zerubem asks:
Karl Ove, what do you think about W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard? Are they important writers to you? What books by them do you like (if you like)?
I really want to read Out of the World, but I see it’s going to be published, but Archipelago will release it only in 2020!
Why? Any chance of your first book get an English translation before that date?
Guardian contributor Both those writers are important to me. Sebald, his books The Rings of Saturn is very important to me, the way he leaves the present and goes into memory, the past, without leaving the place, it evokes what is in that place all the time. Bernhard, I absolutely love, he is one of the darkest and funniest writers. My favourite book of his is Extinction, a must read for everybody.
'Jurgen Klopp is a great saviour'
zimmer asks:
As a Liverpool fan, but also as a fan of 0-0 draws, what do you think of Jurgen Klopp?
Guardian contributor These exist in separate universes: the 0-0 draws is a general thing about football but it doesn't apply to Liverpool, as I'm a Liverpool fan. I think Klopp is a great saviour.
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ristanWhite asks:
The English bookmakers Ladbrokes had you down at 66/1 to win this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Do you think you would have been a more worthy winner than Bob Dylan?
Guardian contributor I'm very divided. I love that the novel committee opens up for other kinds of literature - lyrics and so on. I think that's brilliant. But knowing that Dylan is the same generation as Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, makes it very difficult for me to accept it. I think one of those three should have had it, really. But if they get it next year, it will be fine.
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candyfloss178 asks:
I went to Stockholm for the first time this summer, and while I was there I thought a lot about how the city is represented in A Man in Love. My question is: how much does your experience of place shape your writing, and, if practical considerations were no obstacle, is there anywhere in the world you would find particularly inspiring to live?
Guardian contributor A very good question. The place is the most important thing in my writing - it always started with the place. Even when I'm writing about objects, it's important. My favourite quotation, from a Finnish writer for a change, by Pentti Saarikoski, he said "I'm not writing about the world and its places, I'm writing about the places and its worlds" – or something similar. And when I studied literature, my topic was literature and the place, and the local, the place where you are, has always been the most important thing in the writing. There's an interesting question by Bruno Latour who asks where the local goes out to be global - it's two different levels of existence. And I try to establish a place, a here and a now. What I like in literature is this, but before I could articulate that, I just felt it.
I read Kundera, and Knut Hamsen at the same time. Kundera is a classic postmodernist writer, he moves his character about; Hamsen is all about presence, no reflection, and I knew that was my preference. For me, all the reflections in my prose, is kind of a failure - it's the lack of ability to express it through flesh and blood and place. That's what I really want to do. That's what evokes the fantasy, and the writing itself - seeing a place.
It's interesting in regard to what we were taught in the beginning of the 90s at university, when it was all about language, and we looked at realistic novels and the notion of the language being transparent - if you read Flaubert you can see the town - it was seen as completely naive. It was about language and science, and this was a postmodernist time. I loved that, I dived into it - I love the feeling that my teacher was a quantum mechanic, and it had that feeling to reading the letters in that way. But then I went back to childhood reading experiences, all about visualisation, and feelings. And that's what I'm doing. And yes, it's naive too.
'I don't like myself'
Nicole R asks:
In the beginning of the first book in the “My Struggle” series, you become very upset when your parents invalidate the “face” in the sea you saw on television. Your writing reminds me of similarly raw feelings of invalidation I had long since forgotten since childhood. How do you think the invalidation that children feel affects them as adults?
Guardian contributor That's a good question. For me personally, it's such a big part of my personality, that my father did that all the time. In the end, it was like something was broken. Because as a child, the most important thing is to be accepted and loved, and if you're criticised you know something is wrong with you - it could be a dangerous thing, because it has to do with your self-esteem, and whether you like yourself, which I don't. Then you get children yourself, and you see it's so easy to do that. It's easy to see them as children - it's very easy to transfer the same feeling to them, and not understand the consequences. It's a constant thing in my life - trying to understand how they're feeling. You could make a joke about them, but it could crush them. Their feelings are much more connected to the world than mine are as an adult - I've learned to deal with things, and they haven't yet.
I don't like myself, no - that must be somehow rooted in my childhood experiences. I'm not blaming anyone, but yes, it comes from there I think. If I get drunk, I like myself, so I try to steer away from that.
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'My first novel's first 190 pages are excellent, and the last 510 pages are written by a writer in love with himself'
Tj Aj Rj Backslashinfourth asks:
I have heard you mention in interviews that My Struggle was a product of your failure to write like the writers you most admired, some of them modernists and realists, who wrote what you considered to be standard novels. That is to say, works of fiction that are patently fabricated, but nonetheless, brilliant and true.
How do you measure your first two novels, which are more conventional, against ‘My Struggle’? Do you prefer one over any of the others? Do you still hold this desire to write a great traditional novel? Do you think that is even possible in today’s literary landscape?
Guardian contributor How do I measure them? I'm currently writing a film manuscript of my first novel. I never re-read them, but I had to read this one. The first one's first 190 pages are excellent, and the last 510 pages are written by a writer in love with himself and his own writing. And the strange thing is a colleague of mine told me that when the book was published, that the first bit was good and then it was terrible... when it was published in English, I could have taken out the bad parts, but I like the fact that it is what it is, and it reflects something. The second novel I've never re-read, I don't have the courage to do that.
My own favourite novels are classical novels in a way. I would love to do that, of course. But for me, I can't write novels. Thomas Mann said a novelist is a person who can't really write novels, and the novel is in that struggle. I think James Joyce could write perfect short stories, but his first novel, it's struggling with the form - and it's a celebration of that.
I would like to write one, still. An example would be Never Let Me Go - a traditional novel in a way, but it has to be unique in some way or another.
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marukun asks:
Do Norwegian people really drink as much alcohol as described in your books? If so do you think their capacity to drink so much is a result of evolutionary adaption?
Guardian contributor I can't answer on behalf of the Norwegian people, but I certainly did. And it wasn't because of any evolutionary adaptation. It's a cultural thing, I guess. For me at least. I hardly could speak to anyone, but when I drank, I could. It was a great way of liberating my own restricted soul. But I don't know if that's the case with the other people there - we all had fun at least.
But aren't the British into binge drinking too? It's nothing to do with Norwegian culture!
'I basically have no ideas'
ian leak aks:
I once interviewed Andy Partridge from XTC, who told me he squirrels away ideas for lyrics to a use at a later date. Do you do a similar thing with your writing?
Guardian contributor No. I basically have no ideas. I have just published four books in Norway, short texts, and that's an old project I tried to do - I had the idea but I couldn't write them before, back in 99, and all of a sudden I could write them out. They're about things, and objects, and phenomena. It's kind of a mixture of prose poems, essays, oral paintings.
It's funny you mention XTC, I was really into them for many years. One of the great bands of their era.
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beware123 asks:
Having read My Struggle I feel like I know you, how do you feel about that?
Guardian contributor
andrea14 asks:
I’m just reading Min Kamp 4 in Norwegian, and I feel as if I was in Northern Norway in deepest winter and darkness long before the ever distracting smartphone pest arrived.
Although your life - like most others - is partly described as a “kamp”, a struggle, I feel good while reading the books. It is as if I was allowed to get a long inside view of another person’s experiences and feelings, and isn’t that something one often would like to do? But I keep wondering: Did you write a diary during all those years? How were you able to recreate all the dialogues and the atmospheric density?
Guardian contributor I kept a diary when I was a teenager, but not in my 20s. It's all based on memory, not documents.
I always wanted to write a book that moves effortlessly in time and space, and you're part of a wave that goes down and up, left and right. The first book I read that had this quality is Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. He is using metaphor of moving, changing levels. He has a metaphor, then a pocket of something else comes in, and in that pocket could be the future or past. The opera, with all the people in dresses going there, and it changes into an underwater world. It's not just a metaphor though. I was reading that when I was 35 or something, and I couldn't write myself - I couldn't write anything. And then two years later I could, I was writing 700 pages in a row, and it's connected to Proust - it's so influenced by it. But I didn't know that at the time. I'm interested in having a feeling of movement. If you listen to music there are no paragraphs, no chapters, it's just flowing, it can go from emotional and warm to something abstract and hard, and it's the same movement, the same journey. That's an aesthetic ideal I have - I've never managed it, but I like the idea.
I just read an art historian, a critic who wrote a book about Edvard Munch, he gave a definition of style, and said it was a way of controlling information. If you are a painter there can be endless details - there has to be a way to stop. That's style.
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DavidFlynn asks:
Can you clarify the relationship between fact and fiction in the My Struggle series?
Guardian contributor When I started out, the thing is that this is a book about the past. About what I remember, what's inside my head. So all the things I'm writing about, I have memories of, but I never know if the memories are accurate or not. It's a very subjective book, and it's also about what it is to remember. And when you go back to something you remember, the distinction between what it was and how you remember are blurred, so in the childhood book, book three, my method was to enter the memories, visualise them, and set them into motion. One memory, I do remember, but I don't know what led up to it or afterwards, and those things are invented. Dramatising memory, that's the thing. But I do try to keep it as it was - but the details are invented. But I do remember the colour of the chair - but I don't remember a car passing. The dialogue is invented of course, but I had a sense of what I could have said, or my friends - that's why I call it a novel, and it's told in the language of a novel. I wanted the effect of a diary, where you are attached to the person. But to dramatise, open it up, make it move somehow.
What people challenge things in My Struggle, it's the things really close to the present. But the childhood book, I sent that to friends I had in childhood, and they said: this is exactly the same! How can you remember? They have the same.
bearcake asks:
In Some Rain Must Fall, (page 299 onwards) you play chess with Espen, who easily wins three times consecutively in a matter of minutes. The section seems to encapsulate your perception of inferiority and inadequacy, both as a child and as an adult at this point in time.
Although you say you hate chess, you continue to play with a clearly more practised and educated player who studies the games of the old masters and offers to be a kind of mentor and go over openings and so on with you.
Would you agree that there are parallels here with chess and the act of writing? In particular in terms of the anxieties induced as a result of the fear of failure or rejection, of not being the best or even good enough.
Also. Have you ever met Magnus Carlsen?
Guardian contributor I don't play chess, and there is a certain feeling that chess reveals your intellectual capacity, and it is very hard to time and again to understand you really have no.... it's personal in a way, I can play football and lose, but chess, it's related to your intellectual capability. And it's also very intimate, you're playing with someone next to you, and it's a game on so many levels. I once did an IQ test and scored very low, which was embarrassing. Anything to do with maths, I'm absolutely stupid when it comes to that. But this chess game was with a friend, he wanted it, so I did it - I didn't enjoy it at all.
In relation to writing - a good chess player is based on intuition, and have the ability to see something and visualise it - that must be enormously important to both.
Magnus, I've never met him, but he has something almost superhuman, in visualising things in an instant. It has to do with intuition. But I have no idea what's going on in Magnus Carlsen's mind.
'You're not a real writer until you have enemies'
Chris Westoby asks:
In A Man In Love, you explain to Geir that you don’t give a s**t what people think about you. That’s cool, BUT, what’s your stance on being misunderstood? Many argue that My Struggle’s clarity doesn’t offer much wriggle room for us to make personal interpretations of it, but what if there are moments when we are getting you completely wrong? Has anyone ever made a comment about you as a person, whether kind or critical, based on what they’ve read, and you’ve thought: ‘that’s not how I thought I’d come across at all!”? And does that matter much to you?
Guardian contributor I can't remember having written that. I care way way too much what people think about me, and that's what made the whole enterprise of writing My Struggle necessary for me. For the first time you wrote freely without thinking of what people would think about me, that was like walking into hell, and it was the worst thing for me to write, knowing that people would hate me for writing it. But it also felt extremely liberating. I can now do that in my writing, it's fine to publish controversial stuff or stuff that people will hate. But in a social setting it's still the same - I'm still desperate to be liked. When I do an event, I do anything to please the audience. It's horrifying - I can't control it. I'm so afraid of being disliked, and there I am, talking about myself for an hour.
But another thing that happened was that I separated myself between me and what's out there in the media - I don't read it, and I know it's a cartoon, a character, it's impossible to identify with it. But my face has been attached to that caricature - when I look in the mirror I see 'Knausgaard', so I don't like to look at the mirror. But the most important thing was to liberate myself.
I have enemies, I never had that before. It's an enriching experience. You're not a real writer until you have enemies.
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Shuggiebear asks:
One of the joys of reading My Struggle was your developing relationship with your brother. He seemed like a good role model; bolder than you in standing up to your Dad, more musically gifted and sussed, smart, balanced, available for mature advice about relationships. I found the scene where you glassed him at the party genuinely disturbing. That was the most dramatic episode in the series for me, or in fact of any novel that I recall reading, perhaps because it felt so real. Is he still doing alright in the graphic arts business? I would like to find out more about his journey. I haven’t read book 6 as I’ve heard that it’s still being translated. Do you know when it will be published in the UK? Love your work, Davy.
Guardian contributor My brother has made all the covers to all my books in Norway, but is no longer working as a graphic artist. He published a book last year about a Norwegian band, and is currently working on a book about guitar players, talk with them about all the details, almost like a nerd thing but still very interesting! And we are also having a publishing house together with some friends - he's doing good. He's turned 50. He's older, so all his experiences, he's taking the punches for me.
Book six will be out in 2018.
MarioCavaradossi asks:
Reading your books, I am sometimes reminded of Walt Whitman’s use of the self, particularly in “Song of Myself”. Whitman seemed concerned with using the first-person to describe a collective experience – “I am large. I contain multitudes”.
In writing My Struggle, were you attracted to the idea of using your individual experiences as a means of representing a wider identity?
Guardian contributor That never occurred to me. In the beginning I thought that my book was so private and so idiosyncratic that it really had no relevance for other people - I was absolutely sure about that. But I've learned in the reception of it, and also during the writing of it, that it's true, the more private you get, the more you are like other people. There is a Swedish poet, the leading modernist poet in Sweden like TS Eliot in England - Gunnar Ekelof. He says: the bottom in you is the bottom in others. You have the same ground. I feel that, as a reader with other books.
mgmckenny asks:
Thank you for writing these books, I honestly feel your honesty in your writing has changed my life somehow. My question is this: Do you still watch Liverpool FC? And will you be watching tonight? :D
P.s. Managed to get a proof copy of Home and Away so will start it as soon as I’ve finished what I’m on now!
Guardian contributor I do watch them whenever I can, and I would love to watch the game tonight but I'm at an event tonight so I'm not sure that's possible... but it seems like there are great things happening there at the moment. I'm expecting a trashing of Manchester United.
kenningar asks:
What is your routine for editing? Daily, weekly, or do you wait until you have a complete first draft?
Also, any chance that The Aesthetics of a Broken Nose may be available in English some day? It seems like an interesting book.
Guardian contributor The last book I edited was the first book of My Struggle. But my normal routine is that I just write and the book is done, but since the first book it has been very little editing. There are of course remarks... I start my day by reading the day before, edit, and continue to write. It's much more a matter of: if it's not working, I remove it, and write it again. It's very different when it comes to journalism, I've been working with American editors and that's a different story - that's hard work for two weeks on a piece. Very detailed, shaping and reshaping all the time - it's like making a sculpture. I love that - they're so professional, and sensitive to the text. The difference is my own writing is more personal and more like as it appears - it would be wrong to change it too much. I'm not interested in constructing something - I'm more interested in the flow. The writing itself is editing - it's working, it's working, then it's not, and I take it out.
The Aesthetics of a Broken Nose, by Geir Angell Oygarden - it's really such a brilliant book, and it is completely original, in its thinking and in its method. Geir is a friend of mine, he was boxing for two or three years, studying boxers so he was beaten every day to be able to do that. He wanted to interview, but also participate - it makes it a very special and very interesting book. It really should be translated - it really is a great book about boxing, Scandinavia, the welfare state... publishers, you should pick it up!
Karl is with us now!
First up is this from Sean Healy, who asks:
I really love your books. They have so much truth and poignancy in them. I’m curious to know who some of your key influences from English literature – classic or contemporary – are?
Guardian contributor The first book that really made an impression on me in a life changing way was Ursula K Le Guin, the Earthsea trilogy. I read it when I was 10, and I re-read it a few years ago, and still find it as compelling and great as it was then. It felt like it had such a depth to it, in such a simple way - and is very adventurous. I find something of same in Borges and Calvino, and I always loved that fantastic literature. It's still as brilliant.
When I was a teenager I discovered Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children especially, and my first writing was very much inspired by him - I found his writing so rich, and expanding everything. That was a new concept to me. He added something to world, rather than the condition I come from is taking something away from it; minimalism. This was maximalism - that was very important for me. I still regard The Satanic Verses as a modern classic, a really truly great book in all senses.
Then in my 20s I read Ulverton by Adam Thorpe, which was an amazing reading experience, how he managed to capture time and passing of time, of changing cultures. He opened up possibilities in thinking about what a novel could do, for me. And at the same time I read Ian McEwan and his book A Child of Time, not his most well known but a direct influence for me in my first novel. ONe of the subjects is regression and when I read that it was like the last piece of what I was going to do came into place. I owe that book a lot.
And I'm reading Rachel Cusk, Outline. I read Life's Work by her, which is brilliant, and Outline is outstanding. She's one of the best writers at the moment, what I've read of her. I've got a feeling there's something new in there.
And classics: Dracula by Bram Stoker. I've read it twenty times. I really want to write that book! And another book that I think I should write, but I don't have to because it's written - I think about it every other week. Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro - it has something magical about it. It's absolutely fantastic.
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Post your questions for Karl Ove Knausgaard
One of the most powerfully honest – or to its critics, profoundly narcissistic – literary projects of recent years has been Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, a six-book autobiography that charts the Norwegian writer’s personal trials and tribulations. The hospitalisation of his wife with a breakdown, the death of his father – nothing is off limits. “This tiny quotidian universe was not intrinsic to any story and provided no narrative drive, but it was a part of me, and therefore I had to write about it,” he explained later in the Guardian.
The books have been enormously popular across the world, though they have also caused controversy – not only does My Struggle share a name with Hitler’s Mein Kampf, members of Knausgaard’s family were hurt by his candour.
The most recent edition, Some Rain Must Fall, was recently published in paperback; it was praised as an “astonishing, brutal and consistently absorbing project” in the Guardian. Knausgaard has also just written Home and Away with Fredrik Ekerlund, a series of essays about football. With both books coming out, he is joining us to answer your questions on anything in his life and career, in a live webchat from noon GMT on Monday 17 October. Post them in the comments below, and he’ll answer as many as possible.
I wish I could answer more questions! The one on favourite albums for example... Remain in Light, Talking Heads. Thanks, lots of questions were really good and interesting.