Redpill me on this guy, where do I begin with him? My library has a ton of his stuff.
>>25293374>Redpill me on this guyhe's good>where do I begin with himMy Struggle vol 1>don't you want to say anything elseThere isn't anything else to say
>>25293376What else have you read by him and what are your other favorites? My library has a dozen of his books, i want to take out more than one.
>>25293374My stuggle is very good, but it almost becomes kind of voyeuristic, because it reads like a novel but is autobiographical. Sjelens Amerika is fantastic, it’s an essay collection about existential themes and art, but I just saw that there’s no English translation (I’ve read it in german). Still I highly recommend that.A time for everything is very interesting because it’s so different from my struggle and his later style. It’s a book about angels and a kind of retelling of cain and Abel’s story. It’s odd, but quite intriguing.
>>25293495how does it compare to remembrance of things past?
>>25293376I'm reading vol. 1 and I'm about 40 pages in, when does it get good?
I read volume 1 and have volume 2 on my shelf. really enjoyed it but going back to back on my struggle seems exhausting
i only know this guy because of how much of a poseur he looks in every promo picture, he really nails that "i am tortured, having to listen to the hum of Miele appliances" look
>>25293503I haven’t read any Proust yet
>>25293517never
>>25293548he does have russell brand vibes
In My Struggle one of his teachers tells him he'll never be a great novelist, only an academic, and he seems determined to prove them right.
>>25293517Page one but having a soul is required for enjoying it. Sorry.
>>25293503Not even remotely comparable, moron.!
>>25293972>>25293503He's often compared to Proust because both will take an everyday occurrence and take off on a tangent related either to his childhood or to a bit of philosophy he read. But it's a bad comparison because Proust is working through a plot, while Knausgaard is Seinfeldian in refusing to tell one.
>>25294093I can understand the talking-point about Proust, it's easy shorthand for retarded journalists who need to communicate something superficial about Knausgaard's achievement, but at deeper levels it's not a relevant comparison. Look at what everyone remembers from Proust: Swann and Odette, Charlus's weird behavior, the death of Marcel's grandmother, Mlle. Vinteuil's fascinating character arc, Albertine's evasions and flightiness. Not so much the narrator himself: he turns brilliant phrases, obviously, but a great deal of the time they're about other people and their doings. When we zero in Marcel, it's so that we can see him reacting to someone: even the novel's primary plot arc, the love affair with Albertine, is one based entirely in his responses to this woman's erratic behavior. Only at the very end do things really come back to the narrator himself, and even there it's far less based in his self-perception than in his perception of the changes in others.Whereas with Knausgaard what one takes away is one incident after another directly involving the narrator: his travails bringing beer to a party, his rock band, his self-mutilation at a writing retreat, his awkwardness in confronting a heavy-drinking relative, and so on. The other characters do things at the periphery of Karl's consciousness, and the things they do are somewhat interesting, but not the personalities themselves, not in the same way as the figures Proust vividly portrays. The things going on around Karl become occasions for him to spin his own meditations (not even profound in that regard because I could just either read Musil or Proust for that) in a far more self-centered way than Proust tends to do (and I don't mean "self-centered" in a negative way there). If you don't take to that, that's fine of course, but it's a different thing from what Proust is doing.
>Seinfeldian
>>25293517you can just say you don't like reading, it's fine
>>25293517Given those responses the book sucks and you can drop it.
>>25293964>you'll never be a great fantasy football player, only a great football playerWhat a weird criticism by that teacher
>>25293374I'd start with school of night. It's in the middle of a series but it's a standalone novel. If you like that, then go back to the my struggle series.
>>25294482MC did literally nothing wrong in that
>>25294283>i dont read
>>25295432Consider the illustrated I Ching, perfect for non reading wastrel
>posting comics on a literature board is LE EPIC
its great and book 6 is a total slog. his thoughts are fucking unreadable but the stories and how his prose are incredibly addictive outside that. I perosonally skipped all the retarded poetry musing in book 6
I was listening to the Great Courses series on the Vikings yesterday and the lecturer said probably three or four times that Icelandic sagas continue to have a major influence on Scandinavian novels/literature. Is this true? How?
>>25295494Book 6 is the best one anon
>>25295525celane suckoff irritated me. I liked the series for the autistic detail not a 60 page breakdown of a poet i dont care about
>>25295507it is a great mystery why icelandic literature might have made its way to scandanavia surely
>>25295494book 6 sounds omega based, sounds like im reading him now
>>25295540I‘m asking about themes or structure or something identifiably connecting them.
>>25293374Reading Morning Star right now and it’s really comfy. Havent read his other works
>>25293374His work is shallow and shitty, but it unfortunately encapsulates our current times perfectly. The novels are essentially just diaries containing pages and pages of mundane neurotic self-pity, some gossip about his own family, and a sprinkling of pop-psychology. As others in this thread have pointed out, he embraces the familiar "brooding author" persona by constantly posing in dim light with a cigarette. Self-absorbed failed or aspiring authors enjoy his work because it nurtures the fantasy that success as an artist can be achieved through merely committing to the artistic persona. The work itself is not really relevant. Reading it is a ritual by which you convince yourself that anyone's self-absorbed musings can be "great literature" if presented in a tastefully typeset and bound Penguin edition. So there is still hope for you. You too can be hailed as a great literary genius simply by being an articulate, well-read, self-pitying, neurotic guy.
>>25295716sounds kinda awful, i hate confessional fiction that masquerades as artsy diary entries. i think toni morrison got it completely right decades ago when she started criticizing newer writers for only writing about themselves, essentially conflating introspection with navel-gazing.
>>25294366I wish I had experienced something similar, how do you respond to something like that?
>>25295540that's not what was asked, tardo
>>25295494same; that holocaust poetry essay thing was boring, but everything else was a pleasure to read.
>>25295532>I liked the series for the autistic detail>but not for the autistic detailHow did you get this far being this stupid?
>>25295432>I don't think And reading isn't a substitution, midwit.
>>25296770>i still don't read
>>25296213He means social autism as opposed to actual autism
What the fuck was his father's problem?
>>25296057I would rather read a thousand pages of him musing on poetry than ten about his awful wife
Do you think his daughters will write their own version shittalking him?
>>25300213aren't you reading the wrong books, then?
