Karl Ove Knausgaard's turn to the fantastic
A new preview from Issue Seventeen
“I think the moral of the story is we should both do a light comedy,” Jeremy Strong said to Karl Ove Knausgaard at the end of an extremely long January interview, to which the Norwegian novelist replied, “Yeah. I don’t know what to say to that.” It’s rare to find Knausgaard at a loss for words. With the publication of the fourth volume of his Morning Star series earlier this year, 2,512 pages from that project alone have now appeared in English — still a far cry from the 3,600 pages of his magnum opus My Struggle. In our new Issue Seventeen preview, Max Norman digests the Knausgaardian oeuvre and produces a careful, incisive account of the author’s evolution from autofictional hyperrealism to the philosophical semi-fantasy of the Morning Star novels. Read the fruits of Norman’s struggle online today.
Roman-Flood | Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Diabolic Realism
MAX NORMAN
The cumulative effect of the slowly rising tide of this series, less roman-fleuve than roman-flood, is an uneasy and not unpleasurable uncertainty, both within the novels themselves and at the level of the whole project. How much farther can he go? And will we have the patience to follow him?