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Hi -- KOK wanted to call it Argentina because Argentina was his favorite soccer team growing-up and represented to him an almost mythically distant place and therefore would contrast with the proximity to his experience of everything in the project. His friend Geir convinced him that it had to be called My Struggle and KOK has said that it's really the only ironic thing about the book -- how it's about washing dishes instead of taking over the world -- but apparently the last book to come this fall has a 200-page essay on Hitler and eeks out similarities between his young self and Hitler's young self, how in another world he could've become a Hitler and Hitler, with some artistic encouragement, could've become more like him. Or at least that's what I remember from his interview with Ben Lerner in Brooklyn a few years ago.
Interesting, that would be the explicitly opposite what I said above, which seems absolutely logical somehow.
Also, Geir was right one, not a single bit of humor (that I could detect) in the books (so far). Jokes and irony is pretty old and tiresome these days, but refraining from it for thousands of pages on end it quite a feat (and almost unbearable).
Thanks for the info Lee!
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Lee
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May 08, 2018 10:16AM
Hi -- KOK wanted to call it Argentina because Argentina was his favorite soccer team growing-up and represented to him an almost mythically distant place and therefore would contrast with the proximity to his experience of everything in the project. His friend Geir convinced him that it had to be called My Struggle and KOK has said that it's really the only ironic thing about the book -- how it's about washing dishes instead of taking over the world -- but apparently the last book to come this fall has a 200-page essay on Hitler and eeks out similarities between his young self and Hitler's young self, how in another world he could've become a Hitler and Hitler, with some artistic encouragement, could've become more like him. Or at least that's what I remember from his interview with Ben Lerner in Brooklyn a few years ago.
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Interesting, that would be the explicitly opposite what I said above, which seems absolutely logical somehow. Also, Geir was right one, not a single bit of humor (that I could detect) in the books (so far). Jokes and irony is pretty old and tiresome these days, but refraining from it for thousands of pages on end it quite a feat (and almost unbearable).
Thanks for the info Lee!
