"Literary Superstar" Karl Ove Knausgaard, Norway's Proust:

[cali]

When Karl Ove Knausgaard began writing the books that have already made him one of the most famous Norwegians in history, he was impelled, in part, by a sense of a surfeit of fiction. There were too many stories, everywhere, "films and DVD box sets but also documentaries and even reports in the papers and on TV" and they made him sick.

There's a wonderful irony to this. Knausgaard, 45, now sustains the kind of fervid public conversation usually induced by those stories – the cliffhanger-heavy soap operas and HBO drama series. But My Struggle isn't TV, nor is it even fiction. His six-volume epic is nothing less than his entire life, in all its tedium and occasional ecstasy, committed to paper, at the rabid rate of 20 pages a day.

The level of obsession around this literary Gesamtkunstwerk has been so intense that some Norwegian workplaces have reportedly instituted "Knausgaard-free days", when staff are forbidden to talk about the books. This is a country of about 5 million, where half a million copies have been sold – in other words, one out of 10 Norwegians has bought at least one of the volumes, which makes the phrase "publishing sensation" seem inadequate. Now, the books have been translated into 15 languages and the English-speaking world is impatiently awaiting the third instalment of Don Bartlett's translation, published later this month.

Knausgaard was already a respected writer in Norway before he began the work that made him an international literary phenomenon. His first novel, 1998's Out of the World won the Norwegian Critics' prize for literature, the first debut ever to do so. His second, 2004's A Time For Everything is a meditation on angels that earned him more critical acclaim and several prizes. My Struggle, though, came out of a personal crisis. He was 40 years old and had lost faith in fiction. He was attempting to write a novel about his father but every sentence he forced out "was met with the thought, 'But you're just making this up. It has no value.'"

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Smith also wrote: "Everywhere I've gone this past year the talk, amongst bookish people, has been of this Norwegian." And Knausgaard does indeed seem to have reached a "writer's writer" status, like that of Marcel Proust, to whom he is most often compared. (Knausgaard has said: "I not only read À la recherche du temps perdu, but virtually imbibed it.&quot

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http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2014/mar/01/karl-ove-knausgaard-norway-proust-profile

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. Thanks for posting, but I wish a new Tolstoy would come along.