SOUNDTRACK: TRICKY-“Christiansands” (1996).
This book is set in Kristiansands, and so naturally this song was ringing through my head the whole while I was reading it. I’ve known this song for ages, but had no idea that Chirstiansands was an actual place in Norway.
This song is dark and tense. Over a slinky beat, a spare guitar riff introduces Tricky’s voice as he rasps (his voice is slightly modified to give him a weird echo). And while he’s reciting his verses, the gorgeous voice of Martina Topley-Bird, repeats what he’s saying in a whispered voice until she sings out the chorus “I met a Christian in Christiansands.”
The verses repeat with Tricky emphasizing, “master your language and in the meantime I create my own. It means we’ll manage.”
I honestly don’t know what the song is about, and it feels like it never properly ends–that riff, at once menacing and gripping never seems to conclude. It’s a masterful track and hard to forget once you’ve heard it.
[READ: May 11, 2013] My Struggle Book One
I read an excerpt of Book Two from this series in Harper’s. And despite the fact that nothing really happened in it, I was drawn in by the writing style. This first novel is very similar in that not a lot happens but the voice is very captivating. The translation is by Don Bartlett and it is fantastic–I can only assume the original Norwegian is just as compelling. So, despite the fact that this autobiographical series contain six books (six!) and totals over 4,000 pages (how could this be if Book one is a mere 400? Books 4-6 are over 1,000 pages each), I decided to give it a try. (Incidentally, Book Two has just been translated into English this month).
This series has caused some controversy because it is given the same title as Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Min Kamp in Norwegian), and also because he says some pretty means stuff about people who are still alive (like his ex-wife). Although there isn’t much of that in Book One.
Indeed, Book One basically talks about two things–a New Year’s Eve party when Karl Ove was youngish and, as the bracketed title indicates, the death of his father. (The title A Death in the Family is the same book as My Struggle Book One–from a different publisher. It has a totally different cover but is the same translation. I don’t quite get that). But indeed, these two events take 430 pages to write about.
How is this possible? Because Karl Ove writes about every single detail. (I assume this why the books are considered novels, because there is no way he could remember so much detail about every event). I’m going to quote a lengthy section from a New Yorker review (by James Wood) because he really captures the feeling of reading the book:
There is a flatness and a prolixity to the prose; the long sentences have about them an almost careless avant-gardism, with their conversational additions and splayed run-ons. The writer seems not to be selecting or shaping anything, or even pausing to draw breath…. There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard’s book: even when I was bored, I was interested. This striking readability has something to do with the unconventionality of “My Struggle.” It looks, at first sight, familiar enough: one of those highly personal modern or postmodern works, narrated by a writer, usually having the form if not the veracity of memoir and thus plotted somewhat accidentally, concerned with the writing of a book that turns out to be the text we are reading. But there is also a simplicity, an openness, and an innocence in his relation to life, and thus in his relation to the reader. Where many contemporary writers would reflexively turn to irony, Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties, unafraid to appear naïve or awkward. Although his sentences are long and loose, they are not cutely or aimlessly digressive: truth is repeatedly being struck at, not chatted up.
That idea of being bored but interested is really right on–and it may sound like a bad thing, but it’s not. You can read along thinking that there’s no way he is going to give so much unimportant detail. But you get this description of drinking a cup of tea: (more…)
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I Just Read About That... 