Always in crisis, actually
(I did wonder about using the urgent phallic icon for this post, srsly)
If a man publishes a six volume autobiographical novel of excruciating quotidien detail and self-revelation, it is naturally going to be proclaimed a masterpiece, no? Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s bestselling, deeply exposing six-part memoir has been a literary sensation the world over - and upset not a few of his relatives.
It sounds to be MI MANPAIN I SHOW U IT (o dear) and I do feel that it may end up in the same unvisited area of secondhand bookshops along with similar endeavours, e.g. Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe sequence, C P Snow's Strangers and Brothers, that American writer whose name I always can't remember, etc etc; anyway, big and much-praised in their day but off the radar now.
I can't find this one dissenting quote in the lists of plaudits from the print edition of The Observer online, but I do wonder if Michel Faber has actually nailed it: 'I suspect that Knausgard's lifelong yearning to achieve literary immortality may prove biodegradable too.'
On reflecting about this, I remark that there are seem to be few examples in this genre which have the staying power of A La Recherche de Temps Perdu. We wonder if this is because M Proust did not have all these anxieties about Being A Man: The issue of masculinity is a recurring theme in My Struggle. He says he formed his views on male identity as a child growing up in the 1970s. He was teased by the other boys for being a “jessie” or gay.
“It put such doubt in me that I’ve never really recovered from it,” he says. “I have all these notions of what it is to be a man. You shouldn’t cry for instance [he spends many pages crying or trying to conceal his tears] and you shouldn’t talk about feelings. I don’t talk about feelings but I write a lot about feelings. Reading, that’s feminine, writing, that’s feminine. It is insane, it’s really insane but it still is in me.”
Plus, you know, the social vistas Marcel presents.
Wot a charmer Knausgard sounds - He met Bostrom at a writer’s conference while he was still married to his first wife, the journalist Tonje Aursland. He made a pass at her, which she rejected, and, in a drunken state of demoralisation, he deliberately cut up his face with broken glass. He later left Aursland and moved to Sweden, but she only learned of the initial episode with Bostrom when she read the second volume, A Man in Love, where it is recorded with characteristically scrupulous candour.
I was thinking, no, Plath actually bit Hughes' cheek herself on their first meeting, right?
As well as all his upsetting families, friends, etc through this tell-all process.
I note that we also have, in the Observer Magazine, a tiresome piece on The Crisis of Modern Masculinity, as though (a historian comments) masculinity has not always been in crisis, or at least, complaints that it is woe woe in crisis have been a recurrent theme over the centuries, if not Since Time Immemorial.
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And, on seeing something nasty in poncey overpriced restaurants, both Marina O'Loughlin and Jay Rayner have had very bad (if amusingly written up) experiences this week. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2237448.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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