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Jesus attends a Rhythm Time class (I have no idea what this is) and meets a woman for whom he has an erection. For some reason, this does not surprise me. He reads better books than the one that we are reading (The Brothers Karamazov and Demons by Dostoevsky) and tells us that he never thinks while he reads. Jesus smokes a cigarette on the east-facing balcony of his home and is fascinated by the “orangey red” of the brick houses below: “The orangey red of the bricks!” He drinks a Coke Light: “The cap was off and the Coke was flat, so the taste of the somewhat bitter sweetener, which was generally lost in the effervescence of the carbonic acid, was all too evident”. He sees an old woman staring through the window of a Subway. Jesus thanks the hostess, Stella, for inviting them to her party. In the evening, Jesus, his wife, and his daughter attend a party. Jesus takes his children to a McDonald’s and then to the Liseberg Amusement Park. We learn that raising children is difficult. All of the epiphanies are banalities.įor most of this review, I will refer to Karl Ove Knausgaard as “Jesus,” since he resembles a cigarette-smoking Jesus on the cover of the English translation of the second volume.
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He spends his time, and wastes our own, recounting trivialities, stupidities, and banalities. He is now in his forties and has a wife and three children. The first volume dealt with Knausgaard’s unimportant childhood Volume Two concerns the middle of the author’s life, his present. There is not a single metaphor in the text, as far as I can tell, and the extended metaphor (perhaps even the pataphor?) is one of Proust’s most salient literary characteristics. Knausgaard calls his logorrheic autobiography, My Struggle ( Min Kamp), a “novel,” but in what sense is it a novel? It is completely devoid of novelistic properties. Those who compare Knausgaard to Proust have never read Proust and have no knowledge of Proust beyond the keyword “madeleine.” Those who have actually read À la recherche du temps perdu know that Proust’s great novel is not the direct presentation of its author, a self-disclosure without literary artifice. Comparing Knausgaard to Proust is like comparing John Green to Proust. Knausgaard does not have a fingernail of Proust’s genius. If I could accomplish one thing in my life, it would be to prevent people from comparing the Scandinavian hack Karl Ove Knausgaard with Marcel Proust.
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I don’t know how to sum it up / ’cause words ain’t good enough, ow.” –Oscar Wilde, Preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s only aim.” “The artist is the creator of beautiful things. An Analysis of My Struggle ( Min Kamp): Volume Two (Karl Ove Knausgaard)