carpentrix:

Recapturing the World with Karl Ove Knausgaard

Not long ago, I went for a run in the late afternoon, heading west towards a bright and setting sun. Coming down a low hill, with a wooden fence and rolling hills to my right, a glimpse of sea to the north, something happened. The song on the stupid earbuds was right, my body felt light and fast, and I felt myself dissolve into the sun. I exited the boundaries of my body, obliterated into the light, and was taken up into it all, the hills with brown grass, the low bushes showing the first pubic fuzz of spring, the pocket of sea in the distance, the long low fence, the crows there at flight across the field. A momentary transformation, euphoria, seven seconds, maybe 10, and I was deposited back to earth, to feel the concrete underneath my sneakers again and the breath in and out of my lungs. What a thing to admit — I sound like a maniac, I know. But it is no coincidence that this happened in the midst of a three-day binge on Book Two of My Struggle, and not a week after finishing A Time for Everything. This happened precisely because I was in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s hands.

I had the pleasure and challenge of writing about the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard for the LA Review of Books. It’s a long weird essay-review, almost over the top, about seagulls and angels and meaning. Please, give it a read here. Knausgaard fucking rules.

P.S. Hey, Dustin? Over at Melville House? Next time I’m in New York I’d like to buy you beers for turning me on to this guy.

[Photograph by Sigrid Nygaard]

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