Running for Your Life: Knausgaard Summer

The past five summers I’ve spent a big chunk reading “My Struggle” by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

For the uninitiated, Knausgaard’s memoir is an eight-volume literary experience that has yet to be published in its entirety in English translation. Given that my Norwegian is as proficient as my Mandarin, I consume the English versions as they come out (in the paperback variety, which has been the case the past five years). I am currently reading Volume Five.

On a recent vacation I jotted down a note describing just why I commit to this endeavor every year – Believe me, it’s worth it:

“A note here about what it is about Knausgaard that creates the fullness of a reading experience while mining memory and the most basic human emotions – fears, anxieties – conveyed in the most universal of sentiments where the Jamesian “doubt” meets the Danteian death. Even in the childhood-adolescent passages the shadow – the angel of death – never ceases to be apparent. She is in every scene (think of how the book opens with the contemplation of personal end-times). He is the Mad Hatter of our tea party. Be afraid, be very afraid but be enchanted, be swept backward, forward, through the blood and loins and tissue of what it means to be alive.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Jasmine High   

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