My Struggle, Book Two by Karl Ove Knausgård

It was only when I saw a picture of snow or of trees that they were endowed with meaning. “When I was outdoors, walking, like now, what I saw gave me nothing. Nothing else.”įritz Thaulow, 1847-1906 Winter on the Isle of Stord, 1889 If you write to recapture your gravity, I write to recapture the world.

But the apocalypse, what is it now? Trees disappearing in South America? Ice melting, the waters rising. If you’re sorry that action has disappeared, I’m sorry the world has disappeared. And that, the magnificence of the world, is of course a Baroque concept. “When I read Lucretius it’s all about the magnificence of the world. We could have added Odin, who hangs himself from a tree. Schama traces it in Landscape and Memory. The line goes right back from the 70s to Tacitus. As far as I remember, he was a Roman army commander who lost a decisive battle in Germany. Where’s the connection? It’s not about ideas, it reaches right down into the depths of culture, and it can’t be expressed in ideas.” What’s it about? Well, Auschwitz of course. It’s the greatest work of art since the war, perhaps in the whole of the previous century. All you can see is trees and snow, with red stains in places, and then there are some names of German poets written in white. It is a brilliant work that emphatically delivers on the unlikely promise that many hundreds of pages later readers will be left breathlessly demanding more.“Have you seen that picture by Anselm Kiefer? It’s of a forest. But the novel also tells other stories: of becoming a father, of the turbulence of family life, of outrageously unsuccessful attempts at a family vacation, of the emotional strain of birthday parties for children, and of the daily frustrations, rhythms, and distractions of city life keeping him from (and filling) his novel. My Struggle: Book 2 is at heart a love story-the story of Karl Ove falling in love with his second wife. He also tracks down Linda, whom he met at a writers' workshop a few years earlier and who fascinated him deeply. He strikes up a deep friendship with another exiled Norwegian, a Nietzschean intellectual and boxing fanatic named Geir. In the second installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental six-volume masterpiece, the character Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to Stockholm, where, having left his wife, he leads a solitary existence.

My Struggle, Book Two by Karl Ove Knausgård