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I asked how much it cost. He replied that it was free. Free? I echoed in surprise. Yes.
funny him reacting to a FREE beach. my reaction to salisbury not being free
Tousled and heavy with sleep they would open their eyes
can people be “tousled “?
unique. It almost seemed as though the prerequisite for creating art was to renounce art.
like Nietzsche’s texts Gombrowicz’s were descriptions of a path, not the path itself.
Fuck off, Karl Ove. You stupid little shit. I didn’t even reach Gombrowicz’s boot laces. The mere idea of saying something as honest and true about Norwegian literature anywhere near as honest as he did about Polish literature gave me a stomachache. Yes, my hands trembled at the very thought, that I could actually describe everything as it was. That all I had to do was just go ahead and do it.
Perhaps I could do that? If only I’d had a really profligate, sleazy past in the docklands of Buenos Aires, lived at the bottom like a crab, and gorged myself shamelessly on everything I came across,
oh ok, heres that question of : do you need to live a really weird life or be crazy to make art or say something profound about the world. what if you’re just a middle class father of two kids with a bad dead father. maybe thats what hes saying this whole time
For this reason, reading Gombrowicz was humiliating, the standard was so high, and to make things worse I agreed with just about everything he wrote.
thats interesting. if you agree with everything what more do you have to say. do you have to disagree with someone to be aboe to respond to it? no.
“Karl Ove’s quite well known,” Linda said with a smile. Why did she say that? Jesus Christ, how foolish.
He repeated that you pay a one-time sum and you could be here for a few weeks every year. It was like buying a stake in an apartment or in a mountain cabin, he said with a smile to me. No maintenance, no cleaning, everything taken care of, so we could have a luxury holiday every year for the rest of
KARLLLLLLLL karl ove buys a timeshare lmao
“Me too,” Linda said. “Imagine you actually considering buying a time-share!” “Yes, it’s unbelievable. But the worst is that I didn’t catch on. I didn’t get what was happening until afterwards! But you did, right?”
We decided never to go on such a vacation again,
it was like an augury.
Happiness isn’t in my nature, but happy was how I felt.
The darkness seemed to hover in the air, which became grayer and dimmer by the minute as stars appeared in the sky one after the other, hesitantly, a little shyly, as though they didn’t really trust the memory of how they had shone the previous night, proud and firm and minerally unforgiving. But, bit by bit, the memory came back to them and soon the whole of the now black sky was full of sparkling lights.
Leopold has nothing of Stephen’s yearnings and aspirations, he doesn’t want anything else, he’s at home. Leopold is a complete person, Stephen Dedalus an incomplete person. Only Stephen can create, for to create is to want everything, to create is to want to come home, and the whole person doesn’t feel that unrest, that urge, those yearnings.
Hamlet, Stephen, Jesus, Kafka, Proust were all sons, not fathers.
A friend of Linda’s had given us the use of her apartment, which the children reduced to bedlam within seconds.
Ingrid Elam had said, “I don’t think much of this,” which was a mark of quality for me.
I looked down, not wishing to intrude on their grief.
a harpist played Bach,
!!!!! lindas fathers funeral
It was half past three, I went down to the kitchen and made some coffee, went up to the loft in the other house and started writing.
in which the fourth book, which has just come out here, is reviewed. I skim-read it when I came home. Bo Bjørnvig had written it. He said that for the first time in the series I hadn’t been quite honest, and this was noticeable throughout the novel. A slightly false note, he said. I hadn’t thought about the novel since I wrote it, but when I read that comment, it came back, and I knew that what Bjørnvig wrote was true. I had not been honest in that book.
In this book, therefore, I committed neither to the novel nor to reality. For this reason it became a strange book, in which I do the opposite of what an author should, I cover over the truth.
book 4 is not entirely true
theme, I wrote the truth by committing to the novel; in the first two books I wrote the truth by committing to reality. In Book 3 this link is weaker, only to fall away entirely in Book 4. However, everything I said about myself was true.
This is not an excuse, and this is not my way of saying Book 4 is a poor novel, it is still full of the terrible banality and vigor of youth, it is a comedy of immaturity, and despite being conventional it is inimitable, for the simple reason that it arose under precisely the conditions it did. But it is not the truth.
were lawyers involved in any of the other volumes?
The remorseless wind of time, which takes away as much as it brings, has also swept through these pages.
cheesy
She had read the manuscript now, she said. What shall we do? she said. She began to cry as she said that. What shall we do now, Karl Ove? And suddenly I snapped. I sobbed. I said, I don’t know. I cried. I said, I don’t know, Linda. I don’t know.
fuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Tore was thirty-six, I was forty.
andthey spend this time trying on clothes and trading music
The book was more than eleven hundred pages long, and that meant the three months it spanned had enormous importance, like something beyond time.
LOL did karl write this bc he was jealous of Geir
though I would never write a biography about anyone for as long as I lived,
The world was a river of impressions and I was connected to them, that was how it felt, everything had significance, I could examine an acorn for ten minutes as though it contained the secret of the universe, which it did, that was why I stared at it.
It has been an experiment, and it has failed because I have never even been close to saying what I really mean and describing what I have actually seen, but it is not valueless,
is this the most important sentence
“Well, we are,” Yngve said in Norwegian. “Are what?” “Rar, strange,” he said. “Rar in Swedish means nice,” I said.
After reading Proust it was impossible not to see such an old theater as an underwater scene, a kind of coral reef with mussels or shells for seats and fishtails or jellyfish tentacles for women’s dresses.
We can strip down reality, layer by layer, and never reach its core, for what the last layer covers over is the most unreal of all, the greatest fiction of them all, the true nature of things.
how kantian
everyone repaired to a big Irish pub nearby.
I occasionally answered a question from the others, that was how life had become, I was someone you asked questions.
Giske. I’d understood that the only way of managing was to act as if this didn’t mean a thing, as if you were completely uncorrupted, while inside you were thrilled by the meeting and hoped someone would notice.
The sky was gray and wintry, and the people I saw along the road, some kids on bikes and a woman pushing a stroller and carrying a heavy Co-op bag, were not in contact with it, the way crabs are not in contact with the surface of the sea,
i wonder how he avoids coming off as too narcissicst, or exceptional, like he never claims to be the only one who feels this way or sees the world in this detail
The problems started again with Book 4. Instead of using authentic names and sending the manuscript to individuals, I used made-up names and just forged ahead with publication, I couldn’t face another storm. But still people were angry. I wrote Book 5 in eight weeks, by then I really didn’t give a damn,
I had asked my mother not to read Book 3. After reading the second book she had texted me to say that it hurt to be demeaned. After reading Book 4 she called me and was as angry as she could be.
The story about him, Kai Åge Knausgaard, is the story about me, Karl Ove Knausgaard. I have told it. I have exaggerated, I have embellished, I have omitted, and there is a lot I haven’t understood. But it isn’t him I have described; it is my image of him. It’s finished now.
THE NAME
If there were a choice between couples therapy and death, I would unhesitatingly choose death. I
Next time I went I talked to the nurse who had read Mein Kampf. He had gone to the cabin together with another nurse and Linda.
thats great and dumb that MK is seen as a symbol for toughness
Now it is 7:07, and the novel is finally finished.
holy shit
the whole way I will revel in, truly revel in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.
