In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays

by Karl Ove Knausgård, Martin Aitken (Translation), Ingvild Burkey (Translation)

From the New York Times bestselling author of the My Struggle series comes a collection of ambitious, remarkably erudite essays on art, literature, culture, and philosophy.

In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English. In these wide-ranging pieces, he reflects openly and with penetrating intelligence on Ingmar Bergman's notebooks, Anselm Kiefer, the northern lights, Madame Bovary, Rembrandt, and the role of an editor. Accompanied by black-and-white reproductions throughout, these essays illuminate Cindy Sherman's shadowlands, the sublime mystery of Sally Mann's vision, and the serious play of Francesca Woodman. They capture Knausgaard's remarkable ability to mediate between the personal and the universal, between life and art. Each piece glimmers with his candor and his longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Literature, Scandinavian Literature, Art, Philosophy, Writing

416 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2018

About the author

Nominated 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.

Reviews

[Adam Dalva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really strong essay collection, thrumming with Knausgaard's preoccupations and obsessions - his strongest work, I think, doesn't appear here (his amazing "The Terrible Beauty of Brain Surgery" (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/ma...) , and it has something of the dynamic of any essay collection, in that it comes into an out of focus, but I enjoyed this.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've read all of My Struggle and A Time For Everything and were wondering which Knausgaard to read next (The Seasons Quartet, Home and Away, the Munch book, Inadvertent?), this one deserves consideration as your first stop.

It revisits some of the Munch book's focus on Kiefer, Hamsun, and Stephen Gill, and reminded me of Book Four (teaching up north) and Book Five (becoming a writer, friends with young influential writers named Tore and/or Geir), but for the most part it's a welcome extension of familiar dimensions.

It's sequenced well, opening with essays on photographers and artists before moving on to Houllebecq's Submission, Hamsun, an essay at one point on one page comparing War and Peace, Ulysses, and 2666, an excellent short piece on Madame Bovary, the title essay about being called a Nazi rapist pedophile by a Swedish feminist professor easily the most charged with emotion, all with familiar glimpses into domestic life in southeastern Sweden and growing up in Norway.

As in The Seasons Quartet, thematic emphasis is on inner and outer, horizontal and the vertical, but also a new register or dynamic in this: the inside of the internal, the world inside the world -- escape from reality deeper into reality to its core. Best when writing about writing, editing, writers, and daily life, more so than when describing photographs and paintings. Excellent when considering his work's relation to politics, especially in Beirut but also, again, the title essay. Sometimes felt a little rote, especially toward the end of essays, like he defaults to the same topics and themes (inner/outer, creating art that's free), trying to tie things up, undermining in a way his emphasis on writing in the direction of the unknown.

Two tasty quotations:

"We live in a culture that cultivates youth, cultivates simplicity, cultivates the puerile . . . A novel is the opposite: it seeks complexity, it seeks diversity of meaning, it seeks truth in places apart from where truth is sloganized or kept in a frame where it's held and unable to move, rigid and immutable. Even a novel that deals with simplicity and regression is complex and expansive, and this is so by virtue of it being a novel -- otherwise it's something else."

"The situations in which creative writing takes place are often complicated, to put it mildly -- anyone even slightly familiar with the writing profession, as we so grandly refer to it, knows that is one great big entanglement of neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination -- and working with writing in that kind of context means that a concept such as quality is a poor standard indeed, at least if we think of quality as an objective form. In literary editing, quality is a dynamic entity, more a process than a grade, and one that will vary according to the individual writer and editor."

Added these to my to-read list after KOK's recommendations: Njal's Saga, Dollar Road, The Best Intentions, Only Human.

Highly recommended if you're a fan -- not just for completists. Not a recommended starting point, unless you only read essays, in which case, this won't disappoint. Ultimately, I wanted to read it when I wasn't reading it and it made me want to write. Finished on Election Day 2020, at times almost forgetting what's at stake.

[8stitches 9lives · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Land of the Cyclops is a collection of texts about the significance of literature and art, about the place of destiny in modern human life, about being earthbound, but carrying an infinity in it. Knausgaard writes about literature, painting, photography, about the creation of art and the conditions for creating, with the underlying desire to see behind the categories that shape our view of ourselves and the world. He writes about Anselm Kiefer, Anna Bjerger, Jon Fosse, about Michel Houellebecq and Laurie Anderson, among many others.

Literature is unfinished as life, meaningless as life, diverse as life, directionless as life, and can sometimes, even as life, condense into enormous clusters of meaning and world presence. This is a captivating and beguiling anthology with art as its central theme but that ruminates on profound questions surrounding the concept of art and sets foot into the metaphysical by exploring what it means to be human. It's a thought-provoking set of essays that try to understand the nature of reality and truth. Long-time fans of Knausgaard’s work will find much to love within these pages. Highly recommended.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be called a paedophile in the cyclopes’ biggest newspaper is not a pleasant experience. It’s not the end of the world, of course, and it is a legitimate opinion, but it came from a professor of literature, and there’s no other country I know of where literature professors call their writers paedophiles and tell them what they should and shouldn’t write about. That could only happen in the land of the cyclops.

I’ll admit that I haven’t had a lot of luck connecting with the work of Karl Ove Knausgård; I have found something offputting and exhausting in following his "fictional" explorations into the difference between the real and “the real”. Even so, I acknowledge that he’s a major contemporary voice, and having found this opportunity to read his opinions free from the artifice of novel-making, I settled in with an open mind. Most of the essays in In the Land of the Cyclops are about art and artists and their creative processes, with a particular focus on imagery that might make the viewer/reader uncomfortable or confused. And although I hadn’t known anything about the circumstances that led to Knausgård writing the title essay (from which the opening quote was taken), it seems after the fact that this collection represents the philosophy of an artistic ideologue; someone devoted to smashing through all boundaries that culture or society might think to impose on artistic endeavors. Once again, I had trouble connecting with Knausgård’s ideas here, but I cannot deny that he is a major thinker whose essays are provocative and relevant. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

When August Strindberg placed his camera on the ground and let it take pictures of the clouds in the sky, it was that progression he was pursuing and trying to complete, towards the world beyond the human world, the way it is in itself, seen by the soulless eye. With that, the purging of the heavens that had been going on for at least a hundred years was achieved: the clouds were not painted, not composed, not even seen, merely registered by a mechanical apparatus without will or thought, a machine for the recording of the most willless, thoughtless and arbitrary entities imaginable: formations of cloud. In this a place emerges, but it is not the world without human presence, for the world is not something that is, but something that becomes, and all pictures of the world as it is are thereby utopian in the original sense: they are nonplaces. Which is to say, art.

This collection treats a diverse array of subjects, but for the most part, the thirty-three essays concentrate on defining and exploring “art”. When it comes to writing, Knausgård often cites the tension between themes of the horizontal (relativistic) and the vertical (the absolute); the liminal space between human interiority and externality; and the basic impossibility of using words (a cultural construct) to describe the world as it actually is. When it comes to the visual arts, Knausgård makes the case that where a painting or photograph can evoke something preverbal, they are in that moment capturing something truthful and real. To this end, Knausgård writes about (among other topics): The feminist modern photography of both Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman (I wish the ARC included the photos promised in the finished book but everything Knausgård mentions is Googlable); the literary career of fellow Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun; there are book reviews of Michel Houellebecq's Submission and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (“the perfect novel”, “the best novel that has ever been written”); Knausgård often invokes the films (and notebooks) of Ingmar Bergman; and frequently references Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, and Homer’s Odyssey (where else can you find a cyclops and pigmen both?) The tone is consistently scholarly, the topics fundamentally esoteric, and this collection demanded of me careful reading to make meaning.

That the world with which we are so familiar is a meticulous construct, and that the connections we take to be so obvious are in fact arbitrary, is something all visual artists and photographers know, for it is the resistance they encounter when they work, the weight that must be lifted. Any photograph involves selection, the focus on something deemed important, and in this lies an element of compulsion. In photographic art, that selection involves artistic proficiency, and such proficiency, which is preexistent, is determinative of what may be seen. How can we see beyond it? The compositional process and all its various choices mean inevitably that the photographer becomes part of the picture. How can we get beyond that?

By using “In the Land of the Cyclops” as the title essay, and including so many other essays that champion the artistic merit of some pretty challenging material, I can only conclude that Knausgård’s primary goal with this collection was to argue for the artist’s freedom to explore uncomfortable subjects. I can go along with that. I was exposed to some new ideas and some new art in this book — always a welcome experience — and it reaffirmed my idea of Knausgård as an important contemporary voice (even if I don’t completely connect with him, and even if this collection kept putting me to sleep; I think my brain just kept wearing out as it tried to keep up.)

[Brendan Monroe · Rating 3 out of 5]

After finishing Karl Ove Knausgård's monumental "My Struggle" series back in May 2019, I took a break. I had spent so much time in Knausgård's head over the previous couple of years that I needed some time back in my own.

Then last month, as part of my yearly subscription with the glorious publishing house Archipelago Books, I strode down to the mailbox to find this beautiful hardcover collection of 18 Knausgård essays awaiting me.

In some ways, after the breathtaking highs that the "My Struggle" series hit, this is something of a letdown. These are, after all, just essays, not about Knausgård's own life as "My Struggle" was, but about the various sorts of art — mostly photography and literature — that he admires.

Knausgård inserts so much of himself into each of these essays that I wouldn't recommend this collection to anyone who isn't already an ardent fan of his. Still, these essays can be grouped into two categories — those that are neatly built around the subject that he's tackling and are, as a result, poignant and revealing, and those that are rambling and superfluous.

For me, eight of these essays — just shy of half the collection — fell into that later category, most of which were paeans to various photographers Knausgård has a thing for. Art is in the eye of the beholder, to be sure, but too often Knausgård will go on a tangent about a photograph or other artwork that, rather than shedding light on something I hadn't previously seen in the work, I'm left disoriented and utterly baffled by words that take up an awful lot of space, but say nothing.

There are so many digressions, so much lofty language — language so soaring as to seem almost spiritual, but is ultimately empty — that often times I'll finish an essay feeling like I'm trying to grasp a strand that's fraying wildly in the wind.

These essays all end on lines so frustratingly vague and vapid that whatever sense you might have had that Knausgård was getting at something disintegrates and is blown away by the final turned page.

I've excerpted the last line or two of each of these eight essays so that you might get some sense of what I'm talking about.

"Seamlessly, art removes us from and draws us closer to the world, the slow-moving, cloud-embraced matter of which our dreams too are made."

"It is to that place those lifeless body parts point, but they do so in a photograph, which, once our disgust and nausea have passed, becomes but one among the myriad of images that make up the sky above our selves."

"It feels as if she cast herself before our gaze in the expectation that someone there would receive her. Someone there, which is us, we who see."

"That tremble is the soul's reply to a question it is unaccustomed to addressing. Where am I now? I am here."

"We live in the social world, which is sameness, the light of faces, but we exist in the nonidentical, in what is unknown to us, it is the other side of the face, that which turns away mutely, beyond the reach of language just as the blood trickling through the tiny capillaries of the brain is beyond the reach of the thoughts thinking them, a few millimeters away, in that which upon closer inspection turns out to be nothing more than a chemical and electrical reaction in the sponge-like object that the neck holds aloft."

"Perhaps the task of literature now is to go where the story can't reach. In other words, to where nothing is, but everything is becoming."

"They are images without ego, and this is one of their most unusual qualities; they approach the forest, and the forest does not shrink back, does not seek to hide itself away in any assumption as to its nature, but stands as it is, the way it always has and always will, marginally, outside our world."

"The way they sit motionless as their horrid noise issues into the landscape, as if only then they become aware of themselves, that this is where they are now."

Let me assure you that these lines are just baffling, just as inane, as part of the whole from which they were taken as they are here.

These essays remind me in some way of the creative writing classes I took in college. At the time, I thought that any piece I wrote that ended with such indecipherable but seemingly important lines was smart, that it said something about what a thoughtful person I was.

If I'm being a bit hard on Knausgård, it's because I'm a huge fan. His 400-some-odd-page essay on Hitler ("The Name and the Number") sandwiched inside My Struggle: Book 6 is one of the best things I've ever read, as is the entire series. But half of these essays feel as though they've been commissioned and, as a result, seem to be written just because they need to be written, not because the author really cares about the topics at hand. All passion and clarity seem to have been excised in favor of an overabundance of purple prose.

It wouldn't be so plain to see if all the essays were like that, but they aren't. When Knausgård hits on a topic that he really cares about, you can tell.

The essay on Michel Houellebecq's controversial novel Submission is the primary case in point. It may be the best review of the novel ever put in print. Essays on Madame Bovary, Knut Hamsun, and the iconic Swedish Director Ingmar Bergman are also insightful.

Knausgård's title essay is focused on cancel culture and the idea, most often seen on the political left, that a writer isn't allowed to write about whatever or whomever they want in their fiction (see the furor around Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses for the most infamous modern example of this). Knausgård raises some excellent points here, but dubbing these critics "cyclops" dulls the point and makes the whole thing come off a bit silly, like the other half of a playground duel.

Overall, this collection feels too flighty, too thrown together to leave anything other than a middling impression. I'm glad I read it, but I'm also glad I read it after "My Struggle," otherwise I may not have bothered reading anything else by the same author.

[Einar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeg sitter ved den høye benken, på den høye krakken, ved vinduet, på biblioteket, på Tøyen. Det er mørkt ute, jeg ser bare skyggen av de forbipasserende, jeg ser refleksjoner av bokhyllene bak meg, jeg ser lysskiltene til utestedet på andre siden av torget: "bar", "mat", "scene". Jeg leser en tekstmelding fra Leif som jeg ikke forstår, men jeg tror han inviterer på middag. Han bor i nærheten, det tar meg noen minutter å gå bort. Jeg skal si det samme til han som jeg sa igår: Knausgård er en mye bedre essayist enn romanforfatter. Men jeg skal ikke begrunne det. Kanskje jeg gjenforteller scenen der Knausgård har bæsjet hotelldoen på Newfoundland tett.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

👁️ IN THE LAND OF THE CYCLOPS: ESSAYS by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken, 2018 by @archipelagobooks

Dipped in and out of Karl Ove's essays over the whole of November. Art and literature mined deeply - as always, if you are familiar with Knausgaard. He turns his eye and his critique to some modern photographers I was unfamiliar with, and I continue to marvel at the intricacies he can draw out of a still image - weaving memories, references, anecdotes, and art theory into an essay.

The best essays in my estimation come later in the book. Loved "Idiots of the Cosmos" about the Aurora borealis, but also about Proust, mathematics, and Roberto Bolaño's 2666:

"But then something happens that transcends everything, something new comes along, and often it's hard to know exactly what it is, precisely because it's new and exists outside the categories that constrain our thinking, and yet in accordance with something inside us. For me this was Roberto Bolaño's 2666." (pg 215)

(🤷🏼‍♀️I maintain The Savage Detectives is the stronger work, but all for Bolaño appreciation however it comes)

In the title essay, KOK turns to fire 🔥 criticizing the Swedish literary establishment, calling them Cyclops and backward, and all sorts of other well-articulated diatribes about the place where he has lived for decades.

"To Where the Story Cannot Reach" is about writing and editing. It's an enjoyable look at editors who have worked with writers to shape literature, and KOK's own relationship with his editor.

✨If you like Knausgaard, you'll like this one. I skimmed some essays that didn't hold my interest as much (the Houellebecq one) but the strong ones were quite good.

[the overstuffed bookshelf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and Archipelago for this advanced reader's copy of In the Land of the Cyclops by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

First, this is a book of essays which are all about Arts & Photography to various extents. Some are written about specific artists and some are about art and artists in general. Second, this is not a breezy, easy read. Anyone who has read anything by Knausgaard knows not to expect that from his work. It's important for anyone picking up this book to understand the author's style as well as have some knowledge of the content to fully appreciate In the Land of the Cyclops. I'll admit that some of the artists featured were new to me but as a fan of the way that Knausgaard writes I appreciated his ability to draw me in to subjects that had previously I had had no knowledge of.

I thoroughly enjoyed In the Land of the Cyclops, even making note of some particularly meaningful (to me) parts to refer back to. I'm not going to go on and on, if you like Knausgaard, you'll like In the Land of the Cyclops. If you've never read Knausgaard, this shouldn't be your first foray into his works. I'll leave you with my favorite quote from the book, "My life is surface, depth my yearning". If that quote hits you as hard as it hit me, let's be friends and wait patiently for the next masterpiece by Karl Ove Knausgaard together.

[Braden Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

“When the ‘I’ stands outside the world.”

My final read of 2024 so happens to fall with Knausgaard’s essay collection “In the Land of the Cyclops.” Without writing anything too lengthy on this brilliant book, I’ll note that this collection—whose gamut ranges from an existential commentary on Kierkegaard in Beirut, dream analysis, ruminations on Pascal under the aurora borealis, essays on the magical photography of Cindy Sherman, Stephen Gill, and Francesca Goodman, and personal reflections on art, the craft of writing, as well as diaries of idiosyncratic, skin-crawling readings of Dante—all act as a kind of supplementary apocrypha to the philosophically tangential prose-style of “My Struggle.”

This being my 15th(!) book by Knausgaard, I always admire so much his courage to write dangerously in the face of political ideologies that would accuse him of endless transgression, the literary professors who tell writers, “you can’t write this!” He constantly reminds his readers that their world is not “the” world, it is not the category of “the real,” in fact, “the real” is often far more terrifying than their familiar world, and that we must first notice our one-eyed myopia that we see from, that is, “the image of the world rather than in the world itself.” Knausgaard tactfully draws us, through the artwork of Anselm Kiefer or the literature of Knut Hamsun, back out into the fields and backwaters, into the dangers of the forest, out under a cold moon, into thickets of differentiation, into the realm that the novel takes us: the realm of the individual. This is a far cry from the heard-minded mass of sameness that exists in the propagandistic, ideologically-minded land of the cyclops, for whom it is better not to “think about areas of reality that aren’t as they think they should be.”

Knausgaard writes, “what our own gaze contains is something we are usually unaware of, since it is such an integrated part of our identity, and the way we see the world is such an integral part of the world that we hardly ever become aware of our gaze or what it imbues the world with.” This is the role of art—to cleave the gaze from the object, to defamiliarize, to radically alter, to make strange. It is the clash of what we impose on the world and the world apart from our imposition. Speaking of Hamsun’s so-called “dirty modernism”, Knausgaard writes, “our grandest notions, ideals and superstructures, whether religious, cultural, or political, dissolve when they come up against the world, flaking like dandruff on its shoulders, settling like dust under its sofa, a scattering of crumbs on its table.”

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What if we got rid of television? The Internet? It would give us back our sense of place, but also our pain, and for that reason it’s a nonstarter, absence of pain being what we strive for and have always striven for, this is the essence of modern life. It’s why we live in the image of the world rather than in the world itself.”

In a series of essays focused primarily on art, Karl Ove Knausgaard reflects on artists and moments that have affected him profoundly, including a number of provocative American women photographers, Knut Hamsun (always), Ingmar Bergman, short stories from the Old Testament, Kierkegaard, and Emma Bovary. Knausgaard writes with his characteristic openness, an honesty that often veers into uncomfortable realms, and this is perhaps why I enjoy him as much as I do. I know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but his style and self-deprecating wisdom is refreshing to me, time and time again. My only small quibble is that the format of the book—square with heavy glossy pages, so as to display the photographs well—makes for an awkward reading experience for a book with so much text. I am happy, however, that I bought it, as I hope to return it in time.

[William McCall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe a little less than a 3 if I’m being completely honest. Fascinating essays on literary theory and what it means to be an author are dragged down by some esoteric forays into art history that were difficult to follow.

[Tobias Cramer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Det er til stadighed forundrende at se, hvordan den pinlige nordmand fra Min Kamp-bøgerne kan virke så rolig og sikker, når han skriver essays om kunst og kultur. Her skriver han med en kirurgs præcision. Ikke ét snit ligger forkert. Der er en langsommelig indkredsende tilgang på spil, når han undersøger alt fra Anselm Kiefer til Michel Houellebecq.

Lige så snart essayene igen bliver mere personlige og trækker forfatteren med ind i teksten, får vi en opvisning i selvhad og pinlige optrin. Knausgårds modus operandi, når det gælder ham selv, er at stille en elefant ind i en glasbutik, sætte femhundredewatts følgespots på den og så beskrive inderligt, hvad den føler, når den første glaskaraffel uvægerligt splintrer.

Og sådan balancerer I kyklopernes land: Mellem den indsigtsfulde iagttager og den selvbebrejdende klodrian. Fælles for begge ender af spektret er detaljegraden og det indlevende blik. Det synliggør det partikulære i kunsten og det ætsende pinlige i hans optræden.

Som ved alle andre essaysamlinger er der tale om en rodebutik. Nogle tekster virker relevante - andre virker som fyldstof. Uanset hvad er Knausgård en mesterlig essayist, der viser hvad denne oversete genre har at byde på og alene derfor kan det klart anbefales at læse denne tåkrummende og indsigtsfulde tekstbunkelademad.

[Melting Uncle · Rating 4 out of 5]

The essays in Karl Ove Kanusgaard’s In the Land of the Cyclops are similar in style to his other books (the My Struggle series, the seasons quartet, etc.). At this point, Knausgaard has grown into his own style that combines anecdotes from his life, descriptions of nature and inanimate objects, abstract philosophical tangents, and examinations of art or literature. If you’ve read his other books and come to enjoy this, you’ll know pretty much what you’re getting into with this collection.

The best essays are towards the end of the book. “Idiots of the Cosmos” may be the best example of the author at peak essayistic power. It begins ostensibly about the northern lights then quickly shifts focus and moves effortlessly through a pretty wide range of topics including Proust, Pascal, Joyce, Bolaño, Tolstoy, Norwegian news, gender, technology, Don Quixote, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, and Peter Sloterdijk. The title essay finds Kanusgaard in “angry” mode lashing out at Swedish academics and press. “To Where the Story Cannot Reach” is a fascinating look at the relationship between author and editor.

Other parts of the book were less exciting. The parts that dragged were either 1) hardcore analysis (i.e. similar to the Paul Celan explication part in the middle of My Struggle 6) or 2) summarizations of either books or pictures (similar to parts of K’s Munch book). The book is lavishly printed (very heavy with shiny pages) and includes some color pictures of paintings or photographs. Unfortunately they weren’t able to include a picture of every photograph that Kanusgaard describes in his essays on photographers like Sally Mann, Francesca Woodman, and Cindy Sherman so you either have to look the pictures up or take his word for it. The essays on specific books or authors (Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries, Kierkegaard) can feel a little bit like thinking-out-loud in a way that’s sometimes dull or ponderous. And even when he’s writing about books I’ve read there are times when I don’t understand what Karl Ove is talking about.

At this point I’ll probably read anything Knausgaard publishes in English. He writes in a way that feels absolutely contemporary but at the same time he draws a lot from the history of art and literature, so that his work includes Bjork, Massive Attack, the Velvet Underground, Ingmar Bergman, but also Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, Dostoevsky. He has a curiosity that’s contagious.

Relative to his other books 4/5
Relative to books by other authors 5/5

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

15th book read in 2025

At the end of last year, I decided to read one book a month from the backlog of books I have received from my subscription to Archipelago Books. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s collection of essays, received in January 2021 was next up on that list.

I don’t exactly remember when I first started that subscription. In 2015 I read Ann Morgan’s book The World Between Two Covers, in which she followed her project to read at least one book from every country in the world. All my reading friends know I love a reading project, so I adapted hers to my own quest to read more books translated from other languages besides English. Some time after that I discovered Archipelago Books, a non-profit publisher based in Brooklyn, NY. At first I would order the occasional book from them. I began to keep track of the translated books I read each month and the countries/languages from which they came. Eventually I signed up for their subscription at the lowest available level ($15 per month with an average of 12 books sent to me per year.)

That is how I came to have In the Land of the Cyclops on my Archipelago shelf. I have read the first in Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, which I fully enjoyed for the intimacy he shares about his growing up years. He proved to be a deep thinker and meticulous observer of life around him in Norway.

I do not often read essay collections. For me they are even less enticing than short story collections. I employed my usual practice, applied to short stories and poetry, and read one per day. These 18 essays were collected from work he had published in various places from 2000 to 2020. Some are reviews of books or paintings. Some are a gathering of thoughts he had on life, reading, and writing. Out of the 18 pieces I found four that elicited deep feelings or excitement in me.

He has said in interviews that he writes every day. I try to write every day, if only in my journal or in writing short reviews of the books I read. Honestly about the only things I do every day are sleep and eat and read. Reading is my favorite activity in life and of course it inspires me to write. I think I am always writing in my head!

I hated having to write essays in school. In high school I would put off writing papers for English class until the night before they were due. I would write one draft late at night and turn it in. Or I would get an extension and turn it in late. Always a first draft. Looking back though, it was my start as a writer.

This collection brought all those thoughts back to me. It was worth reading.

[Wesley Glover · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed a handful of these essays on, among other topics, Kierkegaard, Dante, the photographers Cindy Sherman and Stephen Gill, the writers’ Gustave Flaubert, Knut Hamsun, Michel Houllebecq and the painter Anselm Kiefer.

Knausgaard is endlessly curious and has a rare gift at drawing the natural world and all its phenomena closer to us. He is at his best writing about science and the infinitesimally small. Perhaps it is the romantic in me, but there is an existential fullness I feel when the abstract becomes intimate in his writing, when his self, or what used to be called the ‘soul’, reaches for the sublime. Using these artists as his launch point, Knausgaard investigates the notion of self and its relationship to the natural world, to culture, and to the ‘other’. I don’t think these essays have the same narrative thrust and force as his 120 mph auto-fiction, but then again, how does one live up to such inflated expectations?

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the essays definitely deserve 5 stars.

[Eric Sutton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Guardian called the essay collection "anemic," and I can see why to an extent - Knausgaard does have a penchant for discursiveness - but at the same time I find his writing teeming with life despite his somewhat amateurish attempt at the genre. For example, Knausgaard is not a literary critic in the traditional sense - he even admits to not having reading Kierkegaard or Houellebecq before - but he turns that naiveté into the core of his writing: how the experience shaped him, why he was fearful in the first place, what his initial impressions were, the context in which he read the texts, etc. He always, without fail, writes about his life, and that's why I read most everything he produces. I don't want to read Houellebecq criticism necessarily, but I will read Knausgaard on Houellebecq because I know that it will be so much more than literary criticism. His success is his fearlessness. He writes about his life, as good writers do, without contrivance, not caring if it falls short. Sure, some of the essays waned and took odd directions, but I never found them to be pedantic. He takes chances through his medium that so few are compelled to take, which I consider inspiring. The titular essay is the best one. It drew parallels to contemporary progressive movements here in the US. Knausgaard is called a Nazi for writing about Hitler, a pedophile for writing about underaged sex in his first novel. Where is a line drawn? When can one safely write about taboo subjects without being vilified? In our craze to deconstruct oppressive hegemonies - a movement of which I am in full support - we tend to destroy anything that might make us uncomfortable and, in turn, might make us think. It becomes a monolithic ideology, a scary prospect, and Knausgaard allegorically captures this phenomenon well, albeit brutally.

In the Land of the Cyclops is by no means his best work, but I enjoyed reading pieces that existed somewhere in between his seasonal quartet vignettes and his long-form non-fiction.

[Lachlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Knausgård I felt an exhilaration I have not felt since my teens and early twenties when I'd discovered a new author whose works spoke to me on the deepest level, enlarging my perspective, or immersing me in a new form (Dostoyevsky, Jung, Wade Davis, Hesse - hey, I was young!).

Throughout these meditation on art, nature, life, and writing, Knausgård's prose switches from lyrical/poetic, to internal/sensory, to art critical, to a deeply reflective philosophical mode. This sort of panoramic, multi-perspectival writing creates a powerful effect, bridging the intellectual and the sensory, the natural and the human, the personal and the analytical. As a struggling writer, the style is a revelation.

In The Land Of The Cyclops is the most honest, human and humane writing I have read in many years. I only hope we see another collection of essays released in English soon.

[Bücherangelegenheiten · Rating 4 out of 5]

„In the Land of the Cyclops“ ist ein Sammelband voller Essays des norwegischen Schriftstellers Karl Ove Knausgård. Ob Essay hier der richtige Begriff ist, sollten Lesende für sich selber entscheiden. Treffender wäre vermutlich eher Gelegenheitsschriften, denn bei den 18 Beiträgen in diesem Buch handelt es sich eher um Rezensionen, Ausstellungsbesprechungen, Betrachtungen über Dante, Ingmar Bergman, Dostojewski und eine Einleitung zu einer neuen Ausgabe von "Madame Bovary“.

Knausgård wandert durch seine Gedanken und schreibt über Kunst, Bücher, sein Leben und über das Träumen. Besonders stark in den Vordergrund rücken dabei nicht wie man vermuten könnte, die Literatur, sondern Bildende Kunst und Fotografie. Die Frage, die alle Essays verbindet, ist die nach der Kraft von Kunst, was Kunst ist und was Kunst mit den Personen macht, die sie Konsumieren.

Besonders lesenswert ist aber auch das, was Knausgård zu literarischen Werken zu sagen hat. Das Essay über Michel Houellebecqs „Unterwerfung“, in dem er zugibt, dass eine Rezensionsanfrage vonnöten war, um ihn dazu zu bringen, sich erstmals mit dem Autor Houellebecq und seinem Werk zu befassen, ist besonders gelungen.

„In the Land of the Cyclops“ wäre kein Knausgård-Buch, wenn Knausgård nicht auch über sich selbst schreiben würde, wie er mit den Problemen der Welt umgeht, was ihm Sorgen bereitet. Knausgård reflektiert sich und seine Umgebung auf dem Papier und lässt die Lesenden an dem Prozess teilnehmen. Diese Egozentrik zieht sich durch das gesamte Werk von Knausgård, dass kann man verwerflich finden, interessant ist es alle mal.

Alles was Knausgårds Schreiben so besonders macht, die Reflexion, die Vorsicht, das Beschreibende und das Philosophische, findet man auch in seinen Essays wieder. Wer sich traut Knausgård auf seiner Reise zu begleiten, wird viel Freude mit „In the Land of the Cyclops“ haben.

Eine klare Leseempfehlung!
Note: 2+

[Sorin Hadârcă · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knausgaard îs a fine essayist, just short of outstanding. The only thing that's lacking in his essays is the why: what connects the topics to their author and why should we care. Without this quality, the selection appears to be random - coming back from office I saw a tree and here's what I thought about it. Not enough. Almost as if the I of the author has been purposefully concealed. Perhaps this is the case: after reaviling a lot in My Struggle, privacy turned out the first priority. But for a reader that's used to enjoying Karl Ove's company that's a minus.

[Frederik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vidunderlig samling af samtidsrelevante essays fra vor tids mest relevante skandinaviske forfatter. Knausgård spidder den ulidelige svenske politiske korrekthed (svenskere er kykloper!), og sætter på fremragende vis ord på billedkunstens bydende nødvendighed igennem anmeldelser af værker af Anselm Kiefer og diverse nordiske kunstnere. En forfriskende Knausgårdindsprøjtning, der i den grad dulmer abstinenserne og savnet efter afslutningen af Min Kamp-bøgerne.

[George Bieber · Rating 5 out of 5]

My introduction to Knausgard; overwhelmed by the comfort I felt in reading what he put down. All of the essays eventually come back to literature and/or art/artists but in between there is plenty of deep personal insight (which I could relate to; we are only about a month apart in age and only a few thousand miles in location :), but clearly his pursuit of writing only parallels my culinary destiny). I've ordered several of his novels so expect to hear more from me about Karl. 5Stars+++

[Biblio Files (takingadayoff) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Knausgaard writes fiction and memoir as well as essays, and until this collection, I haven't read any of it. I chose this collection because I generally like reading essays, especially essays written by novelists, even if I am not a fan of the novels themselves. I've abandoned novels by Amy Tan, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Marian Keys, and many others, and yet found their essays to be most enjoyable. Knausgaard is not at all enjoyable. He is very dark, everything seems to have a layer of grime around it. Is it just a Scandinavian thing?

[Andrew Bertaina]

In some ways, I'm no longer a particularly good critic of Knausgard. Reading his work is now akin to checking in with an old friend as I've spent more time with his work and life than I have with many family members. That aside, I suppose I keep checking in to read Knausgard on the photography of Sally Mann and Stephen Gill or on the editorial relationship between authors and writers because it's so wide-ranging. Beyond that, he's one of the preeminent living landscape writers, which most people, outside of Toril Moi, have entirely disregarded.

[Jake Schell · Rating 4 out of 5]

These essays are thought provoking and enjoyable to read. "The Other Side of the Face," "In the Land of the Cyclops," and "To Where the Story Cannot Reach" were my favorites. Worth the the time to read and reflect on these pieces.

[Nika · Rating 5 out of 5]

he writes as if he has the experience and outlook as vast as ten people. i wish i could write like this :'-(

[Ivan K. Wu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not an essayist. Best work is probably behind him.

[Owlseyes]

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...

[Jan Jindřich Karásek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Does this man ever miss?

[Alex O'Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the most moving collection of essays I have ever read