Paul Bryant's Reviews > Min kamp 1

well that's because extremely average straight white men were in charge of all the publishing and bookstores and libraries. soooooo ya know, they liked it.

you might think they'd be interested in something other than themselves now and again

Paul wrote: "you might think they'd be interested in something other than themselves now and again"

everybody being all matchy matchy was the norm in society for a long time. variety in people groups one associated with or read about for entertainment and not just study was a new concept. glad we live in a time (and country) were it is the norm.

i honestly could not imagine living in a place where everybody was basically the same race or socioeconomic status or whose ancestors all came from the same area. i just canNOT imagine it. luckily there are books and other media about it. :-)

but how popular it is. I've seen this series but never was interested. and what do you think about Proust's (never read it, again did not sound interesting, even though it is PROUST!)

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

lol 😝

I didn't know that the average straight white man is a world-class prose writer? Also I'm wondering where one can find "centuries" of autobiographical novels like Min Kamp given that autofiction was invented a few decades ago

I cant wait for people of colour to get their chance to publish insanely long tomes about being complete wankers. Cuz ultimately a book amounts to only the most basic demographic of the person who wrote it.

you are trying very hard

80 per cent of people who work in publishing are women.

I like that quote. It puts into words why I walked out of the movie Anomalisa so very very angry. Yes.

Presumably you knew that the book would be about an unremarkable white guy's reflections on his life going in (it's hardly a secret the book is keeping!) So what inspired you to read the book itself, and what did you think about it?

well I have added this book to a shelf I created called "probably never" for books I should read but probably never will... so I haven't read it, you see. I did try one little Knausgaard, but it did not go very well -

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

On the other hand, this series of books would be, for most English speaking people, a rare experience of reading something written by a Norwegian, and therefore giving them an intimate insight into a very different culture not even accessible through travel. The average anglophone reads few, if any translations. This alone makes these books quite different from the regular stock the average America, Brit, etc, is reading, don’t you think?

anyone saying that the Min Kamp series is "an unremarkable white guy's reflections on his life" obviously hasn't read the series (esp. book 6). KOK is not as talented as Proust but this would be like referring to À la recherche as "an unremarkable gay white guy writing about his adolescence and young adulthood"

Yes, it's true that there are disgracefully few modern books translated into English, and not enough readers of translated works also. But obviously Min Kamp is a very notable work. In the interview the quote came from Celeste Ng mentioned it as the last book she couldn't finish. So she did give it a go. And then she decided Knausgaard was an unremarkable straight white guy.

I agree with Ms Ng's sentiment but I tried to read Little Fires Everywhere and didn't finish beacuse I found it extremely average...

I’m not opposed to people saying that a book sucks for its contents - or even that an extremely average or unremarkable book isn’t worth reading because hey, there are a lot of books out there. But an unexamined premise of posts on both “sides” of this discussion seems to be a sort of convertibility between whether a person is unremarkable and whether their autobiography is. The baseline premise of the series seems to me that a rather ordinary life closely observed can have some literary merit - I’d be curious about the extent to which people think the book succeeded or failed at it, but I feel like writing a review of the book where the complaint is that Knausgaard, the man, isn’t all that extraordinary - especially with not having read it - is just sort of rejecting the premise.

Like, you can not care of course! I don’t find most books interesting and indeed I didn’t find Vol. 1 of this interesting enough to read the second. But let’s take a premise I don’t care about - let’s say a cookbook (my instinct is just to Google for recipes when needed.) I *could* take a cookbook written by a white man and write a review saying: “cookbooks! Don’t care much for those! But isn’t it suspicious that this white man could get his cookbook published when most cookbooks are not?” and I guess that would be true enough as far as it goes, but I don’t quite know what the goal of such a review would be.

Matthias wrote: " but I don’t quite know what the goal of such a review would be."

reviews are opinions. that is their goal- to give the writer's opinion. that's it. they can do more but their main purpose is to give an opinion.

To reduce this excellent piece of literature because of white guilt is a disgrace. This series is sometimes brilliant, sometimes monotonous, it is breathtakingly unironic, genre defying and, for me, sometimes highly democratic in its (somewhat) week narrative form: Min Kamp, My Struggle, doesn’t keep you locked in what he wants to tell you, beside who said what, and who died in what way, Min Kamp doesn’t carry you along with one specific agenda. More importantly though, it is radical, it claims: to write literature, to write fiction, isn’t about making things up, it’s (literally) about breathing air into matters that exist in real life.

Yes, representation is a huge problem in the publishing world, but how you could reduce literature with one political statement like this, makes me think you’re into reading for the wrong reasons.

Or maybe it’s easy to cancel Min Kamp because patriarchy because it’s exhausting to read six humongous novels? If you should cancel it for anything it should be for it’s ethical problems towards his family, or how maybe look at how women are portrayed in the work itself, as us Norwegians (or Swedes for that matter) did when it was published. Read it, then revisit this claim, I challenge you!

what about Patrick Melrose novels? :)

I read two of those, they aren't at all daunting, they're tiny! One was great, one tiresome. And yeah, another privileged white straight guy complaining about everything.

Paul wrote: "I read two of those, they aren't at all daunting, they're tiny! One was great, one tiresome. And yeah, another privileged white straight guy complaining about everything."

I read first one and wasn't impressed :) but people LOVE them

I thought he was pleasantly unpleasant about everybody in the first one. But Knausgaard is an entirely different thing. As far as I know, having only read one of his slender books, he recounts his life in painstaking but entirely serious detail. I couldn't take that!

quick question , how many goddamn books do ypu read a day? 5? 7? are you the one prophecy talked about? you the chosen one?( yes it was a reference )

one per 5 or 6 days usually

I’m curious Paul, do you think you grew bored of the book because you find the close view of an average life dull, or was it because of something more to do with the voice?

The Celeste Ng got it, didn't she? Thanks for quoting her in a review. peace, janz

Hi Hazel, it wasn't me who got bored with this one, it was Celeste Ng. I read Spring by Knausgaard which is only 192 pages long, and I finished it. That was enough for me for a long time!

Thanks for sharing it, Paul. I read quite a few polarised reviews of the book so I could not make up my mind about it.

plus, he stole the title from hitler... just sayin'

I think that is what is called a deliberate provocation, like a naughty kid sitting next to his mother and sticking his tongue out at you

Paul wrote: "I think that is what is called a deliberate provocation, like a naughty kid sitting next to his mother and sticking his tongue out at you"

okay, I'm gonna take a coffee and try and unpack that metaphor... lol!

perhaps he was marketing to extremely average straight white men with funny little mustaches

I remember the Celeste Ng interview you're referring to. I tried to answer the questions as though twas I who's the notable author.

Also titling your book to sound like fascism's bible is... a choice.

I found a New Yorker article from 2014 called Why Name Your Book After Hitler’s? - it seems that Knausgaard has a naughty friend called Geir who suggested My Struggle as the title. From an interview

When I remarked that some people believe that the title shows poor taste, he laughed and said, “Yeah. I obviously don’t think so, but yeah. And if it was, so what?”

here's the explanation:

Knausgaard defends the title adamantly in at least one respect: he insists he was not aiming for shock value or sales. (He believed that the project would have no commercial appeal, he says, and felt that the initial print run of ten thousand copies was optimistic. Together, the six books in the series have sold about half a million copies in Norway alone.) Knausgaard allows that the title was “a way of saying ‘fuck you’ to the reader.” But that reflected, he felt, the aesthetics of his project: he would give no thought to pleasing the audience, never mind family or friends. He told me, “If it was boring, I wanted it boring.… No compromises were made in this book. The title kind of makes that statement.”

Paul wrote: "I found a New Yorker article from 2014 called Why Name Your Book After Hitler’s? - it seems that Knausgaard has a naughty friend called Geir who suggested My Struggle as the title. From an intervie..."

the arrogance... my goodness.

If you've watched Younger it's occurring to me that a Swedish author who was there in Sn1 was parodying him. And he was a very unpleasant man as well.

Paul wrote: "I found a New Yorker article from 2014 called Why Name Your Book After Hitler’s? - it seems that Knausgaard has a naughty friend called Geir who suggested My Struggle as the title. From an intervie..."

so then, he's an extremely average straight white douchebag...

well, average douchebags don't get this treatment - this s from the same 2014 article :

Karl Ove Knausgaard swept through New York City last week as the literary sensation of the moment. No writer has emerged on the world stage to more acclaim in at least a decade, and readers had to be turned away at all three of his events. On Friday at the New York Public Library, where prominent writers and journalists packed the front rows, the crowd seemed spellbound

Paul wrote: "well, average douchebags don't get this treatment - this s from the same 2014 article :

Karl Ove Knausgaard swept through New York City last week as the literary sensation of the moment. No writer..."

"Fashion is fashion is fashion" - Karl Lagerfeld

For the moment, I'll stick with Monsieur Proust.

I never watched Keeping Up with the Kardashians either.

It's named after Min Kamp because he's intentionally writing the precise artistic inversion/refutation of Mein Kampf (each book maps onto a corresponding section of Hitler's autobiography); see my review for book 6.

Also are you guys aware that it's possible to read Proust AND Knausgaard? Crazy, I know. And I'm pretty sure that Joyce was a literary sensation in Paris in 1922-23, I suppose we shouldn't read him either

knausgaardiscourse is really clarifying re: the value of a creative work for the sake of its impact versus the content itself. ng is right when she pointed out the systemics. in that, i can't imagine an author wanting to address point by point in an interview why they would write an in-depth 3,000+pg inversion of mein kampf when the project itself was a tool of total immolation. the guy ruined his own life, for a time, by his own hand. in turn he grifted on the public kerfuffle surrounding it, and had a right to--he still published, in the span of two years, more than most 21st c. authors do in their career...it was a landmark in autobiographical literature, regardless of any opinions on the content itself. by volume alone it's notable

it's also bit knobbish to pull in proust here when the only commonality is the sheer length of their best known works & the 'white european' thing. apples & oranges / walnuts & cashews.

eCodex wrote: "when the only commonality is the sheer length of their best known works & the 'white european' thing..."

size & race...

Jim wrote: size & race..."

& snobbish attitudes of their die-hard name-dropping fandoms included.

like, i want to be clear--you're definitely right in that knausgaard is an arrogant slog. and, yes, i also prefer proust...but it's just--unproductive? to dismiss min kamp from that angle. it glosses over a lot of the serious, granular critique that can be levelled against knausgaard's text [that it completely deserves] in a way that romanticizes the radically different media/public relations contexts of the authors. there's no way to name drop balzac in a discussion on rupi kaur without coming across as snooty.

productive critique is about handling the material with where it is and what it does, from its own interior contours. anyways--apologies for 'going off'. proust deserves more than this lmao

eCodex wrote: "like, i want to be clear--you're definitely right in that knausgaard is an arrogant slog. and, yes, i also prefer proust...but it's just--unproductive? to dismiss min kamp from that angle. it gloss..."

no worries... Paul's reviews are always a free-for-all, so have fun with it

Right, so he 'grifted' on the public kerfuffle by . . . no longer writing about his friends/family but instead writing three novels about his childhood and adolescence? He never expected the first two novels to sell at all. Also there's plenty of commonality with Proust (who is mentioned multiple times in Knausgaard's text), so it's not exactly weird to bring him up

I particularly liked your review of Book 5 by the way - I have been reading a lot of MK reviews today to find out what its strange allure is. Many of them say what a slog reading the books has been and how boring they can be for 100s of pages at a time, but they always dish out four or 5 stars anyway. Maybe just maybe in some cases another example of literary Stockholm syndrome....