![]() ![]() ![]() His artistic credo, which he believes he shares with Munch, is senk lista (‘lower the bar’): the important thing is just to keep on writing, in the same way that for Munch all that mattered was to keep on painting. He stops, doubles back on himself, examines the assertion, and either qualifies or reinforces it before moving on. Suddenly he finds himself making a massive assertion. Knausgaard’s bold self-acceptance performs a similar function for our own nervous times. Orwell praised the healthy and liberating effect of reading Miller during the politically tense 1930s, when it seemed to him that people had begun to censor their own thoughts (‘Ought I to be thinking this?’). Writing in Inside the Whale in 1940 about Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, George Orwell described the experience of feeling that ‘he knows all about me, he wrote this specifically for me’. The style was adopted with great success by Henry Miller, and Miller is probably the confessional novelist with whom Knausgaard can most profitably be compared. JIssue Have You Heard of Nikolai Astrup The Norwegian artist, a younger contemporary of Munch, is largely unknown outside Norway’s borders. ![]() Knausgaard has perfected the confessional, ‘speaking’ style of writing that his fellow countryman Knut Hamsun introduced into modern Western literature in the 1890s with novels like Hunger and Mysteries. ![]()
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