didn’t have a domineering father, but for the most part I found myself thinking about relatability as I read. I don’t love the word all that much—finding a novel “relatable” seems like the critical hallmark of weak students in undergrad English Lit classes. But Knausgaard’s extremely relatable material evoked my memories to the point of it seeming like pulling the proverbial rabbit from the hat on my head. Karl Ove and a friend start a band they call Blood Clot—and a rush of memories returns about a “band” I started in third grade called Blue Blood in which I played “drums” (Chock Full of Nuts coffee cans, their openings covered in crayon-scrawled construction paper secured by rubber bands, against which I’d improvise idiosyncratic polyrhythms with Magic Markers). Most scenes and details of Book Three serve as Proustian madeleines for the reader. By so effectively immersing himself and the reader in a nearly plotless progression of text that’s nevertheless compelling, he evokes his childhood in a way that evokes that of readers’ too. It’s like Knausgaard gets out of the way of retelling his childhood story, allowing readers room to remember their own stories. That’s a generous and difficult thing to do.
Who I am to them I have no idea, probably a vague memory of someone they once knew in their childhood years, for they have done so much to one another in their lives since then, so much has happened and with such impact that the small incidents that took place in their childhoods have no more gravity than the dust stirred up by a passing car, or the seeds of a withering dandelion dispersed by the breath of a small mouth. And, oh, wasn’t the latter a fine image, of how event after event is dispersed in the air above the little meadow of one’s own history, only to fall between the blades of grass and vanish?
Knausgaard remembers this period of his life because his family moved as he entered the Norwegian equivalent of high school. The kids he grew up with continued to affect each other through all the incidents of their teenage years and beyond. But Karl Ove’s boyhood ends there. It’s contained in time. And it’s contained in Book Three, event after event dispersed in the clean, crisp air of these pages.
The official publication date isn’t until late May, a few weeks from summer. By then, after what’s been one of the coldest, snowiest winters on record in Philadelphia, let’s hope the preadolescent days of the year bring atmospheric refreshment on par with the sweetness and storms of Knausgaard’s childhood.
(If interested, here are my reviews of Books One, Two, Four, and Five.)
February 1, 2020
In the 3rd installment of his 6 Volume autobiographical romain fleuve, Karl Ove Knausgård shifts back in time to his grade school years in an interesting read, however less gut-wrenching than the first two books. The narration here is more linear (although with significant forward leaps which were occasionally disconcerting) than the other books, but still uses the typical KOK maniacally descriptive writing style. This particular tome has a bit of a more scatological focus which is sometimes interesting, but I could have passed on all the feces in the forest episodes.
Early in the book, as he tries to block the sound of his mother urinating in the bathroom next to his room, young Karl Ove sees a cat chasing a mouse outside (page 52). I particularly appreciated how he connected sounds of the banality of using the toilet with the actions of the cat and mouse.
"The cat turned sharply and stared at the mouse, which still hadn't moved. A jet of water from the tap splashed against the porcelain sink. The cat jumped down from the wall, strolled over to the road, and lay down like a small lion. Just as Mom pressed the handle and opened the door, a twitch went through the mouse, as though the sound had released an impulse in it, and hte next moment it set off on a desperate flight from the cat, which had obviously reckoned with this eventuality as it required no more than a fraction of a second to switch from resting to hunting. But this time it was too late. A sheet of white Eternit cladding left lying in the lawn was the mouse's salvation as it squeezed itself underneath a second before the cat arrived.
I felt that most of the time I could relate to KOK's trials and tribulations growing up. The swimming cap incident (p. 122-126) was highly realistic and reminded me a bit of passages from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which made the reading meaningful. One technique he seemed to have borrowed from Joyce was occasionally using a more staccato language for the younger Karl Ove even if the adult writer Karl Ove's tone is still dominant.
What is most remarkable about the book is the insight it provides to readers on Vol 1 into the relationship between Karl Ove and his family, but particularly with his violent and erratic father including the abusive behavior and domestic terror he instilled (his older brother Yngve leaves the family at 18 abruptly to fend for himself, fed up with the abuse), the origins of his alcoholism, and the impact that this has on the sensitive psychology of KOK. Of particular note, is the passage around pages 137-144 about the pristine state of Grandma's house knowing how it winds up two decades later immediately following Dad's suicide-by-drinking. The passage as they drive home resonated with me:
"I loved traveling in a car at night, with the dashboard lit, the muted voices coming from the front seats, the gleam of street lamps as we passed beneath washing over us like breakers or waves of light, the long, completely dark stretches that cropped up intermittently, where all you saw, all that existed, was the tarmac lit up by the headlights and the countryside they illuminated at the bends. Sudden treetops, sudden crags, sudden sea inlets. It was always a particular pleasure to arrive at the house in the night as well, to hear footsteps on the gravel and the sharp slam of the car doors and the rattle of keys, to see the light in the hall come on, revealing the presence of all the familiar objects. The shoes with the grommet as eyes and the tongue as a forehead, the chilly gaze from the white two-holed electric sockets above the baseboard, the hat stand in the corner with its back turned." (p. 144).
I think it is seemingly actionless passages like this where he takes description to a poetic extreme that make his a truly great writer.
I alluded to the passage of time being somewhat uncomfortable above. Perhaps, it is captured a bit in this phrase: "Childhood sometimes consisted of an infinity of such moments, all equally compact."(p. 254). This reminded me about how he described angels observing passing time in A Time for Everything. Further on: "We were in midchildhood and time was suspended there. That is, the moments raced along at breakneck speed while the days that contained them passed along almost unnoticed. (p. 255). That is precisely how I felt growing up in terms of observing the time pass.
One last quote that I enjoyed that might inspire me to swim again as it perfectly captures a particular aspect of that sport that I find both annoying and interesting:
"I also liked the feeling of being encliused inside my self when I put on my swimming cap and goggles, not least during competitions, when I had a whole lane of my own waiting for me beneath the starting blocks, but often the thoughts waiting there, in swimming's atronaut-like loneliness, became chaotic and sometimes almost panicked...And I could see that the swimmers in the adjacent lanes were already way ahead, which I was told by the voice inside me intent on winning, and I started a discussion with it. But even though this inner dialog, which carried on calmly while I was swimming and fighting for all I was worth, and therefore lent an almost panic-stricken aura, a bit like a military HQ deep in an underground bunker with officers speaking in controlled tones while the battles raged overhead..." (p. 303) I could really relate to that, personally.
So, why only 4 stars? Well, this volume was still less engaging and more uneven writing-wise than the first two while still being intriguing. On to Vol 4!
Fino's KOK Reviews:
Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Book 4
Book 5
Book 6
A Time For Everything
Early in the book, as he tries to block the sound of his mother urinating in the bathroom next to his room, young Karl Ove sees a cat chasing a mouse outside (page 52). I particularly appreciated how he connected sounds of the banality of using the toilet with the actions of the cat and mouse.
"The cat turned sharply and stared at the mouse, which still hadn't moved. A jet of water from the tap splashed against the porcelain sink. The cat jumped down from the wall, strolled over to the road, and lay down like a small lion. Just as Mom pressed the handle and opened the door, a twitch went through the mouse, as though the sound had released an impulse in it, and hte next moment it set off on a desperate flight from the cat, which had obviously reckoned with this eventuality as it required no more than a fraction of a second to switch from resting to hunting. But this time it was too late. A sheet of white Eternit cladding left lying in the lawn was the mouse's salvation as it squeezed itself underneath a second before the cat arrived.
I felt that most of the time I could relate to KOK's trials and tribulations growing up. The swimming cap incident (p. 122-126) was highly realistic and reminded me a bit of passages from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which made the reading meaningful. One technique he seemed to have borrowed from Joyce was occasionally using a more staccato language for the younger Karl Ove even if the adult writer Karl Ove's tone is still dominant.
What is most remarkable about the book is the insight it provides to readers on Vol 1 into the relationship between Karl Ove and his family, but particularly with his violent and erratic father including the abusive behavior and domestic terror he instilled (his older brother Yngve leaves the family at 18 abruptly to fend for himself, fed up with the abuse), the origins of his alcoholism, and the impact that this has on the sensitive psychology of KOK. Of particular note, is the passage around pages 137-144 about the pristine state of Grandma's house knowing how it winds up two decades later immediately following Dad's suicide-by-drinking. The passage as they drive home resonated with me:
"I loved traveling in a car at night, with the dashboard lit, the muted voices coming from the front seats, the gleam of street lamps as we passed beneath washing over us like breakers or waves of light, the long, completely dark stretches that cropped up intermittently, where all you saw, all that existed, was the tarmac lit up by the headlights and the countryside they illuminated at the bends. Sudden treetops, sudden crags, sudden sea inlets. It was always a particular pleasure to arrive at the house in the night as well, to hear footsteps on the gravel and the sharp slam of the car doors and the rattle of keys, to see the light in the hall come on, revealing the presence of all the familiar objects. The shoes with the grommet as eyes and the tongue as a forehead, the chilly gaze from the white two-holed electric sockets above the baseboard, the hat stand in the corner with its back turned." (p. 144).
I think it is seemingly actionless passages like this where he takes description to a poetic extreme that make his a truly great writer.
I alluded to the passage of time being somewhat uncomfortable above. Perhaps, it is captured a bit in this phrase: "Childhood sometimes consisted of an infinity of such moments, all equally compact."(p. 254). This reminded me about how he described angels observing passing time in A Time for Everything. Further on: "We were in midchildhood and time was suspended there. That is, the moments raced along at breakneck speed while the days that contained them passed along almost unnoticed. (p. 255). That is precisely how I felt growing up in terms of observing the time pass.
One last quote that I enjoyed that might inspire me to swim again as it perfectly captures a particular aspect of that sport that I find both annoying and interesting:
"I also liked the feeling of being encliused inside my self when I put on my swimming cap and goggles, not least during competitions, when I had a whole lane of my own waiting for me beneath the starting blocks, but often the thoughts waiting there, in swimming's atronaut-like loneliness, became chaotic and sometimes almost panicked...And I could see that the swimmers in the adjacent lanes were already way ahead, which I was told by the voice inside me intent on winning, and I started a discussion with it. But even though this inner dialog, which carried on calmly while I was swimming and fighting for all I was worth, and therefore lent an almost panic-stricken aura, a bit like a military HQ deep in an underground bunker with officers speaking in controlled tones while the battles raged overhead..." (p. 303) I could really relate to that, personally.
So, why only 4 stars? Well, this volume was still less engaging and more uneven writing-wise than the first two while still being intriguing. On to Vol 4!
Fino's KOK Reviews:
Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Book 4
Book 5
Book 6
A Time For Everything
November 4, 2021
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Iz svega što sam pročitao naučio sam da treba biti hrabar, da je hrabrost možda najveća od svega, da treba biti iskren i pošten u svemu što radite, i da se nikad ne smije izdati druge. Osim toga, nikad se ne treba predati, nikad odustati, jer ako ste ustrajni, uspravni, iskreni i pošteni, ma koliko zbog toga bili usamljeni i ma koliko zbog toga ostali sami, na kraju ćete biti nagrađeni.
Skoro da sam u potpunosti zaboravio svoje mladalačko doba. Trećom knjigom mi je Uve osvijetlio kockice sjećanja na djetinjstvo, i podsjetio me na sve te banalnosti i ludorije koje ono sa sobom nosi. Bez obzira na geografski položaj djetinjstvo je monolitno i njega manje-više prati plač, dreka, trčanje tamo-amo, nagli izlivi radosti i slično. U suštini moje djetinjstvo kao da se slilo u njegovo, odosno njegovo u moje. Uve je u stanju da vrlo dobro iskoristi intonaciju govora njegovih roditelja, naročito oca, koji će vjerovatno u svakom čitaocu buditi određenu jezu i napetost, kao i samu znatiželju u svakoj mogućnosti kada se on pojavi. Ako se pitate zašto Uve ima tako neblagonaklon stav prema ocu (prethodne dvije knjige) onda će vam ovaj treći tom to u potpunosti razjasniti. Uve nas ne uvodi duboko u unutrašnjost jedne ličnosti, već mahom umnožava spoljnu manifestaciju likova čije se posljedice prostiru sve dalje i dalje i stvaraju nove. Ono što je olakšavajuće kada je u pitajnu treći tom jeste da je pisan linearno, nema previše Uveovih opsesivnih digresija i čudnih skokova.
Iz svega što sam pročitao naučio sam da treba biti hrabar, da je hrabrost možda najveća od svega, da treba biti iskren i pošten u svemu što radite, i da se nikad ne smije izdati druge. Osim toga, nikad se ne treba predati, nikad odustati, jer ako ste ustrajni, uspravni, iskreni i pošteni, ma koliko zbog toga bili usamljeni i ma koliko zbog toga ostali sami, na kraju ćete biti nagrađeni.
Skoro da sam u potpunosti zaboravio svoje mladalačko doba. Trećom knjigom mi je Uve osvijetlio kockice sjećanja na djetinjstvo, i podsjetio me na sve te banalnosti i ludorije koje ono sa sobom nosi. Bez obzira na geografski položaj djetinjstvo je monolitno i njega manje-više prati plač, dreka, trčanje tamo-amo, nagli izlivi radosti i slično. U suštini moje djetinjstvo kao da se slilo u njegovo, odosno njegovo u moje. Uve je u stanju da vrlo dobro iskoristi intonaciju govora njegovih roditelja, naročito oca, koji će vjerovatno u svakom čitaocu buditi određenu jezu i napetost, kao i samu znatiželju u svakoj mogućnosti kada se on pojavi. Ako se pitate zašto Uve ima tako neblagonaklon stav prema ocu (prethodne dvije knjige) onda će vam ovaj treći tom to u potpunosti razjasniti. Uve nas ne uvodi duboko u unutrašnjost jedne ličnosti, već mahom umnožava spoljnu manifestaciju likova čije se posljedice prostiru sve dalje i dalje i stvaraju nove. Ono što je olakšavajuće kada je u pitajnu treći tom jeste da je pisan linearno, nema previše Uveovih opsesivnih digresija i čudnih skokova.
December 9, 2015
"Time never goes as fast as in your childhood; an hour is never as short as it was then. Everything is open, you run here, you run there, do one thing, then another, and suddenly the sun has gone down and you find yourself standing in the twilight with time like a barrier that has suddenly gone down in front of you:"
-- Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book Three: Boyhood Island
There is something mundane, yet otherworldly about Knausgård's third book. It exists on the island of Tromøy, a large island (relatively) on the South Eastern tip of Norway. His hard-ass father teaches and his distracted mother works in a sanitarium. He is surrounded by friends, family, an older brother, and anxiety and curiosity. In many ways it is an honest look at middle childhood; those awkward years that start just before puberty and end a couple years after puberty. The magic of Knausgård's quasi-fictional memoir is his brutal openness. He isn't afraid to write down his most awkward sexual experiences as a boy or young man. He spends a lot of time discussing his weaknesses and his idiosyncrasies. However, while Knausgård himself might be the primary character and narrator, he is haunted by the shadow of his father. You can see how the fear and anxiety created by this enormous father figure impacts both Karl Ove and his brother. His father is both a storm that blows his boys or a maelström that constantly threatens to suck them in. I think this characterization fits, because so many times as the boys sat in the house alone waiting for their father to arrive the tension felt like a ship anticipating a storm. Darkness would descend and a hard madness would hit and then, just as fast, disappear. The prose was beautiful, and in parts, seemed heavy enough to bleed the heavy, dark prose straight through the thick pages of the archipelago book.
-- Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book Three: Boyhood Island
There is something mundane, yet otherworldly about Knausgård's third book. It exists on the island of Tromøy, a large island (relatively) on the South Eastern tip of Norway. His hard-ass father teaches and his distracted mother works in a sanitarium. He is surrounded by friends, family, an older brother, and anxiety and curiosity. In many ways it is an honest look at middle childhood; those awkward years that start just before puberty and end a couple years after puberty. The magic of Knausgård's quasi-fictional memoir is his brutal openness. He isn't afraid to write down his most awkward sexual experiences as a boy or young man. He spends a lot of time discussing his weaknesses and his idiosyncrasies. However, while Knausgård himself might be the primary character and narrator, he is haunted by the shadow of his father. You can see how the fear and anxiety created by this enormous father figure impacts both Karl Ove and his brother. His father is both a storm that blows his boys or a maelström that constantly threatens to suck them in. I think this characterization fits, because so many times as the boys sat in the house alone waiting for their father to arrive the tension felt like a ship anticipating a storm. Darkness would descend and a hard madness would hit and then, just as fast, disappear. The prose was beautiful, and in parts, seemed heavy enough to bleed the heavy, dark prose straight through the thick pages of the archipelago book.
May 21, 2014
"In many ways the third volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's fiercely-debated memoir is the smallest – in both its scope and in its physical size – and the most banal thus far. For a sequence of works which appear to be singlehandedly redefining the quality and value attached to banality in literature this no small feat. This section of the monumental work, published in the UK as Boyhood Island, focuses on Knausgaard’s life as a small child: his first experiences at school, his trips to the remote farm where his grandparents live and his first time being in love. In the shadow of these experiences lies the relationship with his father which, here, we find at its most visceral.
Knausgaard's vulnerability by virtue of his youth – coupled with the fact of his family's dependence on his father – ensures that he exists in a state of permanent anxiety: the subterranean drone of the unthinkable has weakened in Boyhood Island, the disturbing aural notes of the text which left the previous volumes perched on the abyss have been replaced by a more direct current – one of immediate danger, which equally permeates and infects every level of the text. Every motion of his body and movement of his tongue, each word and action, carries with it a component of fear, a sense of danger at how his father might react. This danger is a reflection of another - the inherent danger of the practice of autobiography itself."
Daniel Fraser in The Quietus
I had been warned by my Scandinavian friends on Instagram: Book Three is more formal, less intense. It's more straightforward and less innovative in its form than the first two. Well, I'll take this level of "more formal" and "less intense" over anything else I'll read this year and run with it.
My Goodreads friend Lee told us to prepare to relive childhood with this one and that is exactly what I did. I did so with such fierceness and electricity that my own childhood memories kept resurfacing from page to page, seminal and luminous moments that I had not thought about for years.
The feeling of living from hour to hour with such ultra-sensitivity to everything is expressed here with no detour or shame or complacency. The lasting effect, like a stamp branded into the skin, of a father's ebbing violence on a young boy's identity and emerging character is absolutely riveting. The pages are suffused with the hot white light of a Norwegian island and the small victories and defeats that define a little boy's day and you will never want to leave.
Knausgaard's vulnerability by virtue of his youth – coupled with the fact of his family's dependence on his father – ensures that he exists in a state of permanent anxiety: the subterranean drone of the unthinkable has weakened in Boyhood Island, the disturbing aural notes of the text which left the previous volumes perched on the abyss have been replaced by a more direct current – one of immediate danger, which equally permeates and infects every level of the text. Every motion of his body and movement of his tongue, each word and action, carries with it a component of fear, a sense of danger at how his father might react. This danger is a reflection of another - the inherent danger of the practice of autobiography itself."
Daniel Fraser in The Quietus
I had been warned by my Scandinavian friends on Instagram: Book Three is more formal, less intense. It's more straightforward and less innovative in its form than the first two. Well, I'll take this level of "more formal" and "less intense" over anything else I'll read this year and run with it.
My Goodreads friend Lee told us to prepare to relive childhood with this one and that is exactly what I did. I did so with such fierceness and electricity that my own childhood memories kept resurfacing from page to page, seminal and luminous moments that I had not thought about for years.
The feeling of living from hour to hour with such ultra-sensitivity to everything is expressed here with no detour or shame or complacency. The lasting effect, like a stamp branded into the skin, of a father's ebbing violence on a young boy's identity and emerging character is absolutely riveting. The pages are suffused with the hot white light of a Norwegian island and the small victories and defeats that define a little boy's day and you will never want to leave.
March 31, 2023
(Re-editing of my review of 5 years ago)
Rating 2.5 stars. In contrast with the first and the second installment, in this third part Knausgard simply presents a straight chronological story. It covers his youth, from birth to the pre-pubertal phase. With lots of details, of course, as we are used to with him. And regularly he also repeats what he already wrote in part 1. The story is interesting as a time document and as a coming-of-age testimony, in which we see how the young Karl Ove struggles with the world around him and builds his own identity in interaction with others: his peers (the neighbourhood boys), the wonderful but mysterious world of the girls, but especially his father, who alternates between periods of empathic living together and unpredictable terror (again we do not know what caused this).
We perceive the young Knausgard as a hypersensitive boy, who is constantly plagued by fear, cries a lot, and is hardly able to keep himself standing up. This is all interesting to follow, indeed, but sometimes really too detailed. Is this purely therapeutic writing by Knausgard? A personal reconstruction of the past from the perspective of the middle-aged man, with all the unreliability attached to it? Or does he want to show us something more? Even after reading this third installment, I still don’t know. I guess I have to persevere.
(... And I did. In the meanwhile I read the whole series, and eventually it became clear what a formidable self-reflexive exploit this whole cycle is. Not every part is toplevel, but Knausgards excruciating way of looking at reality - especially his own behavior - truly is mesmerizing. See my other reviews, or my global review: My Struggle I-VI)
Rating 2.5 stars. In contrast with the first and the second installment, in this third part Knausgard simply presents a straight chronological story. It covers his youth, from birth to the pre-pubertal phase. With lots of details, of course, as we are used to with him. And regularly he also repeats what he already wrote in part 1. The story is interesting as a time document and as a coming-of-age testimony, in which we see how the young Karl Ove struggles with the world around him and builds his own identity in interaction with others: his peers (the neighbourhood boys), the wonderful but mysterious world of the girls, but especially his father, who alternates between periods of empathic living together and unpredictable terror (again we do not know what caused this).
We perceive the young Knausgard as a hypersensitive boy, who is constantly plagued by fear, cries a lot, and is hardly able to keep himself standing up. This is all interesting to follow, indeed, but sometimes really too detailed. Is this purely therapeutic writing by Knausgard? A personal reconstruction of the past from the perspective of the middle-aged man, with all the unreliability attached to it? Or does he want to show us something more? Even after reading this third installment, I still don’t know. I guess I have to persevere.
(... And I did. In the meanwhile I read the whole series, and eventually it became clear what a formidable self-reflexive exploit this whole cycle is. Not every part is toplevel, but Knausgards excruciating way of looking at reality - especially his own behavior - truly is mesmerizing. See my other reviews, or my global review: My Struggle I-VI)
July 6, 2015
If Karl Ove Knausgaard is Proust, which he isn’t, then Book Three of My Struggle is Combray. Evocation of childhood or adolescence is one of my favorite genres, be it film or novels or autobiography, and there are certainly tones here of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (my favorite film, if you haven’t seen it, get thee to a Netflixery), Spirit of the Beehive (there’s even a strangely familiar beekeeper scene in Book Three, almost as otherworldly as the one in Victor Erice’s masterpiece), Ratcatcher (really no similarities to speak of, I just wanted to endorse Lynne Ramsay’s fantastic film), and most especially Linklater’s Boyhood, a movie I thought was pretty okay. Book Three is, again, not Proust, not Danilo Kiš’s Garden, Ashes, it is not Nabokov’s diamond-refracted childhood remembrance of Speak, Memory, it hovers in the same orbit as Musil’s Confusions of Young Torless, that might come close to something like an analog, but really it isn’t, it isn’t Jakob Von Gunten, it certainly isn’t A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, but it is kind of something maybe like Dubliner’s “An Encounter”... no, not really any of these, but something all of its own, by itself… something said in plainspoken language, naked and upfront, without subterfuge, with a keen eye toward self-laceration, about what it was like for Karl Ove to be a boy. Like the previous two volumes, nothing exceptional, nothing beyond what anyone might experience - he was awkward, he was lonely, he was mocked, he loved his mother, he feared his cruel father (who certainly was cold and cruel, but from what is written here, not radically abusive), played with his genitals, was fascinated by his excrement, found out eventually that girls were desirable, was rather mediocre at sports, fell in love with reading, was naive and arrogant at times and failed and faltered and cried and was hurt and kept growing up, growing through it, growing into his being. There is a gentleness to this volume that wasn’t as present in the previous two, necessary of evoking one’s childhood, where time and regret don’t yet hang like the pillory around our shoulders, when our selves have not yet had the chance to be twisted and grossly knotted into strange forms like bony trees by the progress of our growth in the wind, in the lashing rains of life passing… A truly lovely image of a dandelion in the closing pages of this volume hallows the light- and shadow-painted landscape of this idyl, an idyl full of the shooting star-brief happinesses of youth, its small triumphs, the miniature-epic that is the world of our young selves uncovering the knowledge hidden everywhere and the blooming of consciousness opening up to the world, as much as it is steeped in sadness, embarrassment, fear, distress, and the nightmare specter that lives in dark windows that death casts even over our earliest, most innocent years. A truly enjoyable book, made even more so by its relation to the preceding volumes. It begins to fill out the empty spaces and corners of Karl Ove’s psyche through which we have been wandering; it adds a substructure to this life’s recitation we are listening in on.
December 11, 2023
بعد أن أطلعنا كارل أوڤه كناوسجارد على علاقته مع والده المكروه من قبله، ومدمن الخمر في الجزء الأول (موت في العائلة)، من ملحمة كفاحي ذات الستة أجزاء والتي صدرت خلال السنوات 2009/2011، يأتي هنا في الجزء الثالث ونشاهد ونعيش تفاصيل فترة الطفولة وما قبل البلوغ وعلاقته المرتبكة مع والده المزاجي القاسي آنذاك، وسبب كرهه له حتى وفاته.
"وما كان لدي غير شئ واحد أتمناه كثيرًا: أن أكبر… أن أصير كبيرًا، وأن تصير لي قدرة على التحكم بحياتي. كنت أكره أبي، لكني كنت بين يديه، عاجزًا عن الفرار من سلطته".
من جهة أخرى نرى علاقته القوية بوالدته الطيبة الحنون وبحثه عنها دائمًا في البيت، مع أنه يذكر هنا استغرابه عن اختفاءها من ذاكرته، ويظل والده صاحب المساحة الأكبر من ذاكرة الطفولة.
"جعلتني عدم معرفتي بمكان وجودها أحس كأنني لم أعد ممسكًا بالبيت.. صار البيت كله غارقًا في نوع من الارتباك، على نحو مقلق تمامًا".
إذًا ما علمناه في الجزء الأول وحالة العداء بينه وبين الأب تم توضيحه هنا؛ وبيان عمق الجرح الغائر في نفس كناوسجارد تجاه الوالد الصارم المزاجي القاسي؛ وبالتالي أدى ذلك إلى حياة شبه سرية في خارج البيت وحياة بيتية حسب مزاج الأب، أيضًا نجده يتجه للرياضة والقراءة والانغماس فيهما وتعلم جراء ذلك الصبر والشجاعة والإخلاص والصدق. كما نقرأ ونعيش معه مغامرات الطفولة وبراءتها والأصدقاء وتكون الشخصية العامة، والنجاحات والاخفاقات، وعلاقته بأخيه الوحيد الأكبر منه وتقديره له وبصمته الواضحة في تكوين شخصيته.
أرى أن كناوسجارد كاتب بارع؛ ذو صوت متفرد وأصيل، ولا تشعر بالملل خلال قراءة كلماته وأسلوبه المميز في السرد؛ بل أستعجب من نفسي عدم حدوث ذلك وسر الاستمرار في القراءة بكل متعة لذكرياته من الجزء الأول، وهذا الجزء المميز عن الطفولة ونرى العالم من وجهة نظره.
يتميز العمل بسهولة اللغة والذكريات الحميمة؛ من طرافة ومآزق وحب وكره ومشاعره في تلك المرحلة المهمة من حياة كل إنسان، ودمج السيرة الذاتية بالأدب الروائي وهو جنس أدبي يلقى رواجًا عالميًا، حيث حققت ملحمة كفاحي النجاح الباهر وباعت في النرويج وحدها ذات عدد السكان القليل نصف مليون نسخة، وترجمت أعماله إلى أكثر من خمس وثلاثين لغة حول العالم. في انتظار باقي الأجزاء بحماس شديد.
"أوليست هذه صورة جميلة؟ صورة تناثر الحوادث في الهواء، حادثة بعد حادثة، تناثرها على المرج الصغير الذي هو التاريخ الخاص بكل إنسان، تناثرها وسقوطها بين أنصال العشب، واختفاؤها؟"
"وما كان لدي غير شئ واحد أتمناه كثيرًا: أن أكبر… أن أصير كبيرًا، وأن تصير لي قدرة على التحكم بحياتي. كنت أكره أبي، لكني كنت بين يديه، عاجزًا عن الفرار من سلطته".
من جهة أخرى نرى علاقته القوية بوالدته الطيبة الحنون وبحثه عنها دائمًا في البيت، مع أنه يذكر هنا استغرابه عن اختفاءها من ذاكرته، ويظل والده صاحب المساحة الأكبر من ذاكرة الطفولة.
"جعلتني عدم معرفتي بمكان وجودها أحس كأنني لم أعد ممسكًا بالبيت.. صار البيت كله غارقًا في نوع من الارتباك، على نحو مقلق تمامًا".
إذًا ما علمناه في الجزء الأول وحالة العداء بينه وبين الأب تم توضيحه هنا؛ وبيان عمق الجرح الغائر في نفس كناوسجارد تجاه الوالد الصارم المزاجي القاسي؛ وبالتالي أدى ذلك إلى حياة شبه سرية في خارج البيت وحياة بيتية حسب مزاج الأب، أيضًا نجده يتجه للرياضة والقراءة والانغماس فيهما وتعلم جراء ذلك الصبر والشجاعة والإخلاص والصدق. كما نقرأ ونعيش معه مغامرات الطفولة وبراءتها والأصدقاء وتكون الشخصية العامة، والنجاحات والاخفاقات، وعلاقته بأخيه الوحيد الأكبر منه وتقديره له وبصمته الواضحة في تكوين شخصيته.
أرى أن كناوسجارد كاتب بارع؛ ذو صوت متفرد وأصيل، ولا تشعر بالملل خلال قراءة كلماته وأسلوبه المميز في السرد؛ بل أستعجب من نفسي عدم حدوث ذلك وسر الاستمرار في القراءة بكل متعة لذكرياته من الجزء الأول، وهذا الجزء المميز عن الطفولة ونرى العالم من وجهة نظره.
يتميز العمل بسهولة اللغة والذكريات الحميمة؛ من طرافة ومآزق وحب وكره ومشاعره في تلك المرحلة المهمة من حياة كل إنسان، ودمج السيرة الذاتية بالأدب الروائي وهو جنس أدبي يلقى رواجًا عالميًا، حيث حققت ملحمة كفاحي النجاح الباهر وباعت في النرويج وحدها ذات عدد السكان القليل نصف مليون نسخة، وترجمت أعماله إلى أكثر من خمس وثلاثين لغة حول العالم. في انتظار باقي الأجزاء بحماس شديد.
"أوليست هذه صورة جميلة؟ صورة تناثر الحوادث في الهواء، حادثة بعد حادثة، تناثرها على المرج الصغير الذي هو التاريخ الخاص بكل إنسان، تناثرها وسقوطها بين أنصال العشب، واختفاؤها؟"
January 13, 2020
I cannot think of another book I’ve encountered that so perfectly captures the ache of adolescence. Does it have something to do with the fact that Karl Ove and I both started jr high in the 1980s, giving a quite specific framework of references? Likely. But it goes far beyond that.
As a fellow ‘jessie’ of the same generation, I can’t but help project myself into much here. The physical pain of longing; the desire for recognition; the crying. My God, the crying—I wondered at the time if it would ever stop.
And it has. Looking back over the last 30+ years, the tears, without fizz or bang, just dried themselves; so much so that I cannot remember the last time I cried. It’s been years upon years. This is not something to boast about, and I can’t help missing the young boy that looked a lot like me. He felt with precision. Maybe this happens to everyone, I don’t know.
But I do miss that boy, even if I can still sense him fleetingly when the house is quiet, I’m up all night reading, and briefly untethered from the rapidly-failing meat known as my body.
That boy could have cared less, yes. But I couldn’t care less now, and that’s an evil I never wanted. Is it too late to start again?
I don’t know. Ask me tomorrow.
As a fellow ‘jessie’ of the same generation, I can’t but help project myself into much here. The physical pain of longing; the desire for recognition; the crying. My God, the crying—I wondered at the time if it would ever stop.
And it has. Looking back over the last 30+ years, the tears, without fizz or bang, just dried themselves; so much so that I cannot remember the last time I cried. It’s been years upon years. This is not something to boast about, and I can’t help missing the young boy that looked a lot like me. He felt with precision. Maybe this happens to everyone, I don’t know.
But I do miss that boy, even if I can still sense him fleetingly when the house is quiet, I’m up all night reading, and briefly untethered from the rapidly-failing meat known as my body.
That boy could have cared less, yes. But I couldn’t care less now, and that’s an evil I never wanted. Is it too late to start again?
I don’t know. Ask me tomorrow.
October 10, 2020
" Το νησί της εφηβείας "
Στον τρίτο τόμο μαθαίνουμε για την παιδική κ εφηβική ηλικία του συγγραφέα. Σε αυτό το βιβλίο ο Καρλ Ούβε λύνεται κ μας παρουσιάζει την αλήθεια του. Ένα τρομοκρατημενο παιδί που συνεχώς φοβόταν τις αντιδράσεις του πατέρα του. Ζούσε με αυστηρούς κανόνες μέσα στο σπίτι κ οι τιμωρίες ήταν καθημερινό φαινόμενο. Μέσα σε αυτή την κατάσταση βλέπουμε μια μητέρα, αμέτοχη κ ταυτόχρονα σύμφωνη με την τακτική του άντρα της. Θα μπορούσα να τη χαρακτηρίσω άοσμη κ αόρατη ως μάνα κ ως γυναίκα.
Ο Καρλ Ούβε έχει το ταλέντο να περιγράφει με άπειρες λεπτομέρειες ένα γεγονός χωρίς να σου προκαλεί κούραση κ βαρεμάρα. Κυλάνε τα γεγονότα αβίαστα κ σε οδηγούν στα άδυτα της ψυχής κ της σκέψης του.
Στον τρίτο τόμο μαθαίνουμε για την παιδική κ εφηβική ηλικία του συγγραφέα. Σε αυτό το βιβλίο ο Καρλ Ούβε λύνεται κ μας παρουσιάζει την αλήθεια του. Ένα τρομοκρατημενο παιδί που συνεχώς φοβόταν τις αντιδράσεις του πατέρα του. Ζούσε με αυστηρούς κανόνες μέσα στο σπίτι κ οι τιμωρίες ήταν καθημερινό φαινόμενο. Μέσα σε αυτή την κατάσταση βλέπουμε μια μητέρα, αμέτοχη κ ταυτόχρονα σύμφωνη με την τακτική του άντρα της. Θα μπορούσα να τη χαρακτηρίσω άοσμη κ αόρατη ως μάνα κ ως γυναίκα.
Ο Καρλ Ούβε έχει το ταλέντο να περιγράφει με άπειρες λεπτομέρειες ένα γεγονός χωρίς να σου προκαλεί κούραση κ βαρεμάρα. Κυλάνε τα γεγονότα αβίαστα κ σε οδηγούν στα άδυτα της ψυχής κ της σκέψης του.
February 26, 2018
"L’Isola dell’Infanzia" è in un certo senso il prequel de "La Morte del Padre”.
Un tassello fondamentale per capire il rapporto di Karl Ove col padre. E quindi per leggere con una chiave più ricca il Libro 1.
A livello cronologico racchiude la prima parte della sua vita, più o meno tra i 5 e i 13 anni.
La cosa che mi ha convinto meno è questa: se parli di cose successe trent’anni fa credo sia quasi impossibile trasferirle dalla memoria alla carta con una tale quantità di particolari senza romanzarci un po’ sopra. E quindi, se questo può essere un punto negativo, forse viene un po’ meno quel bisogno di aderenza alla realtà alla quale Knausgård ci ha abituato nei primi due libri.
Dal mio punto di vista è un libro che è cresciuto alla distanza, con una seconda parte più stimolante rispetto alla prima (proporzionale alla crescita del protagonista).
Al solito è tutto molto personale e si parla di una discreta quantità di cose.
Prima di tutto la scuola, la famiglia e gli amichetti.
Le scorribande tra boschi, sentieri e torrenti.
I panorami incontaminati della Norvegia del sud.
Le vacanze dai nonni, l’ossessione per le ragazze, i libri letti compulsivamente.
Litri di lacrimoni e la camera da letto come rifugio dalle sfuriate del padre.
Il nuoto, il calcio, il punk.
Un sacco di musica: Police, Beatles, Roxy Music, Clash, Specials e tanti altri.
Più o meno a metà Knausgård si sofferma a parlare della madre, di quanto sia stata importante per lui ma anche di come siano pochi i ricordi che conserva di lei nella memoria. E lo fa in passaggi asciutti, profondi e lucidi da farti chiudere per un momento il libro e guardare imbambolato il muro.
Come questo:
"Lei mi ha salvato, perché se lei non fosse stata lì presente, sarei cresciuto solo con papà e in quel caso prima o poi mi sarei tolto la vita, in un modo o nell’altro.
Ma lei c’era, si bilanciava così il buio rappresentato da papà, io sono vivo e il fatto che non lo faccia con gioia non ha nulla a che vedere con l’equilibrio dell’infanzia.
Vivo, ho figli miei, e in fondo con loro ho semplicemente cercato di realizzare un’unica cosa, e cioè che non devono avere paura del proprio padre.
E non ce l’hanno. Lo so."
In generale credo mi sia un po’ mancato il Knausgård che parla del se stesso adulto.
Buono ma senza scatti decisi in avanti. [74/100]
Un tassello fondamentale per capire il rapporto di Karl Ove col padre. E quindi per leggere con una chiave più ricca il Libro 1.
A livello cronologico racchiude la prima parte della sua vita, più o meno tra i 5 e i 13 anni.
La cosa che mi ha convinto meno è questa: se parli di cose successe trent’anni fa credo sia quasi impossibile trasferirle dalla memoria alla carta con una tale quantità di particolari senza romanzarci un po’ sopra. E quindi, se questo può essere un punto negativo, forse viene un po’ meno quel bisogno di aderenza alla realtà alla quale Knausgård ci ha abituato nei primi due libri.
Dal mio punto di vista è un libro che è cresciuto alla distanza, con una seconda parte più stimolante rispetto alla prima (proporzionale alla crescita del protagonista).
Al solito è tutto molto personale e si parla di una discreta quantità di cose.
Prima di tutto la scuola, la famiglia e gli amichetti.
Le scorribande tra boschi, sentieri e torrenti.
I panorami incontaminati della Norvegia del sud.
Le vacanze dai nonni, l’ossessione per le ragazze, i libri letti compulsivamente.
Litri di lacrimoni e la camera da letto come rifugio dalle sfuriate del padre.
Il nuoto, il calcio, il punk.
Un sacco di musica: Police, Beatles, Roxy Music, Clash, Specials e tanti altri.
Più o meno a metà Knausgård si sofferma a parlare della madre, di quanto sia stata importante per lui ma anche di come siano pochi i ricordi che conserva di lei nella memoria. E lo fa in passaggi asciutti, profondi e lucidi da farti chiudere per un momento il libro e guardare imbambolato il muro.
Come questo:
"Lei mi ha salvato, perché se lei non fosse stata lì presente, sarei cresciuto solo con papà e in quel caso prima o poi mi sarei tolto la vita, in un modo o nell’altro.
Ma lei c’era, si bilanciava così il buio rappresentato da papà, io sono vivo e il fatto che non lo faccia con gioia non ha nulla a che vedere con l’equilibrio dell’infanzia.
Vivo, ho figli miei, e in fondo con loro ho semplicemente cercato di realizzare un’unica cosa, e cioè che non devono avere paura del proprio padre.
E non ce l’hanno. Lo so."
In generale credo mi sia un po’ mancato il Knausgård che parla del se stesso adulto.
Buono ma senza scatti decisi in avanti. [74/100]
March 12, 2024
A friend recently had a chat with me, and she mentioned that rating a book 3 stars is more damning than 1 or 2. At least with 1 or 2, she argued, you would remember the feelings of hatred and immense emotion. She said that 3 stars melted into a land of the forgotten, an unacceptable fate. I agree with her. However, there are plenty of memorable scenes in this one. Memorable being used here without the necessarily positive sheen that comes with that word often. Just… something that will remain in memory.
Here are some of the scenes, without censorship and without further reference to my copy, just off the dome [Warning: don’t read if you are worried about this offending your morning sensibility]:
- Karl Ove crying
- Karl Ove and his friend kneeling on a log and swinging turds out of their ass
- Karl Ove crying
- Karl Ove vigorously fingering his asshole to “work out” the shit that had been “built up” inside of him due to his being simultaneously afraid of going to the bathroom and enjoying the feeling of not taking a shit [Freud is turning over in his grave]
- Karl Ove crying
- Karl Ove finding a Heineken bottle in a landfill and putting his dick inside it
- Karl Ove crying
- Karl Ove battling with ideas of what it means to like certain music, books, and stories
- Karl Ove crying
- Karl Ove basically being in love with a girl, landing a date with that girl, and then proposing that they time their first kiss and then playing tonsil football with her for 12 minutes, which is unbelievably uncomfortable, and then leading her to break up with him the next day
- Karl Ove crying
And oh, the tyrannical father. Obviously, the first volume of My Struggle is about the death of his father, and you don’t really have a context for the death and his conflicted feelings until this book. And then… You sort of feel for Karl Ove. You start to feel a vicarious relief that he does not have to live with that anymore.
Here are some of the scenes, without censorship and without further reference to my copy, just off the dome [Warning: don’t read if you are worried about this offending your morning sensibility]:
- Karl Ove crying
- Karl Ove and his friend kneeling on a log and swinging turds out of their ass
- Karl Ove crying
- Karl Ove vigorously fingering his asshole to “work out” the shit that had been “built up” inside of him due to his being simultaneously afraid of going to the bathroom and enjoying the feeling of not taking a shit [Freud is turning over in his grave]
- Karl Ove crying
- Karl Ove finding a Heineken bottle in a landfill and putting his dick inside it
- Karl Ove crying
- Karl Ove battling with ideas of what it means to like certain music, books, and stories
- Karl Ove crying
- Karl Ove basically being in love with a girl, landing a date with that girl, and then proposing that they time their first kiss and then playing tonsil football with her for 12 minutes, which is unbelievably uncomfortable, and then leading her to break up with him the next day
- Karl Ove crying
And oh, the tyrannical father. Obviously, the first volume of My Struggle is about the death of his father, and you don’t really have a context for the death and his conflicted feelings until this book. And then… You sort of feel for Karl Ove. You start to feel a vicarious relief that he does not have to live with that anymore.
July 29, 2015
Cuando leí el segundo libro de la serie de Karl Ove, me quedé con una sensación medio rara. Sentía que era demasiada intimidad con el, con su vida cotidiana, sus problemas, y con las tonterías banales que nos suceden a todos, pero que contadas por el te acaban gustando.
Me di cuenta unos días después de haberlo terminado, que seguía pensando en el, en sus tonterías, en lo bonito que escribe, en fin, que lo extrañaba. Así que decidí intentar el tercero de la serie. Lo tuve que leer en inglés, porque me entró una enorme urgencia de leerlo de nuevo, y fue lo único incómodo que tuvo toda la experiencia.
Porque puedo decir que este libro me gustó mucho más que el hombre enamorado, y eso es decir mucho, pero es que este es un libro precioso. No pensé que llegaría a más de lo que había llegado, pero si llega a mucho más.
Hay algo en la vulnerabilidad de la infancia, que yo creo que nunca llegamos a olvidar, o si lo olvidamos conscientemente, estoy segura de que se nos quedan los recuerdos, los rencores, el dolor, las alegrías, en algún rincón, y están presentes siempre. Se me dispararon muchos con este libro, y por eso lo quiero aún más. Mis reacciones no eran racionales, contaba cosas que me hacían volver a muchos momentos de mi infancia en donde quería estar en otro lado, ser otra persona, salir de donde estaba.
Este libro es precioso, estoy emocionada y quizás me ponga un poco sentimental, y de eso se trata leer, de emocionarte por algo y sentirte cerca de su historia.
Voy a tener que leer el primero de la serie, la muerte del padre, y voy a tener que leer este de nuevo, cuando por fin sea traducido al español.
Que emoción que existan escritores que te muevan tanto. Te amo Karl Ove!
------------------
Acabo de terminar de releer este volumen, y aunque pensé que me brincaría más partes, terminé por leerlo todo. Es una belleza de verdad amigos, he hablado mucho sobre karl ove y sus libros, pero es que son como la vida, tan complejos, tan simples, tan horribles y tristes a momentos, porque la verdad sí me brinqué varias escenas con su papá.
Pero lo que lo hace tan importante, para mi, es que nos da una prueba de humanidad, pone todo ahí, no solo sobre los demás, si no la manera en como lo hace de sí mismo es algo especial, porque no es solo mostrar de una manera exhibicionista, si no por el narrar todo completo, por mostrarse entero como personaje. Lo que hace Karl ove para mi es jugar con la realidad y la ficción de una manera especial, porque si, todo eso se supone que pasó. Y luego la pregunta queda: ¿eso realmente importa?
Me di cuenta unos días después de haberlo terminado, que seguía pensando en el, en sus tonterías, en lo bonito que escribe, en fin, que lo extrañaba. Así que decidí intentar el tercero de la serie. Lo tuve que leer en inglés, porque me entró una enorme urgencia de leerlo de nuevo, y fue lo único incómodo que tuvo toda la experiencia.
Porque puedo decir que este libro me gustó mucho más que el hombre enamorado, y eso es decir mucho, pero es que este es un libro precioso. No pensé que llegaría a más de lo que había llegado, pero si llega a mucho más.
Hay algo en la vulnerabilidad de la infancia, que yo creo que nunca llegamos a olvidar, o si lo olvidamos conscientemente, estoy segura de que se nos quedan los recuerdos, los rencores, el dolor, las alegrías, en algún rincón, y están presentes siempre. Se me dispararon muchos con este libro, y por eso lo quiero aún más. Mis reacciones no eran racionales, contaba cosas que me hacían volver a muchos momentos de mi infancia en donde quería estar en otro lado, ser otra persona, salir de donde estaba.
Este libro es precioso, estoy emocionada y quizás me ponga un poco sentimental, y de eso se trata leer, de emocionarte por algo y sentirte cerca de su historia.
Voy a tener que leer el primero de la serie, la muerte del padre, y voy a tener que leer este de nuevo, cuando por fin sea traducido al español.
Que emoción que existan escritores que te muevan tanto. Te amo Karl Ove!
------------------
Acabo de terminar de releer este volumen, y aunque pensé que me brincaría más partes, terminé por leerlo todo. Es una belleza de verdad amigos, he hablado mucho sobre karl ove y sus libros, pero es que son como la vida, tan complejos, tan simples, tan horribles y tristes a momentos, porque la verdad sí me brinqué varias escenas con su papá.
Pero lo que lo hace tan importante, para mi, es que nos da una prueba de humanidad, pone todo ahí, no solo sobre los demás, si no la manera en como lo hace de sí mismo es algo especial, porque no es solo mostrar de una manera exhibicionista, si no por el narrar todo completo, por mostrarse entero como personaje. Lo que hace Karl ove para mi es jugar con la realidad y la ficción de una manera especial, porque si, todo eso se supone que pasó. Y luego la pregunta queda: ¿eso realmente importa?
Read
May 30, 2017Ne mogu ovo da ocenim jer mi je Knausgor pre svega zabavan, nasmejem se i prepričavam epizode cimerki pola dana. Nezahvalno mi je da bilo šta ocenjujem i sudim jer sam u poslednje vreme čitala knjige koje govore o detinjstvu na sasvim drugačiji način, tako da mi je ovo poput nekog romana Gradimira Stojkovića, samo za odrasle i sentimentalne.
Trebalo je da lupim recku svaki put kad plače, mislim da je prosek jednom u pet strana. Drago je, toplo, zabavno, nešto što bih davala deci krajem osnovne i početkom srednje da čitaju. Još uvek mislim da je prvi deo književno najuspeliji, ali uvek ću pročitati sve što izađe jer mi je ... Pa, lepo dok čitam. :)
Trebalo je da lupim recku svaki put kad plače, mislim da je prosek jednom u pet strana. Drago je, toplo, zabavno, nešto što bih davala deci krajem osnovne i početkom srednje da čitaju. Još uvek mislim da je prvi deo književno najuspeliji, ali uvek ću pročitati sve što izađe jer mi je ... Pa, lepo dok čitam. :)
November 10, 2017
Mit kompromissloser Offenheit präsentiert uns K.O. Knausgard den dritten Band seiner autobiografischen Romanreihe, von frühester Kindheit bis zum Beginn der Pubertät.
Sehr detailliert, man ist verblüfft über solch ein Langzeitgedächtnis, beschreibt er
die Probleme und wenigen Lichtblicke seiner Schulzeit, sowie das angespannte Verhältnis
zu seinem Vater. Bedeutend besser als der zweite Band. Lesen!
Sehr detailliert, man ist verblüfft über solch ein Langzeitgedächtnis, beschreibt er
die Probleme und wenigen Lichtblicke seiner Schulzeit, sowie das angespannte Verhältnis
zu seinem Vater. Bedeutend besser als der zweite Band. Lesen!
April 24, 2020
“Mano kova. Vaikystės sala” - trečioji Karl Ove Knausgard gyvenimo knygų dalis. Pirmąsias suskaičiau su didžiuliu malonumu ir šįkart viskas lygiai taip pat - patiko nei kiek ne mažiau. Sunkiausia dalis - papasakoti jums apie šią knygą. Viskas dėl to, kad rizikuoju apipilti liaupsėmis ir pasirodyti šališka iki negaliu.
Šįkart Karlas atvirauja apie vaikystę. Šešti - keturiolikti jo gyvenimo metai. Visa šeima persikelia gyventi į salą ir užsisuka kasdienis gyvenimas. Berniukas žaidžia su kitais vaikais, pradeda lankyti mokyklą, atvirauja apie savo išdaigas, pirmas simpatijas, šeimos kasdienybę. Atrodytų, viskas kaip pas normalų eilinį berniuką, jei ne du nuolat pasakojimą lydintys jausmai: baimė ir gėda. Juose tiesiog skendi praktiškai kiekviena Karlo diena.
Rašymo stilius, kurį daug kas lygina su Prustu, kartais gali atrodyti iki skausmo detalus. Aprašoma iki menkiausių dalelių dalelyčių. Kai kam gali pasirodyti nuobodu, bet man Knausgard tekstai - gryno malonumo dozė. Juose aš nekeisčiau nieko.
Autorius turi talentą ne tik puikiai pasakoti, bet kartu atskleisdamas savo vaikystės prisiminimus, jis atveria ir skaitytojo uždulkėjusius atminties klodus. Jis gali papasakoti dalykus, kurių jūs nebūsite darę, pavyzdžiui kišę savo penio į butelį ir gavę gana skaudų jame užsislėpusio vabzdžio įkandimą, bet aprašomi jausmai jums bus pažįstami ir išjausti. Be to jo žodžiai tokie paveikūs, kad skaitydamas knygą ne tik skaitai, bet ir išgyveni tą patį. Toli gražu ne kiekvienas rašytojas tai sugeba.
Kai tik pasirodė Knausgard pirmoji knyga buvo tokių kurie nematė jo kūrinyje nieko naujo ir galų gale pasigedo kuklumo- “kaip čia dabar rašyti apie save ir dar taip smulkmeniškai”. Bet tame paprastume ir glūdi esmė. Be to kaip sunku rašant apie save būti atviru- nekelti savęs aukščiau tikrų faktų, bet ir nenusikuklinti. Karl Ove Knausgard yra atviras iki skausmo. Jo tekstai jį absoliučiai apnuogina. Galima sakyti tampa pažeidžiamas, bet, mano nuomone, būtent atvirumo pagalba jis toks stiprus.
Interviu rašytojas atvirauja apie vaikystės traumas ir tai, kaip jos gyvos ir šiandien. Išgyventi jausmai niekur nedingo. Jam sunku daryti daugybę dalykų būtent dėl itin stipriai išgyventų gėdos ir baimės jausmų. Kaip tėvas Karl sau išsikėlė vieną tikslą - kad vaikai jo nebijotų. Džiaugiasi, kad įžengus į vaikų kambarį, mergaitės nenustoja žaidusios, o jų akys nelaksto nuo daikto prie daikto. Jos saugios.
Tai knyga, kuri parodo kokia jautri vaiko siela, kaip galima ją užgauti. Nenoriu nieko neigiamo ar kritiško sakyti apie šį kūrinį, nes man jis per daug patinka. O su Knausgard kūryba yra taip- arba ji jums patiks arba ne. Vidurio čia nėra. Bet pabandyti tikrai labai kviečiu visus.
Video apžvalga: https://bit.ly/2yD7JPn
Šįkart Karlas atvirauja apie vaikystę. Šešti - keturiolikti jo gyvenimo metai. Visa šeima persikelia gyventi į salą ir užsisuka kasdienis gyvenimas. Berniukas žaidžia su kitais vaikais, pradeda lankyti mokyklą, atvirauja apie savo išdaigas, pirmas simpatijas, šeimos kasdienybę. Atrodytų, viskas kaip pas normalų eilinį berniuką, jei ne du nuolat pasakojimą lydintys jausmai: baimė ir gėda. Juose tiesiog skendi praktiškai kiekviena Karlo diena.
Rašymo stilius, kurį daug kas lygina su Prustu, kartais gali atrodyti iki skausmo detalus. Aprašoma iki menkiausių dalelių dalelyčių. Kai kam gali pasirodyti nuobodu, bet man Knausgard tekstai - gryno malonumo dozė. Juose aš nekeisčiau nieko.
Autorius turi talentą ne tik puikiai pasakoti, bet kartu atskleisdamas savo vaikystės prisiminimus, jis atveria ir skaitytojo uždulkėjusius atminties klodus. Jis gali papasakoti dalykus, kurių jūs nebūsite darę, pavyzdžiui kišę savo penio į butelį ir gavę gana skaudų jame užsislėpusio vabzdžio įkandimą, bet aprašomi jausmai jums bus pažįstami ir išjausti. Be to jo žodžiai tokie paveikūs, kad skaitydamas knygą ne tik skaitai, bet ir išgyveni tą patį. Toli gražu ne kiekvienas rašytojas tai sugeba.
Kai tik pasirodė Knausgard pirmoji knyga buvo tokių kurie nematė jo kūrinyje nieko naujo ir galų gale pasigedo kuklumo- “kaip čia dabar rašyti apie save ir dar taip smulkmeniškai”. Bet tame paprastume ir glūdi esmė. Be to kaip sunku rašant apie save būti atviru- nekelti savęs aukščiau tikrų faktų, bet ir nenusikuklinti. Karl Ove Knausgard yra atviras iki skausmo. Jo tekstai jį absoliučiai apnuogina. Galima sakyti tampa pažeidžiamas, bet, mano nuomone, būtent atvirumo pagalba jis toks stiprus.
Interviu rašytojas atvirauja apie vaikystės traumas ir tai, kaip jos gyvos ir šiandien. Išgyventi jausmai niekur nedingo. Jam sunku daryti daugybę dalykų būtent dėl itin stipriai išgyventų gėdos ir baimės jausmų. Kaip tėvas Karl sau išsikėlė vieną tikslą - kad vaikai jo nebijotų. Džiaugiasi, kad įžengus į vaikų kambarį, mergaitės nenustoja žaidusios, o jų akys nelaksto nuo daikto prie daikto. Jos saugios.
Tai knyga, kuri parodo kokia jautri vaiko siela, kaip galima ją užgauti. Nenoriu nieko neigiamo ar kritiško sakyti apie šį kūrinį, nes man jis per daug patinka. O su Knausgard kūryba yra taip- arba ji jums patiks arba ne. Vidurio čia nėra. Bet pabandyti tikrai labai kviečiu visus.
Video apžvalga: https://bit.ly/2yD7JPn
April 13, 2015
The third book in the Knausgaard saga explores Karl Ove’s boyhood. The family moves to the largest island in southern Norway, Tromøy, where Karl Ove's father teaches Norwegian in high school and his mother works with families experiencing trauma. Finally we learn why Karl Ove was so terrified of his father. The older brother Yngve now becomes the shadowy enigma we only glimpse but cannot see. Yngve is the essence of the older brother—a little dismissive of his younger sibling, but generally supportive and friendly enough. I yearn to see more of him, but suspect Karl Ove’s penchant for self-revelation did not extend to his brother.
This is a remarkable piece of work. The more I read the more I want to read. Fiction or nonfiction? Of course it is both. In a series this long and detailed one cannot have but used elements of both. In order to ring true it must have recognizable motivations and actions, yet the detail feels new rather than remembered. I found myself mesmerized by the thirteen-year-old Karl Ove. The scene in which he takes “the prettiest girl” he’s met to the forest by bicycle to kiss is positively painful—and classic.
The difference between the personalities of Karl Ove’s parents is spelled out in a paragraph about driving styles:
This revealing paragraph shows us two critical portraitures and Knausgaard’s run-on style which impels the reader forward. We know immediately the difference in the two personalities, and in Karl Ove’s as well. On the day Karl Ove was reprimanded for embarrassing another boy, Edmund, for not being able to read, Karl Ove tells us “I both understood and I didn’t”—why his family was mean to him and kind to Edmund, whom they hardly knew. He was learning two sets of behaviors and being confused by which to adopt. By including this incident in his record we know that it became clearer to him at some later point.
There is no mention of Knausgaard’s overall direction with this third of the six books, though in the very last pages Karl Ove comes across a photograph in a history book of a naked woman starving to death. The next page of the history book contains images of a mass grave with many strewn corpses. Immediately readers' minds go to the Holocaust with no further prompting. The juxtaposition of the sunny warmth of impending summer and the stark brutality of the images jerks us from our reverie and places Karl Ove's boyhood in a larger context. The years are passing but there are a few holes in the picture of a forty-year old life. We’ve now had the beginning and the end, but early adulthood and a first marriage are still missing.
Is it literature? I think so. We have already “gone somewhere” though each volume leads only to another at this point. A person with contradiction and depth is given life in these pages. The detail is lush and ample and oh-so-readable, the story instructs us, and the context haunts us. I look forward to seeing what Knausgaard wants us to understand, but he has already given us something very special indeed.
This is a remarkable piece of work. The more I read the more I want to read. Fiction or nonfiction? Of course it is both. In a series this long and detailed one cannot have but used elements of both. In order to ring true it must have recognizable motivations and actions, yet the detail feels new rather than remembered. I found myself mesmerized by the thirteen-year-old Karl Ove. The scene in which he takes “the prettiest girl” he’s met to the forest by bicycle to kiss is positively painful—and classic.
The difference between the personalities of Karl Ove’s parents is spelled out in a paragraph about driving styles:
”Speed and anger went hand in hand. Mom drove carefully, was considerate, never minded if the car in front was slow, she was patient and followed. That was how she was at home as well. She never got angry, always had time to help, didn’t mind if things got broken, accidents happened, she liked to chat with us, she was interested in what we said, she often served food that was not absolutely necessary, such as waffles, buns, cocoa, and bread fresh out of the oven, while Dad on the other hand tried to purge our lives of anything that had no direct relevance to the situation in which we found ourselves: we ate food because it was a necessity, and the time we spent eating had no value in itself; when we watched TV we watched TV and were not allowed to talk or do anything else; when we were in the garden we had to stay on the flagstones, they had been laid for precisely that purpose, while the lawn, big and inviting though it was, was not for walking, running, or lying on...[Dad always drove much too fast.]”
This revealing paragraph shows us two critical portraitures and Knausgaard’s run-on style which impels the reader forward. We know immediately the difference in the two personalities, and in Karl Ove’s as well. On the day Karl Ove was reprimanded for embarrassing another boy, Edmund, for not being able to read, Karl Ove tells us “I both understood and I didn’t”—why his family was mean to him and kind to Edmund, whom they hardly knew. He was learning two sets of behaviors and being confused by which to adopt. By including this incident in his record we know that it became clearer to him at some later point.
There is no mention of Knausgaard’s overall direction with this third of the six books, though in the very last pages Karl Ove comes across a photograph in a history book of a naked woman starving to death. The next page of the history book contains images of a mass grave with many strewn corpses. Immediately readers' minds go to the Holocaust with no further prompting. The juxtaposition of the sunny warmth of impending summer and the stark brutality of the images jerks us from our reverie and places Karl Ove's boyhood in a larger context. The years are passing but there are a few holes in the picture of a forty-year old life. We’ve now had the beginning and the end, but early adulthood and a first marriage are still missing.
Is it literature? I think so. We have already “gone somewhere” though each volume leads only to another at this point. A person with contradiction and depth is given life in these pages. The detail is lush and ample and oh-so-readable, the story instructs us, and the context haunts us. I look forward to seeing what Knausgaard wants us to understand, but he has already given us something very special indeed.
February 12, 2024
20th book of 2024.
3.5. We are now at the halfway mark already (it's a lot easier than Proust!), and Knausgaard has dedicated this entire volume to childhood, specifically ages 7-13. Like most people, I prefer adult Knausgaard, and there's no competition when you have his long reflections on life, adulthood, marriage, parenthood, writing, expectations, etc., compared to this volume which is filled with kissing girls, crying on nearly every page, setting fire to things and looking at porn mags, oh, and being assaulted by his dad. That said, this is vital to the whole struggle. I'm intrigued by his overall plan, why he decided to write volume 2 as adulthood and then backtrack here in volume 3. The writing, like Joyce does in Portrait is a bit looser and simpler, even more so than the other volumes. At times I found it bordering on juvenile, but we are in juvenile years. I found some bits were long and repetitive but Knausgaard is sticking to his guns and trying to portray everything 'truthfully' and simply. It did spur old memories for me, especially with the running around, lighting fires, body exploring, etc. There are a few bits when Knausgaard and Geir are getting their cocks out to put them in a bottle or laugh about their ballsacks and I thought, how strange! Then remembered my own boyhood, friends and I getting our cocks out to see who could piss the farthest before setting fire to whatever we could before we got caught. I guess all boys are, deep down, the same.
3.5. We are now at the halfway mark already (it's a lot easier than Proust!), and Knausgaard has dedicated this entire volume to childhood, specifically ages 7-13. Like most people, I prefer adult Knausgaard, and there's no competition when you have his long reflections on life, adulthood, marriage, parenthood, writing, expectations, etc., compared to this volume which is filled with kissing girls, crying on nearly every page, setting fire to things and looking at porn mags, oh, and being assaulted by his dad. That said, this is vital to the whole struggle. I'm intrigued by his overall plan, why he decided to write volume 2 as adulthood and then backtrack here in volume 3. The writing, like Joyce does in Portrait is a bit looser and simpler, even more so than the other volumes. At times I found it bordering on juvenile, but we are in juvenile years. I found some bits were long and repetitive but Knausgaard is sticking to his guns and trying to portray everything 'truthfully' and simply. It did spur old memories for me, especially with the running around, lighting fires, body exploring, etc. There are a few bits when Knausgaard and Geir are getting their cocks out to put them in a bottle or laugh about their ballsacks and I thought, how strange! Then remembered my own boyhood, friends and I getting our cocks out to see who could piss the farthest before setting fire to whatever we could before we got caught. I guess all boys are, deep down, the same.
March 2, 2021
Even more stripped-down than A Man in Love; Boyhood Island hits only one note. Knausgård has abandoned the wider view; the generalised portrait of life at a distance, focusing exclusively on the microscopic details. In doing so he somehow remains eminently readable - his account is sympathetic; relatable, and rings every nostalgic bell. Yet there is something hollow and one-dimensional about this third book in the series, when compared to the vibrant, poignant and pathos-filled A Death in the Family.
July 30, 2022
Knausgårdas - geras rašytojas, nors aš vis, imdama naują jo muilo operos dalį, esu pasiruošusi nuspręsti priešingai. Bet tai, kad vis labiau imu jo nemėgti, turbūt ir rodo, kaip sėkmingai jis kuria tą tekstinę savo personą.
Trečia "Mano kovos" knygos tema - vaikystė, taigi tikėtumeisi kokių nors saldžių, ironiškų, bet ir smagių prisiminimų, aišku, ir traaaaaumos, dar būtinai - "visa tai vedė prie to, koks aš esu šiandieną" momentų. Vietoj to Knausgårdas siūlo knygą, kuri net dviem aspektais kalba apie tai, kad ne visiems žmonėms reikia turėti vaikų. Ir aš skaitydama nuolat galvoj sukau dvi mintis - 1) tai turėtų būt privalomas skaitinys sužadėtinių kursuose, 2) ką daro autobiografija, kuri nepasakoja "visa tai vedė prie to, koks aš esu šiandieną", ką ja norima mums pasakyti - ar paeksperimentuoti su tuo, kaip gali priversti savęs nemėgti, ar kaip tik atsitolinti nuo savęs, sudaiktinti buvusį save. Kaip sukurti mėmę pasakotoją - tas išbandyta įvairiom formom, nuo Dostojevskio depresuchų iki Elliso žiaurybių. Bet kaip sukurti mėmę save? Ir toks užmojis, ir jo išpildymas yra įdomus, ypač grandiozinių macho autobiografijų kontekste. Galbūt Knausgårdas vis dėlto nėra toks vienaplaniškas "žiūriu pro langą ir matau" rašytojas.
Kodėl ne visiems žmonėms reikia turėti vaikų pagal Knausgårdą?
1. Jau pačioj pirmoj serijos knygoj (Mirtis šeimoje), kalbėdamas apie tėvo mirtį, jis nuolatos užsimindavo ir štrichais pasakojo apie tai, koks tas buvo žiaurus. "Vaikystės" saloje tą matom nuolat: tėvas tyčiojasi iš mažojo Karlo Uvės, muša jį, baudžia be priežasties, apskritai kuria namuose visiškai neišgyvenamą atmosferą. Skaitant taip ir atrodo: kai Karlas Uvė išeina iš namų, tai jis ir su kitais bendrauja, ir linksminasi, ieško pornuchos, kabina paneles - kažkaip dalyvauja pasaulyje. Bet namuose jis atsiduria kaip aido kambaryje, kur absoliučiai visi ryšiai su pasauliu pakimba kažkokioj nerealybėj, yra tik čia ir dabar, ir tas čia ir dabar vaikui nepakeliamas. Kaip visa ko blogio priežastį jis nurodo tėvą, bet iš kelių epizodų matosi, kad ir motinai tie vaikai - maždaug kaip sukulentai, a, dar nenumirė, tai gerai, reiškia neblogai auginu.
2. Tėvas tėvu, bet ką šitoje dalyje labai laipsniškai rodo Knausgårdas - tai koks siaubingas gali būti ir pats vaikas. Ir tai, kaip jis sugeba parodyti save-vaiką kaip siaubingą, niekur nenuslysdamas nei į šaržą, nei į moralizavimą, nei į jokį aiškinimą, - iš tiesų įspūdinga. Iš pradžių, kol Karlas Uvė dar mažesnis, negali nepastebėti, kaip jis nuolat verkia, zirzia, meluoja, išsisukinėja. Ok, fragile masculinity dabar jau nebe naujiena, berniukai irgi verkia - pagauni save tuo stebintis ir mintyse sušeri sau už tai, kad labai stereotipiškai tuo nusistebėjai.
Bet laipsniškai Karlas Uvė peržengia tai, ką galėtum pavadinti pažeidžiamu, uždūchintu vaiku, ir pradeda pasakoti apie kasdieniško ir banalaus žiaurumo (taip, banalus blogis, pun intended) kupiną vaikystę. Jis nuolat tyčiojasi iš kitų vaikų, ypač jei tie kokie nors "kitokie" - lėtesni, durnesni; jis nuolat nori būti iškeliamas ant pjedestalo, o kai nebūna iškeliamas, įtūžta ir pradeda vardinti visus, kurie blogesni už jį patį (pvz kokie debilai mano klasiokai, o mokytoja apie juos vis tiek kalba). Jam visiškai wtf atrodo paprasta draugystė, ir kai kaimynas susidraugauja su lėtu ir storu klasioku, Karlas Uvė juos abu nurašo kaip nesuprantamus debilus. Viename puslapyje aiškina, kaip myli mamą ir kaip ji buvo jo pasaulio centras, viską sujungianti ašis, o po kiek laiko jau skundžia mamą tėvui, kad ji kažką sugadino, ir paskui jai irgi tenka paragaut tėvo teroro. Paskui nuplaukia į salelę ir ją su draugu padega, tada juokiasi.
Iliustratyviausios scenos - knygos pabaigoj, kai jam pradeda darytis įdomu merginos. Jie su draugais pradeda nusivedinėti vieną mergaitę kažkur toliau ir ją prievarta grabalioti, kaišiot pirštus tarp kojų. Paskui jis pradeda "draugauti" su kita mergaite ir detaliai per kelis puslapius aprašo, kaip penkiolika minučių laikė prispaudęs ją prie žemės ir sugrūdęs į burną liežuvį, ir neleido atsikelt, ir seilės tekėjo jai per veidą (paskui ji jį "meta" ir jis nesupranta kodėl, negi jis toks blogas, mergaitės tokios nesuprantamos, verkia). Ir viskas dėl to, kad kitas pažįstamas bičas "nustatė" laižymosi rekordą - 10 minučių, tai Karlas Uvė būtinai turėjo tą rekordą sumušti.
Šita buitinė prievarta iš serijos "jie tik vaikai" arba "boys will be boys" kelia šiurpą ir liūdesį, o visai šalia jos - šiltas bendravimas su močiute, kuri turbūt vienintelė supranta Karlą Uvę, kačiukai, mamos laukimas, visokie šviesūs prisiminimai. Karlas Uvė vis dėlto nėra sociopatas, nėra vaikas-demonas, jis nemalonus, ne iš tų kur būna "geras" ar "patogus" vaikas. Įspūdinga, kaip jis rodo vaikystę ne kaip tai, kas tau nutinka (laimė / trauma), bet kaip tai, ką sukuri arba sunaikini ir pats, na bent iš dalies. Ir kaip tu pats dalyvauji smurte ir, jį patirdamas, visiškai čia pat jį perduodi toliau. Ir tai, kad ir pats tą patyrei, tavęs neišteisina.
Įspūdinga, kad pasakodamas jis to nevertina, nemoralizuoja, ir tik iš to, kad prievartos scenos aprašomos gana detaliai, supranti, kad rašytojui Karlui Uvei nėra viskas taip px kaip vaikui Karlui Uvei.
Dabar labai užsinorėjau paskaityti tuos nedaugelį jo romanų - įdomu, kaip juose jis mato pasaulį, įdomu, kokie tenai žmonės ir santykiai.
Pora ilgesnių antireklaminių citatėlių norint pradėti nekęsti mažojo Knausgårduko. Ir vis tiek skaitai ir supranti, kad kažkoks nejaukumas, savo vietos neradimas ir beprasmiškas žiaurumas tau irgi šiek tiek atpažįstamas, kad nekenti Knausgårduko ne tiek už jo aroganciją, kiek ir už tai, kad jis apie ją pasakoja - abejingai ir atsainiai. Na kaip ir su dauguma dalykų, kai tave nervina vaikai - juk dažniausiai save nesąmoningai nervini tu pats ar pati, neturėjęs laisvės elgtis ne pagal civilizacijos taisykles. Bet aš skaitau apie Knausgårduką ir vis tiek jo nemėgstu, ir dalyvauju jo veidrodžio performanse, ir turbūt jaučiu visas tas reakcijas, kurias jau suaugęs Knausgårdas norėjo išprovokuoti. Kaip kokia Marina - ir visai neblogai jam tas sekasi.
Trečia "Mano kovos" knygos tema - vaikystė, taigi tikėtumeisi kokių nors saldžių, ironiškų, bet ir smagių prisiminimų, aišku, ir traaaaaumos, dar būtinai - "visa tai vedė prie to, koks aš esu šiandieną" momentų. Vietoj to Knausgårdas siūlo knygą, kuri net dviem aspektais kalba apie tai, kad ne visiems žmonėms reikia turėti vaikų. Ir aš skaitydama nuolat galvoj sukau dvi mintis - 1) tai turėtų būt privalomas skaitinys sužadėtinių kursuose, 2) ką daro autobiografija, kuri nepasakoja "visa tai vedė prie to, koks aš esu šiandieną", ką ja norima mums pasakyti - ar paeksperimentuoti su tuo, kaip gali priversti savęs nemėgti, ar kaip tik atsitolinti nuo savęs, sudaiktinti buvusį save. Kaip sukurti mėmę pasakotoją - tas išbandyta įvairiom formom, nuo Dostojevskio depresuchų iki Elliso žiaurybių. Bet kaip sukurti mėmę save? Ir toks užmojis, ir jo išpildymas yra įdomus, ypač grandiozinių macho autobiografijų kontekste. Galbūt Knausgårdas vis dėlto nėra toks vienaplaniškas "žiūriu pro langą ir matau" rašytojas.
Kodėl ne visiems žmonėms reikia turėti vaikų pagal Knausgårdą?
1. Jau pačioj pirmoj serijos knygoj (Mirtis šeimoje), kalbėdamas apie tėvo mirtį, jis nuolatos užsimindavo ir štrichais pasakojo apie tai, koks tas buvo žiaurus. "Vaikystės" saloje tą matom nuolat: tėvas tyčiojasi iš mažojo Karlo Uvės, muša jį, baudžia be priežasties, apskritai kuria namuose visiškai neišgyvenamą atmosferą. Skaitant taip ir atrodo: kai Karlas Uvė išeina iš namų, tai jis ir su kitais bendrauja, ir linksminasi, ieško pornuchos, kabina paneles - kažkaip dalyvauja pasaulyje. Bet namuose jis atsiduria kaip aido kambaryje, kur absoliučiai visi ryšiai su pasauliu pakimba kažkokioj nerealybėj, yra tik čia ir dabar, ir tas čia ir dabar vaikui nepakeliamas. Kaip visa ko blogio priežastį jis nurodo tėvą, bet iš kelių epizodų matosi, kad ir motinai tie vaikai - maždaug kaip sukulentai, a, dar nenumirė, tai gerai, reiškia neblogai auginu.
2. Tėvas tėvu, bet ką šitoje dalyje labai laipsniškai rodo Knausgårdas - tai koks siaubingas gali būti ir pats vaikas. Ir tai, kaip jis sugeba parodyti save-vaiką kaip siaubingą, niekur nenuslysdamas nei į šaržą, nei į moralizavimą, nei į jokį aiškinimą, - iš tiesų įspūdinga. Iš pradžių, kol Karlas Uvė dar mažesnis, negali nepastebėti, kaip jis nuolat verkia, zirzia, meluoja, išsisukinėja. Ok, fragile masculinity dabar jau nebe naujiena, berniukai irgi verkia - pagauni save tuo stebintis ir mintyse sušeri sau už tai, kad labai stereotipiškai tuo nusistebėjai.
Bet laipsniškai Karlas Uvė peržengia tai, ką galėtum pavadinti pažeidžiamu, uždūchintu vaiku, ir pradeda pasakoti apie kasdieniško ir banalaus žiaurumo (taip, banalus blogis, pun intended) kupiną vaikystę. Jis nuolat tyčiojasi iš kitų vaikų, ypač jei tie kokie nors "kitokie" - lėtesni, durnesni; jis nuolat nori būti iškeliamas ant pjedestalo, o kai nebūna iškeliamas, įtūžta ir pradeda vardinti visus, kurie blogesni už jį patį (pvz kokie debilai mano klasiokai, o mokytoja apie juos vis tiek kalba). Jam visiškai wtf atrodo paprasta draugystė, ir kai kaimynas susidraugauja su lėtu ir storu klasioku, Karlas Uvė juos abu nurašo kaip nesuprantamus debilus. Viename puslapyje aiškina, kaip myli mamą ir kaip ji buvo jo pasaulio centras, viską sujungianti ašis, o po kiek laiko jau skundžia mamą tėvui, kad ji kažką sugadino, ir paskui jai irgi tenka paragaut tėvo teroro. Paskui nuplaukia į salelę ir ją su draugu padega, tada juokiasi.
Iliustratyviausios scenos - knygos pabaigoj, kai jam pradeda darytis įdomu merginos. Jie su draugais pradeda nusivedinėti vieną mergaitę kažkur toliau ir ją prievarta grabalioti, kaišiot pirštus tarp kojų. Paskui jis pradeda "draugauti" su kita mergaite ir detaliai per kelis puslapius aprašo, kaip penkiolika minučių laikė prispaudęs ją prie žemės ir sugrūdęs į burną liežuvį, ir neleido atsikelt, ir seilės tekėjo jai per veidą (paskui ji jį "meta" ir jis nesupranta kodėl, negi jis toks blogas, mergaitės tokios nesuprantamos, verkia). Ir viskas dėl to, kad kitas pažįstamas bičas "nustatė" laižymosi rekordą - 10 minučių, tai Karlas Uvė būtinai turėjo tą rekordą sumušti.
Šita buitinė prievarta iš serijos "jie tik vaikai" arba "boys will be boys" kelia šiurpą ir liūdesį, o visai šalia jos - šiltas bendravimas su močiute, kuri turbūt vienintelė supranta Karlą Uvę, kačiukai, mamos laukimas, visokie šviesūs prisiminimai. Karlas Uvė vis dėlto nėra sociopatas, nėra vaikas-demonas, jis nemalonus, ne iš tų kur būna "geras" ar "patogus" vaikas. Įspūdinga, kaip jis rodo vaikystę ne kaip tai, kas tau nutinka (laimė / trauma), bet kaip tai, ką sukuri arba sunaikini ir pats, na bent iš dalies. Ir kaip tu pats dalyvauji smurte ir, jį patirdamas, visiškai čia pat jį perduodi toliau. Ir tai, kad ir pats tą patyrei, tavęs neišteisina.
Įspūdinga, kad pasakodamas jis to nevertina, nemoralizuoja, ir tik iš to, kad prievartos scenos aprašomos gana detaliai, supranti, kad rašytojui Karlui Uvei nėra viskas taip px kaip vaikui Karlui Uvei.
Dabar labai užsinorėjau paskaityti tuos nedaugelį jo romanų - įdomu, kaip juose jis mato pasaulį, įdomu, kokie tenai žmonės ir santykiai.
Pora ilgesnių antireklaminių citatėlių norint pradėti nekęsti mažojo Knausgårduko. Ir vis tiek skaitai ir supranti, kad kažkoks nejaukumas, savo vietos neradimas ir beprasmiškas žiaurumas tau irgi šiek tiek atpažįstamas, kad nekenti Knausgårduko ne tiek už jo aroganciją, kiek ir už tai, kad jis apie ją pasakoja - abejingai ir atsainiai. Na kaip ir su dauguma dalykų, kai tave nervina vaikai - juk dažniausiai save nesąmoningai nervini tu pats ar pati, neturėjęs laisvės elgtis ne pagal civilizacijos taisykles. Bet aš skaitau apie Knausgårduką ir vis tiek jo nemėgstu, ir dalyvauju jo veidrodžio performanse, ir turbūt jaučiu visas tas reakcijas, kurias jau suaugęs Knausgårdas norėjo išprovokuoti. Kaip kokia Marina - ir visai neblogai jam tas sekasi.
Kartais į tualetą neidavau ištisas dienas, norėdamas sukaupti kaip reikiant didžiulį rudį, nes man tas teikė džiaugsmo. O kai prispirdavo taip stipriai, kad nė neįstengdavau stovėti stačias ir vaikščiodavau susirietęs, nepasiduodavau pagundai, nes tada visą kūną maloniai mausdavo, - iš visų jėgų įtempdavau raumenis ir tarsi įstumdavau rudį atgal. Bet šis reikaliukas kėlė pavojų: jei per ilgai kentėdavau, rudis galiausiai tapdavo toks didelis, kad vos galėjau išstumti. Jergutėliau, kaip kartais skaudėdavo stumiant tokį milžiną! Vos ištverdavau, nes skausmas apimdavo visą kūną, sprogdino mane iš vidaus, OOOOO, rėkdavau, OOOOOO!!! O galiausiai, kai jau atrodydavo nebeįmanoma, jis išeidavo.
Dievulėliau, koks geras jausmas!
Koks nuostabus jausmas tada mane užplūsdavo!
Skausmo nebėra.
Rudis tualete.
Mane užliedavo ramybė. Tokia ramybė, kad nė nenorėdavau atsistoti ir nusivalyti užpakalio, tik dar pasėdėti ir ja pasimėgauti. (p. 98)
Kai pradėjau lankyti treniruotes, mama nupirko man sportinį kostiumą. Patį pirmą, todėl lūkesčių turėjau didelių, įsivaizdavau visą žvilgantį mėlyną "Adidas" kaip Ingvės, o gal net dar geresnį - "Puma" arba bent "Hummel", arba "Admiral". Bet mamos nupirktas kostiumas neturėjo apskritai jokio prekės ženklo. Buvo rudas su baltais dryželiais, ir nors spalva man atrodė šlykšti, ne tai buvo blogiausia. Blogiausia buvo neblizgi, matinė ir šiek tiek glamžyta medžiaga, todėl kostiumas ne laisvai krito, bet buvo prigludęs prie kūno ir mano užpakalis atrodė dar labiau atsikišęs nei įprastai. Tik apie jį ir galvojau apsivilkęs kostiumą. Net tada, kai prasidėjus treniruotei išbėgau į aikštę, neįstengiau nuvyti šalin minties apie užpakalį. Užpakalis tikriausiai apvalus kaip balionas, mąsčiau vydamasis kamuolį. Mano sportinis kostiumas rudas ir bjaurus, galvojau. Atrodau kaip mulkis. Mulkis, mulkis, mulkis. (p. 203)
- O mūsų klasėje gabiausias esu aš, - pasakiau. - Bent jau geriausiai sekasi rašymas, skaitymas, gamtos ir socialiniai mokslai. Ir vietinė istorija.
Ingvė pažvelgė į mane.
- Nesigirk, Karlai Uve.
- Nesigiriu, tai tiesa! - atšoviau. - Nėra jokių abejonių! Skaityti moku nuo penkerių. Išmokau anksčiau už kitus klasės vaikus. Dabar skaitau laisvai. O Edmundas vyresnis už mane ketveriais metais, bet išvis nemoka skaityti! Pats taip sakei! Tai reiškia, kad ir už jį esu gabesnis.
- Užsičiaupk jau, gana girtis, - paliepė Ingvė.
- Bet aš sakau teisybę. Ar ne, Edmundai? Ar ne tiesa, kad nemoki skaityti? Kad mokaisi papildomai? Juk tavo sesė eina į mano klasę. Ir ji nemoka skaityti. Tik vos vos. Juk nemeluoju.
Tada nutiko keistas dalykas: Edmundo akys pritvino ašarų. Jis staigiai nusisuko ir ėmė žingsniuoti tolyn.
- Ką čia išdarinėji! - sušnypštė Ingvė.
- Bet juk teisybę sakau, - neatlyžau. - Aš geriausias savo klasėje, o jis blogiausias saviškėje.
- Eik namo, - paliepė Ingvė. - Tuojau pat. Daugiau su mumis čia nebūsi.
- Ne tau spręsti.
- Užsičiaupk ir drožk namo! - subarė jis ir uždėjęs rankas man ant pečių stumtelėjo eiti.
- Gerai, gerai, - nusileidau ir ėmiau lipti kalva. Kirtau kelią, įsmukau pro duris, nusirengiau. Juk teisybę pasakiau, tai kodėl jis mane stumdė?
Kai atsiguliau į lovą ir pradėjau skaityti, akis užplūdo ašaros - juk tai neteisinga, juk pasakiau tiesą, kaip neteisinga, neteisinga. (p. 206)
Pati šauniausia buvo vardu Mariana, mes susitikinėjome dvi savaites, kartu čiuožinėdavome pačiūžomis, paskui ji atsisėdo man ant kelių ir pabučiavo, tai nutiko per jos gimtadienio šventę, kurioje buvau vienintelis pakviestas berniukas: Mariana atsisėdo man ant kelių, laikiau ją apkabinęs, kol kalbėjosi su savo draugėmis, mes pasilaižėme, bet galiausiai nebeįstengiau tęsti, nors ji man ir patiko, be jokių abejonių, buvo viena iš gražiausių mokykloje, jei ne pati gražiausia, o gal net truputį jos gailėjausi, nes ji gana skurdžiai gyveno tik su mama ir seserimi, beveik neturėjo naujų drabužių, todėl motina kiek galėdama stengėsi patobulinti jų senus drabužėlius, gautus iš giminaičių, bet būdamas jos kambaryje jutau tuštumą, o bučiuodamasis klaustrofobiją, dažniausiai troškau tiesiog iš ten dingti, todėl galiausiai paprašiau Dago Magnės perduoti Marianai, kad tarp mūsų baigta. Tą pačią dieną padariau didžiulę klaidą: kai ji bėgo pro stoginę nuo lietaus, kur stovėjau, aš, grynai reflekso vedamas, pakišau koją. Mariana parkrito veidu į asfaltą, pasipylė kraujas, ji verkė, bet ne tai buvo blogiausia, o tasai įtūžis, kurį paskui liejo visos kitos mergaitės, susibūrusios jos palaikyti. Nereikia nė sakyti, jog kelias savaites nebuvau itin populiarus. Niekas nesuprato, kad visai nieko blogo galvoje neturėjau, padariau tai tik dėl smagumo. (p. 329)
Vienas iš sodų, pro kuriuos pravažiuodavau, buvo neseniai įveistas, jo viduryje augo viena vienintelė nedidelė obelaitė, nokinanti vieną vienintelį obuolį, todėl nereikėjo didelės vaizduotės numanyti, kad tas obuolys buvo svarbus šeimos tėvui, tą pavasarį pasodinusiam obelį, ir jo dviem mažiems vaikams, kasdien lekiantiems patikrinti, ar obuolys - nes jiems tai buvo Obuolys - jau sunoko. Tai buvo jų obuolys, kas rytą mindamas į mokyklą mačiau jį siūbuojant ant šakos ir galiausiai nugvelbiau.
Bet ne vakare, kai tamsu ir tikimybė, kad mane pastebės, menka, ne - aš nugvelbiau jį ryte pakeliui į mokyklą, tiesiog palikau dviratį šalikelėje, persiropščiau per tvorą, perėjau pievelę, nuraškiau obuolį ir žingsniuodamas atgal suleidau į jį dantis. Prieš akis atsivėrė naujas pasaulis. (p. 391)
January 4, 2019
Prošlu čitalačku godinu započeo sam prvim, a završio drugim tomom Knausgorovih ispovesti, bivajući podjednako fasciniran i inspirisan sa oba podjednako, možda za nijansu dodatno oduševljen drugim delom u kojem se tako sirovo iskreno i otvoreno bavio roditeljstvom, tridesetim godinama, stvarnošću modernog doba, dakle svemu onom što sam mogao da doživim veoma lično u datom trenutku. Potreban je kao beg, ali ne od stvarnosti, već pravo u nju, pomislio sam, potreban je kao zaštita od gomile prosečnih patetičnih štiva kojima obeležimo svaku sezonu. Prošla godina ne beše dobra ni po čemu, ali je zahvaljući njemu ipak dobila omotač, otisak i oklop koji će je čuvati takvu kakva je. Knasgor je omotač, rekoh sebi i započeh sa trećim delom novu godinu i novu sezonu.
Trećem delu nisam dao najvišu ocenu, jer se neka hijerarhija edicije mora napraviti, makar u ličnim favoritima, mada i zato što zaista nisam uživao na maksimumu intenziteta kao sa prva dva. Što ne znači da nije bilo čisto zadovoljstvo prolaziti norveškim porodičnim životom osamdesetih, naprednim školskim sistemom, samostalnošću dece, nama nepoznatim dvenvnim ritualima (ispijanja čaja sa mlekom na primer) kao i bolno teškim odnosom sa autoritarnim, neosetljivim i neostvarenim ocem, čije zahvatanje u dubinu tek predstoji u nastavku, koliko sam video.
Detinjstvo mlađeg brata i sina nateralo me je na otvaranje sopstvenih sanduka sećanja, zapravo otvaralo ih je samo od sebe, osvetljavajući događaje za koje sam bio ubeđen da nisu pohranjivani u dugotrajnu memoriju, uglavnom jednostavnih, dečačkih i ni po čemu posebnih. Tu su, dakle, hvata ti Karl Uve.
https://bezimenaknjizevnazadruga.word...
Trećem delu nisam dao najvišu ocenu, jer se neka hijerarhija edicije mora napraviti, makar u ličnim favoritima, mada i zato što zaista nisam uživao na maksimumu intenziteta kao sa prva dva. Što ne znači da nije bilo čisto zadovoljstvo prolaziti norveškim porodičnim životom osamdesetih, naprednim školskim sistemom, samostalnošću dece, nama nepoznatim dvenvnim ritualima (ispijanja čaja sa mlekom na primer) kao i bolno teškim odnosom sa autoritarnim, neosetljivim i neostvarenim ocem, čije zahvatanje u dubinu tek predstoji u nastavku, koliko sam video.
Detinjstvo mlađeg brata i sina nateralo me je na otvaranje sopstvenih sanduka sećanja, zapravo otvaralo ih je samo od sebe, osvetljavajući događaje za koje sam bio ubeđen da nisu pohranjivani u dugotrajnu memoriju, uglavnom jednostavnih, dečačkih i ni po čemu posebnih. Tu su, dakle, hvata ti Karl Uve.
https://bezimenaknjizevnazadruga.word...
February 8, 2016
[continued from here]
At 15%. The sun sets early on October 21st on the Northern Hemisphere. Another day over. One of the roughly ninteenthousand I have spent so far in this life. No way to bring them back; unless you have a time machine; like a DeLorean, for instance, equipped with a Flux capacitor. Today they would arrive, Marty McFly and Doc Brown, if they were real. From tomorrow we can say that the story of Back to the Future is set in the past. I knew that thirty years ago, but I didn't think about it. Funny how time flies—
Karl Ove drags his childhood into the present and calls it slumhüttenähnlich. Good luck in translating that. I'm too tired–the sun has already set.
kisses for me, all of the kisses for me, bye, bye, baby, bye, bye.
You said you hummed this song on the afternoon of your first school day while making slipcovers for your new schoolbooks. I mean this song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szavq... Wait! Don't click on it! It's the worst kind of earworm. And it has become a caricature of itself over the years. Anyway, your first school day was when? 1974 or 75, when you were five or six? Because that's when school starts in Norway; I looked it up on Wikipedia. But the shitty song wasn't released until March of 1976! Now what am I supposed to think now? That you're lying to us? That your memory is not so sharp after all? Or that this book of yours isn't the kind of memoir that everybody thinks it is and that the Karl Ove in your book isn't really you. I hope to hear from you soon. Sincerely etc. etc.
So, goodbye Karl Ove. For now. Next time I'll see you in February, because I have a strict reading plan for your books.
PS: The German titles of this "autobiographical project" are: Dying, Loving, Playing (this one), Living, Dreaming, and ???. Volume six isn't published yet, and my wild guess for its title is Writing.
[to be continued here]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
At 15%. The sun sets early on October 21st on the Northern Hemisphere. Another day over. One of the roughly ninteenthousand I have spent so far in this life. No way to bring them back; unless you have a time machine; like a DeLorean, for instance, equipped with a Flux capacitor. Today they would arrive, Marty McFly and Doc Brown, if they were real. From tomorrow we can say that the story of Back to the Future is set in the past. I knew that thirty years ago, but I didn't think about it. Funny how time flies—
Karl Ove drags his childhood into the present and calls it slumhüttenähnlich. Good luck in translating that. I'm too tired–the sun has already set.
·•●•·Dear Karl Ove, I wanted to tell you so much about this book of yours, Mim Kamp. Or should I say Din Kamp? Anyway, I'm at 30% now in the third volume, the one about your childhood on Tromøy? Of course, you know that. I really really like it. It speaks to me. You speak to me. I always thought your memory must be the best there is. All these details from so many years ago. It's really really impressive. Until I found this:
kisses for me, all of the kisses for me, bye, bye, baby, bye, bye.
You said you hummed this song on the afternoon of your first school day while making slipcovers for your new schoolbooks. I mean this song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szavq... Wait! Don't click on it! It's the worst kind of earworm. And it has become a caricature of itself over the years. Anyway, your first school day was when? 1974 or 75, when you were five or six? Because that's when school starts in Norway; I looked it up on Wikipedia. But the shitty song wasn't released until March of 1976! Now what am I supposed to think now? That you're lying to us? That your memory is not so sharp after all? Or that this book of yours isn't the kind of memoir that everybody thinks it is and that the Karl Ove in your book isn't really you. I hope to hear from you soon. Sincerely etc. etc.
·•●•·At 66%. There's something going on here, but I can't tell what it is just yet. Water and tears and his own reflection in the dark pane. And garbage upon garbage in the woods. Excrements and his penis in a bottle. Ha ha. Never mind. Porn magazines, of course. And the colors. It's not the father, probably, although he's a dick. It's not the mother either. At least Karl Ove started reading seriously now. That'll help. Him and maybe me too— The nose bridge of my glasses has left a small dent on my forehead.
·•●•·At 100%. Volume three of six is finished! I'm about forty percent done with the whole novel (if you count the pages) and Karl Ove still managed to keep me guessing. There's a lot in this book that you can read just as it is apparently intended to be read, as his childhood memoir when he was about 6 to 14. But there's also some strange undertow, a dark line, that runs all through the text, but under the surface. This is Karl Ove living in waterland. If you read this book you'll discover much water in it. That's not surprising considering the fact that the whole story is more or less set on an island. But there's a lot more water than there needs to be. Rain and snow, showers and bathtubs, the water that's left by his brother in the sink for Karl Ove to wash himself with. And then there are his tears, plenty of them. In German we say (translated) someone has been built near the water, meaning he weeps easily. That's the case with him. His tears are flowing virtually all the time. Sometimes for good reason, most often not. And then there is this watershed moment, when he recalls reading a certain book, and comes to some conclusion about himself. In terms of the plot this book was the most easily accessible of the three I read so far.
So, goodbye Karl Ove. For now. Next time I'll see you in February, because I have a strict reading plan for your books.
PS: The German titles of this "autobiographical project" are: Dying, Loving, Playing (this one), Living, Dreaming, and ???. Volume six isn't published yet, and my wild guess for its title is Writing.
[to be continued here]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
December 9, 2023
De niño, cuando tenía 4 ó 5 años, que probablemente es lo más allá que uno puede recordar, mi abuela solía cocinarnos sesos de cordero a la romana. A mí me encantaban, pero ignoraba qué parte del cuerpo del pobre animal estaba realmente comiendo. Y cuando lo supe no me importó, porque el sabor lo tenía ya muy interiorizado y el gozo era muy superior a los escrúpulos que pudiera sentir por comerlos.
Los sesos a la romana no son para todo el mundo, de eso no hay duda. Como tampoco lo son los percebes, las criadillas o los higadillos de pollo.
Knausgård es como los sesos de cordero: su literatura no es para todos. A muchos les aburre o les provoca indiferencia; a otros incluso les produce cabreo y rechazo: “¿y a mí qué coño me importa si esta mañana te has levantado, has meado de color verde claro y después de desayunar un bol de cereales con leche has salido de tu casa, has llamado al timbre de la de Geir y os habéis ido los dos al colegio en el autobús escolar que para junto al supermercado? ¿Qué me importa que los sábados comieras gachas o el camino que recorrías hasta llegar al vertedero en busca de revistas porno o cascos para vender? Sí, comprendo que a muchos les pueda incluso llegar a enervar tanta descripción, tanta banalidad, página tras página.
Porque los sesos de cordero no son para todo el mundo.
Pero a quienes nos gustan, los consideramos uno de los manjares más exquisitos. Y así es para mí la narrativa de Karl Ove Knausgård. Una prosa que te atrapa, unas descripciones magistrales, unos personajes perfectamente perfilados. No busques mucha acción, grandes dramas o tensión narrativa. No la hay e incluso a veces, cuando crees que va a haberla, el episodio queda inconcluso. Pero no puedes dejar de leer. Giras una página y luego otra, y otra más. Y ya te has olvidado de lo que te explicó tu profe de narrativa; porque aún sin acción, con descripciones que ocupan páginas enteras, Knausgård te subyuga y ya no puedes soltar el libro.
No seré yo quien diga que el estilo del noruego es proustiano, eso que lo juzgue cada lector, pero en esta tercera parte de su monumental “Mi lucha”, La isla de la infancia, su narrativa me ha transportado a mi infancia, como la magdalena.
O los sesos de cordero.
Y no es que no haya conflicto dramático en La isla de la infancia; lo hay y fuerte. Con un padre tan tirano como el de Karl Ove, cualquiera entiende la relación entre ellos que se atisbaba en la primera parte de la saga, La muerte del padre, una relación basada en el miedo y el odio, y los sentimientos de Karl Ove hacia su progenitor: un tipo que manda a su hijo a la cama sin cenar por crímenes tan execrables como perder un calcetín en el vestuario o cogerle la pala nueva para quitar la nieve de la entrada de la casa de unos ancianos vecinos. Un hombre que no duda en agredir físicamente a su propio hijo de siete años o en burlarse de él por llorar o no saber pronunciar correctamente la erre. Esa implacable violencia de baja intensidad pero continuada en el tiempo, física y sobre todo psíquica.
La novela narra la vida del pequeño Karl Ove desde los 6 a los 13 años en una urbanización de clase media en la isla a la que llegó con apenas un año y en la que vivió con sus padres y su hermano mayor, Yngve, durante ese periodo. Aparte del drama familiar, encontramos en la novela un poco de lo esperable: la relación de Karl Ove con sus amigos, concursos de meadas, problemas con las chicas, obsesión por el sexo, su avidez por la lectura, los intentos de formar una banda de punk, ciertos episodios de acoso escolar o la frustración por unas lágrimas que aparecen, a su pesar, siempre en el momento más inoportuno. Tal vez porque uno vivió episodios similares, es fácil empatizar con el pequeño Karl Ove.
La isla de la infancia es una lectura imprescindible para quienes ya entraron en el universo de Knausgård en las dos entregas anteriores de la saga, pero también para quienes deseen disfrutar de la perfección estilística de unas descripciones extraordinarias o quienes, simplemente, deseen poner a prueba los fundamentos que se enseñan en las clases de narrativa.
Y para quienes disfruten comiendo sesos de cordero a la romana, por supuesto.
Los sesos a la romana no son para todo el mundo, de eso no hay duda. Como tampoco lo son los percebes, las criadillas o los higadillos de pollo.
Knausgård es como los sesos de cordero: su literatura no es para todos. A muchos les aburre o les provoca indiferencia; a otros incluso les produce cabreo y rechazo: “¿y a mí qué coño me importa si esta mañana te has levantado, has meado de color verde claro y después de desayunar un bol de cereales con leche has salido de tu casa, has llamado al timbre de la de Geir y os habéis ido los dos al colegio en el autobús escolar que para junto al supermercado? ¿Qué me importa que los sábados comieras gachas o el camino que recorrías hasta llegar al vertedero en busca de revistas porno o cascos para vender? Sí, comprendo que a muchos les pueda incluso llegar a enervar tanta descripción, tanta banalidad, página tras página.
Porque los sesos de cordero no son para todo el mundo.
Pero a quienes nos gustan, los consideramos uno de los manjares más exquisitos. Y así es para mí la narrativa de Karl Ove Knausgård. Una prosa que te atrapa, unas descripciones magistrales, unos personajes perfectamente perfilados. No busques mucha acción, grandes dramas o tensión narrativa. No la hay e incluso a veces, cuando crees que va a haberla, el episodio queda inconcluso. Pero no puedes dejar de leer. Giras una página y luego otra, y otra más. Y ya te has olvidado de lo que te explicó tu profe de narrativa; porque aún sin acción, con descripciones que ocupan páginas enteras, Knausgård te subyuga y ya no puedes soltar el libro.
No seré yo quien diga que el estilo del noruego es proustiano, eso que lo juzgue cada lector, pero en esta tercera parte de su monumental “Mi lucha”, La isla de la infancia, su narrativa me ha transportado a mi infancia, como la magdalena.
O los sesos de cordero.
Y no es que no haya conflicto dramático en La isla de la infancia; lo hay y fuerte. Con un padre tan tirano como el de Karl Ove, cualquiera entiende la relación entre ellos que se atisbaba en la primera parte de la saga, La muerte del padre, una relación basada en el miedo y el odio, y los sentimientos de Karl Ove hacia su progenitor: un tipo que manda a su hijo a la cama sin cenar por crímenes tan execrables como perder un calcetín en el vestuario o cogerle la pala nueva para quitar la nieve de la entrada de la casa de unos ancianos vecinos. Un hombre que no duda en agredir físicamente a su propio hijo de siete años o en burlarse de él por llorar o no saber pronunciar correctamente la erre. Esa implacable violencia de baja intensidad pero continuada en el tiempo, física y sobre todo psíquica.
La novela narra la vida del pequeño Karl Ove desde los 6 a los 13 años en una urbanización de clase media en la isla a la que llegó con apenas un año y en la que vivió con sus padres y su hermano mayor, Yngve, durante ese periodo. Aparte del drama familiar, encontramos en la novela un poco de lo esperable: la relación de Karl Ove con sus amigos, concursos de meadas, problemas con las chicas, obsesión por el sexo, su avidez por la lectura, los intentos de formar una banda de punk, ciertos episodios de acoso escolar o la frustración por unas lágrimas que aparecen, a su pesar, siempre en el momento más inoportuno. Tal vez porque uno vivió episodios similares, es fácil empatizar con el pequeño Karl Ove.
La isla de la infancia es una lectura imprescindible para quienes ya entraron en el universo de Knausgård en las dos entregas anteriores de la saga, pero también para quienes deseen disfrutar de la perfección estilística de unas descripciones extraordinarias o quienes, simplemente, deseen poner a prueba los fundamentos que se enseñan en las clases de narrativa.
Y para quienes disfruten comiendo sesos de cordero a la romana, por supuesto.
March 27, 2020
У трећем тому „Моје борбе“ пратимо рано детињство главног јунака. Доста тога је овде, наравно, домаштано и домишљено. Посебно је то видљиво у описивању осећања, свакако се види да су то размишљања и осећања једне зреле особе, само смештене у главу десетогодишњака. У сваком случају, занимљиво је да видимо као се одвија рано детињство обичног детета у Норвешкој, седамдесетих и осамдесетих година ХХ века. Кнаусгор је слабашни, крхки дечачић, ничим посебан, веома осетљив у односу према вршњацима, али и другима. Главни је, ипак, Кнаусгоров однос са оцем (тиранином), који је обликовао његово целокупно детињство, али и цео даљи живот. Заиста је ужасавајућа хладнокрвност са којом се отац односи према својој деци, а још је већа храброст да се сопствена осећања према таквом оцу вербализују и ставе на папир.
October 21, 2014
I had hoped to get in ahead of the backlash with a backlash to the backlash kind of thing, where I defend KOK against people who are tired of hearing about him. Well, too bad. Not only are the reviews of this volume uniformly positive (hence, no backlash yet), but I found it overwhelmingly boring. So, I am doubly stymied.
At the start of the book, KOK calls his childhood a ghetto-like state of incompleteness. He suggests that childhood is meaningfullish, but not really meaningful, because (yawn) memory distorts the past and anyway, the child is a developing self, not a self intact (well said). This is followed by 400 pages of anecdotes about being a pre-pubescent and pubescent boy who suffers greatly at home (his father, whom we already know to be a monster, is a monster here too) and at school (where his sufferings seem to be more of the 'everyone feels like they were unpopular in middle school' kind). He plays with his anus. He plays with his penis. He reads books. Dad gets angry. Repeat.
Only around page 250 do we get a glimpse of the narrator rather than the character. He laments the absence of his mother from his memories and, by extension, from this book. I lament it too. This lasts for a page and a half before we're back to reportage.
The key to this volume comes around a hundred pages later. A teacher neglects to read KOK's essay aloud, because you have to give the other young children time to exhibit. He decides to get his revenge. "Next time I would write as badly as I could." That is precisely what we have here. A book written about an 8-13 year old, in the head of an 8-13 year old, with the syntactical, linguistic and philosophical sophistication of an 8-13 year old. I know KOK's better than that; I know he's choosing to do this. He is choosing to write as badly as he can. It's pretty bad.
And then at the very end there's *one* moment of adult level art. After a hundred pages of young men playing with their willies and looking at porn (not judging, just describing), [spoiler alert], young KOK comes across a picture of a naked woman--a holocaust victim. Suddenly sex is thrown into question. Then he sees a teacher ogling a 13 year old girl just as young KOK, too, is ogling her. Again, sex is thrown into question. It's a reminder of what he can do when he's not busy pretending to be very young.
At the start of the book, KOK calls his childhood a ghetto-like state of incompleteness. He suggests that childhood is meaningfullish, but not really meaningful, because (yawn) memory distorts the past and anyway, the child is a developing self, not a self intact (well said). This is followed by 400 pages of anecdotes about being a pre-pubescent and pubescent boy who suffers greatly at home (his father, whom we already know to be a monster, is a monster here too) and at school (where his sufferings seem to be more of the 'everyone feels like they were unpopular in middle school' kind). He plays with his anus. He plays with his penis. He reads books. Dad gets angry. Repeat.
Only around page 250 do we get a glimpse of the narrator rather than the character. He laments the absence of his mother from his memories and, by extension, from this book. I lament it too. This lasts for a page and a half before we're back to reportage.
The key to this volume comes around a hundred pages later. A teacher neglects to read KOK's essay aloud, because you have to give the other young children time to exhibit. He decides to get his revenge. "Next time I would write as badly as I could." That is precisely what we have here. A book written about an 8-13 year old, in the head of an 8-13 year old, with the syntactical, linguistic and philosophical sophistication of an 8-13 year old. I know KOK's better than that; I know he's choosing to do this. He is choosing to write as badly as he can. It's pretty bad.
And then at the very end there's *one* moment of adult level art. After a hundred pages of young men playing with their willies and looking at porn (not judging, just describing), [spoiler alert], young KOK comes across a picture of a naked woman--a holocaust victim. Suddenly sex is thrown into question. Then he sees a teacher ogling a 13 year old girl just as young KOK, too, is ogling her. Again, sex is thrown into question. It's a reminder of what he can do when he's not busy pretending to be very young.
September 15, 2018
This is likely where many hopeful readers abandon the Min Kamp quest. The terrain is challenging enough, the sorting of childhood and all that baggage. This particular trek is slick with tears: Karl Ove cries on almost every page. There's a measure of Bernhard in this prevailing condition, this lachrymose loop.
This young protagonist is stuck in a longing, acceptance and materialism can be the devil to many a poor soul. The upward possibility of the time derails tradition, the encounters with the grandparents illustrate this estrangement. An ambivalence reigns, one matched by nature.
My own thoughts were leaning to three stars but the final quarter presents a writhing spasm of contradictory impulses about sexuality. Such demanded pause. My thoughts drifted up from the page. K Pop was playing in the bistro and I considered the teenage heartache of a three minute music video. The kids even modify their features on their selfies. At least the pain remains genuine.
This young protagonist is stuck in a longing, acceptance and materialism can be the devil to many a poor soul. The upward possibility of the time derails tradition, the encounters with the grandparents illustrate this estrangement. An ambivalence reigns, one matched by nature.
My own thoughts were leaning to three stars but the final quarter presents a writhing spasm of contradictory impulses about sexuality. Such demanded pause. My thoughts drifted up from the page. K Pop was playing in the bistro and I considered the teenage heartache of a three minute music video. The kids even modify their features on their selfies. At least the pain remains genuine.
December 13, 2020
Üçüncü durağın sonuna geldik, Karl Ove'un hafızasına diyecek yok, çocukluğunu sanki yeni yaşıyormuş gibi anlatırken bazen can sıkan ve bu kadar detaya ne gerek vardı diye tat kaçıran fakat tamamını göz önünde bulundurunca (özellikle çocukluk anıları dinlemeyi severler için) keyifli bir ciltti.
Babası ile olan gergin frekansları, oldukça sulu gözlü bir çocuk oluşu, azarlanacağını bile bile yaptığı tüm hataları, düşünce tarzını ve bakış açısını görünce şu an ki Karl Ove'un eylemlerini daha iyi anlıyor insan.
Babası ile olan gergin frekansları, oldukça sulu gözlü bir çocuk oluşu, azarlanacağını bile bile yaptığı tüm hataları, düşünce tarzını ve bakış açısını görünce şu an ki Karl Ove'un eylemlerini daha iyi anlıyor insan.
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