For some time now I’ve been, at first curious and by now already enchanted, fascinated even, by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård. By the things he says and the way he says them. He is most (in)famous for his six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, which I’ve just gathered the courage to start reading. It’s not so much his story that I fear, it’s that idea of pushing buttons that I have both been longing and avoiding to push for a long time.
The title is Min Kamp (My Struggle) after the original Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. Of course he is questioned about this in almost every interview, so much so that he ended up including a 400-page essay on Hitler in his books. I was surprised when he said his working title was Argentina because it is a place he longs for, and I would have been equally surprised as the interviewer when he asked her “Have you read it, Mein Kampf?” I haven’t read it and I admit knowing next to nothing about that book.
He raises an interesting point or two about it (in that segment of the video) and later he also says some stuff I found intriguing, about the power of language to alienate ourselves, one of the keys to Hitler’s power. To paraphrase Karl Ove, “It happened in the language, from ‘we’, to ‘them’, to ‘it’. There is no 'you' (in Mein Kampf), it’s ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘them’, but all the humanity is in the ‘you’.
origamiaround
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
gracieabrams
titsay
