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buddhafish 's review for:
A Man in Love
by Karl Ove Knausgård
3rd book of 2024.
Better than volume 1, maybe even by a long shot. Knausgaard relentlessly portrays the banality of his own life and all life. He hates being a father. He doesn't necessarily love his wife (though they continue to have children). He asks himself, frequently, Is this all? Is this life? There are surges of happiness but I found he was always quick to undermine them: it only lasted a few seconds, he says. I tore through this, easily one-hundred pages a day. I find him addictive, as I said before, but more so here. Pages and pages of pushing prams, washing dishes, trying and failing to write. Reading Dostoyevsky. Wondering about the future of his children. Wondering why he is a terrible and selfish father. He describes falling in love incredibly well, and the end of the honeymoon phase just as well. That sliding into routine, normality, how painful it can be sometimes. Nothing good lasts forever or is continuous. I find Knausgaard to be depressing and uplifting. There's a kind of nihilism that also borders on a sort of stoicism. He even finds fiction pointless: so we start to see his inklings at My Struggle; if fiction is pointless and false, where does one go? To the truth. And yet, he tells Geir in one of their 30 page conversations over dinner that he has a terrible memory. So what's all this then? He's likened to Proust enough but I will say one thing on the subject, that, like when I read through In Search of Lost Time, after sitting with the book for an hour or more solidly reading, I would stand up and stretch, perhaps go to the nearest window and look out. The street, the cars and the houses all seemed massive. As if by reading the minute details of Knausgaard, I had also shrunken to the size of their pinprick detail. Then the real world, on surfacing, seemed enormous. An entire house! And, looking up, the unfathomably largeness of the sky. Then I'd settle back into it; things were this big and always had been. I'd drink coffee and do some jobs, go to work, then when I returned to the book, I'd feel everything shrinking again. It's like playing as Alice. In the end it's hard to know whether things are easier to understand when they're tiny or huge. Perhaps only by the shifting perspective do we see them clearly.
Better than volume 1, maybe even by a long shot. Knausgaard relentlessly portrays the banality of his own life and all life. He hates being a father. He doesn't necessarily love his wife (though they continue to have children). He asks himself, frequently, Is this all? Is this life? There are surges of happiness but I found he was always quick to undermine them: it only lasted a few seconds, he says. I tore through this, easily one-hundred pages a day. I find him addictive, as I said before, but more so here. Pages and pages of pushing prams, washing dishes, trying and failing to write. Reading Dostoyevsky. Wondering about the future of his children. Wondering why he is a terrible and selfish father. He describes falling in love incredibly well, and the end of the honeymoon phase just as well. That sliding into routine, normality, how painful it can be sometimes. Nothing good lasts forever or is continuous. I find Knausgaard to be depressing and uplifting. There's a kind of nihilism that also borders on a sort of stoicism. He even finds fiction pointless: so we start to see his inklings at My Struggle; if fiction is pointless and false, where does one go? To the truth. And yet, he tells Geir in one of their 30 page conversations over dinner that he has a terrible memory. So what's all this then? He's likened to Proust enough but I will say one thing on the subject, that, like when I read through In Search of Lost Time, after sitting with the book for an hour or more solidly reading, I would stand up and stretch, perhaps go to the nearest window and look out. The street, the cars and the houses all seemed massive. As if by reading the minute details of Knausgaard, I had also shrunken to the size of their pinprick detail. Then the real world, on surfacing, seemed enormous. An entire house! And, looking up, the unfathomably largeness of the sky. Then I'd settle back into it; things were this big and always had been. I'd drink coffee and do some jobs, go to work, then when I returned to the book, I'd feel everything shrinking again. It's like playing as Alice. In the end it's hard to know whether things are easier to understand when they're tiny or huge. Perhaps only by the shifting perspective do we see them clearly.