Knausgård udefra

I Norge er man sikkert ved at være godt mæt af Knausgård og sikkert også så småt i Sverige og DK, selvom vi muligvis har holdt KOK-hysterien i armslængde. Af den grund kan det være forfriskende at læse om Knausgård, set fra et andet, muligvis større perspektiv.

Jeg fik et tip om dette interview "Completely Without Dignity" fra Paris Review, som egentlig ikke rummer så meget nyt, men inde i teksten finder man desuden et link til dette noget mere interessante essay af Jonathan Callahan, der slutter prægnant og således (og i øvrigt demonstrerer, at det ikke kun er læsere i Skandinavien som forslugent kaster sig over Min kamp):

"My Struggle provides the reader with a portrait of an artist whose sometimes-quixotic-seeming-endeavor to narrate his struggles with life and art in their entirety consumes, possesses, captivateshim, in that last verb’s literal sense, and thereby sets him free. When Knausgaard tells his wife he must leave her at home to care for their recently born daughter, must write; when he won’t compromise even after she threatens to leave him, take the kid with her, then does; and when he furthermore dispenses with every last aesthetic consideration aside from this scribomaniacal need to write, he is both chronicling and dramatizing his own refusal to abandon the pursuit…and it’s this monstrously intact integrity with which he undertakes and then completes his masterwork that answers any question about the madness of a project that, like a rocket fired straight up into the sky, takes aim at its creator and terminates in the obliteration of his authorship, his hunger to create. It’s Knausgaard’s consummation, a triumph that emancipates the husband, father, son, and friend: the author is dead, leaving what’s left of the man free to walk away from his leviathan — preserved forever now in art’s time-cheating formaldehyde — freed from the echo chamber of thwarted intent, in order to emerge, maybe for the first time, into life."