As a child Antinous Bellori witnesses two angels at the riverside in a dark forest and spends the rest of his life pursuing the nature of their existence on earth.
Light and the divine were also the focus of the fictional speculations in Knausgaard’s remarkable novel A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven. He turns to literature and reads Hölderlin’s poetry and Dostoevsky’s novels and discovers “that was where the light was. He sits on a balcony of an evening and ponders: “the Too easily, the light fades and habit shadows his life. He sees it in his father-in-law’s face, so “utterly open it was as though there was nothing between him and the world”. He sees it elsewhere in the “endless summer nights, so light and open”. Light reveals something otherwise absent. When the writer falls in love “everything was light” his new girlfriend was “filled with an inner light” and, when their daughter is born, “she was the light”. The interminable specifics of the content are superficial necessities for an experiment in stretching the everyday to such a degree that it becomes translucent, for light of a kind to shine through. Let's be clear: My Struggle is not about the life of Karl Ove Knausgaard. The writer himself vindicates the impression when he says the length and speed of the writing were important formal constraints.
After all, in terms of the writing there is little difference between volumes one and two: in both the prose is straightforward, the characters memorable and the chronology clear, even when Knausgaard interrupts a domestic cliffhanger to plummet back in time only to resolve the issue in one sentence 236 pages later. Knausgaard is not an old man a knowing distance is not an option.Īrchipelago Books’ bold decision to place the original title in the foreground of the US edition enables us to focus on what's key to Knausgaard's struggle: the background. It should at least contradict the impression that My Struggle is a traditional bildungsroman, a genre in which the book we are reading is the vantage point from which all the missteps and miseries, all the highways and byways of the individual on his path to the summit, can be surveyed: the relief of a landscape.
0 kommentar(er)
