MISCELLANEOUS Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle: Book Six Trans. Don Bartlett & Martin Aitken. New York. Archipelago. 2018. 1,264 pages. Karl Ove Knausgaard has been crowned “the ideal writer of the present moment.” His six-part novel, My Struggle, sold half a million copies in Norway, about one for every ten citizens. Some workplaces had to designate “Knausgaard-free days” because their employees wouldn’t stop talking about him. But more than the Proustian quality of his writing, it was the media coverage surrounding the books that fueled Knausgaard mania. Newspapers asked ethical questions about the novel’s impact on others. His uncle Gunnar sued for libel and defamation. The very title of the novel Lilia M. Schwarcz & Heloisa M. Starling Brazil: A Biography Farrar, Straus and Giroux Translated from Portuguese, this biography of a nation spans five hundred years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics. Covering economics, popular culture, and anthropological and historical scholarship, Brazil follows the political and cultural developments that have left a legacy still tangible today. A thorough and engaging read, this work is packed full of insightful accounts. Lutz Seiler Kruso Trans. Tess Lewis Scribe Lutz Seiler, winner of the English PEN Award and German Book Prize, brings a tumultuous debut novel to an English-speaking audience. Set on a bohemian Baltic coastal island, this novel of a cult of personality during the last days of the Soviet occupation of the GDR grips readers just as Kruso ’s charisma grips our protagonist. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 89 is a provocation: My Struggle, or Min Kamp in Norwegian, elicits Mein Kampf. But to Knausgaard, the more pain his books caused, the truer they became: for one to be free, one must be unsparing of others’ feelings and privacy. His “experiment” was to put that dynamic on display, and it’s his own private life that he exposes most of all. He reveals how much he gets paid; how much his house cost; how many copies his books sold; and how long they took to write. Not long enough in the case of Book Three and Book Four, which he says were not as good. Book Six reveals the novel’s taboo link to Hitler and to the Utøya mass shooting , giving readers the frisson of breaking the rules of propriety. As a literary “bad boy” and admirer of Thomas Bernhard, Knausgaard says he identifies with parts of Hitler’s personality and understands the motivations behind the Utøya massacre that left dozens of children dead. The book’s confrontation with taboo subjects exerts an extraordinary pull on the reader, who is unable to look away and must see how far he will go. Nevertheless, what is perhaps most radical about reading the novel is the feeling of intimacy it creates. Through repetition, everyday domestic banalities become familiar and comforting . All is well with the world when the children come home from kindergarten and watch Bolibompa on TV while their father makes dinner and smokes cigarettes on the balcony. We are sad to say goodbye to the Knausgaards. What helps give the unwieldy 1,264page tome some pacing and lightness is the narrator’s charisma and self-deprecating sense of humor. Knausgaard’s virtuoso exposition of awkward everyday social interactions is unmatched in contemporary literature. In Book Six, he falls for a time-share sales pitch. He also botches an attempt to dispose of buckets of human waste. But what’s most affecting is his love for his family, especially his wife, Linda. It was love at first sight when he met her: “Wham. She was the one. An arrow to the heart.” She struggles with bouts of manic depression, though, which he describes as her not being her true self. Knowing the power of language, he finds the right words to use with his wife when he tells her it’s okay, “You were on your travels.” Ben Streeter George Washington University World Literature in Review 90 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 ...
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Nov 21, 2018
Kevin W Martin 
Open Access