Knausgaard, Karl Ove

Norwegian novelist, author of the six-volume autobiographical series My Struggle

(Vidéo) [ENG] Karl Ove Knausgaard - Entretien avec Charlie Rose

Artesquieu · Aug 26, 2022 · partial coverage

• Karl Ove Knausgaard
• My Struggle
• autobiographical fiction
• shame
• identity
• Norway
• father
• Mein Kampf
• Charlie Rose

Coverage note: full (clean auto-generated English transcript with a few garbled words)

Core ideas

Knausgaard describes how a project he wrote "completely innocently, for myself, by myself," in his own room, with no expectation that anyone, even his friends, would care, became a literary event: the publisher printed a small first edition, and he says about one in ten people in Norway has since read it. In the United States, he notes, readers recognise themselves in it: one woman in San Francisco told him he had written about "an Indian-American woman." He explains this by his aim of finding out "who am I, how did I become the man I am, what is identity," and by the discovery that, contrary to his fear that the book was too private for any identification, "we are much more alike than we think we are," sharing the same hopes and fears (he cites the feeling of being 17). He says readers of his earlier fiction talked about literature, while readers of this series talk about themselves and their own fathers.

He refuses to describe the writing as therapeutic: it was a way of "making novels out of my own life," not of dealing with his psyche. The books' major subject is self-hatred and shame: at 40, with a wife, three children and a house, he was unhappy and wanted to know why, and he says he still wakes up unhappy and that success does not help. He prefers complexity to answers (diagnosing one's life by blaming one's father does not help) and traces his shame to a Protestant, Scandinavian morality ("you shouldn't think you are better than anyone else") and to an unpredictable, angry father who left him without a rooted self, always asking what others think of him; writing was a way of escaping that, and the one place where he wanted to please no one. He says his father is the main character, that his first book "was meaningless" when his father died, and that he still dreams of him. He argues that an ordinary life deserves this much attention, because literature gives access to vast parts of oneself, and that he follows intuition rather than "reflection," which our culture overestimates.

He explains the title as a coincidence: his original title was Argentina (a country of longing), until a friend mentioned Hitler's Mein Kampf; his editor objected but he insisted, and the final volume contains a long essay on Hitler's book, which he found mostly boring, a "poor" piece of writing, striking only for its pathological hatred of Jews and its observations on propaganda. He says he is fascinated by how recent and how defining that history is for European culture, and thinks it could happen again. He also discusses the 2011 massacre in Norway, which pulled him back to his national identity; he reads it, as Åsne Seierstad's title One of Us puts it, as the act of someone from within, says it has nothing to do with politics or radicalism, and notes that the killer seemed surprised that people did not flee "as in a film." He calls the series an "authorial suicide": he put even his ideas for future novels into book six so as to start from nothing, and he will never write about his life afterwards. He recounts his wife's reaction to the book about their relationship ("goodbye romance"), saying that he is completely honest in the book but cannot be in a relationship, and that he may have destroyed her life, too. His goals are to raise his children so they are not damaged and to write "incredibly good novels," which he says is much better than being happy.

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