YouSaid · the spoken record

Karl Ove Knausgård

lines on the record: 75
first: 2019-05-08
most recent: 2019-05-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, but I do actually have thought about doing that, go in his footsteps, because he was for a quite long time. He interviewed Tram in Chicago, did a lot of things. And it's an exciting story, really. But anyway, the thing with writing in his case is that he's getting so close to the world and to the people in his writing is so complex that he's not a nasty in his writing. But in his essays and in his speeches, there's a big distance. There he is a Nasi. And that's what literature can do is to get you so close that these things, like nationalism, just disappears because they don't exist on that particular level. You have to move away from the world to be able to establish a distance to be able to talk about these things at all. But I know Aason nationalist”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He is not your nationalist. He's incredibly complex. And the interesting thing is that you can see that struggle in his writing.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He went to America and he hated America, but he was America. He had that in him. He was there in late 19th century and he wrote a book about it, which is a terrible book. But still he was there and he had that modernity in him. And he never wrote about his parents, never wrote about where he came from. You know, all his characters just appears, you know, and then something happens with them, but there's no past. And I found that incredibly intriguing just because he become the Nazi. He become the farmer. He become the one who sang the song about growth, what do you call it, Machin Skrode? Yeah, exactly. And it's like fighting himself doing that.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a wonderful book, but I think Homson's theme, his subject, is ruthlessness. It's a kind of in a very rooted society, you know, in a rural society, in a family-orientated society like Nova has been, a small society. He was a very ruthless, very urban writer.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think. So much writing is done out of a feeling of not belonging. If you read Kenneth Thompson, he was an RCLed Narsi, we have to be honest about that.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See everything he wants to do is in the book. So I wanted to describe that path from Hitler to Ceylon and his only part in the book that's not about me, but it is, of course, about me, and it's the only part that's not about our time. It's about past. So it's kind of a place, kind of a dark mirror in the book where you could see everything be, you know, get a perspective to everything. And it's the only part I found really pleasure in writing because it was so much I discovered during writing that and it wasn't about me, which is a burden to do, but that was different. It's about the generation, the generation that grew up with the First World War. made Second World War happen.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And there is this No, I think Portal and yeah, maybe. But anyway, he wrote this incredibly, incredibly, incredibly intriguing poem where almost nothing can be named. There's no names. And it's like it's almost impossible to say anything. It's like the language is completely broken. So there's no connection between the element in the language. And I read that and I wrote about it and I realized this is And it's about Holocaust, of course. This is the end of what started with my struggle. And then that was the movement in the book and that was the movement because Hitler also wrote in German and he also wrote you could read it. It's bad, but you could say whatever you want. But the fact that you could actually read him is intriguing and you can see.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it started out like it started in the book. It's a reflection about names because I couldn't use my father's name in the book. That was, my family forbid me that. So I started to be interested in and look around what names really are, what they signify. And then I stumbled across Romanian poets wrote in German called Paul Salan. His parents died in Holocaust and he was Jewish and he wrote post-war in the language of the Nazis.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In one sense, incredibly distant, but when I start to think about it incredibly close, it was my grandparents. Parents' world really, but that wasn't the reason why I started to write. The reason was coincidental, basically, because I called my book My Struggle, which is the English translation of Mein Kampf. And then I had to read it. And then I realized Hitler's book is writing about his own self. I'm writing about my own self. It's the same title. I started to read him and I got incredibly intrigued by what I read because there was so much, not that he was lying, but it was so much that was unsaid, so much that, you know, he twisted his life into something completely different. Couldn't be true. And I just dived into that and started to read more about it and try to find out what kind of man he was and how it could, all this could happen.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's many connections. One would be that when my grandmother died we found Mein Kampf in the chest in the living room, you know. What was that book doing there? Had they read it? And I realized it was kind of common thing in order to have that book. It was kind of common thing to cooperate with the NASA regime. When I grew up in Norway, the story we were told at school was the heroic one, you know, the resistance and How evil civilian resisted But the fact is that now I was known the wheels were rolling and the society was working and it has to be a lot of cooperation with analysis Other grandfather, he befriended Austrian officer that was posted where he lived. When I grew up, Reminiscence from the war, like bunkers, where we were playing at, and it was like war was.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you just have to accept them and work inside of them. That's the only way. So if you can't write, then you have to start to write out from that fact. And I think that's the best advice I ever got to accept everything that happened. So if you have many children, it's a good thing. If you don't have children, it's a good thing. It's like you have to embrace it because that's your life, that's where you are, and writing should be connected to that or painting or whatever it is.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eventually, where I wanted to go into the ordinary mundane even and try to connect to what was going on in life, you know, life isn't sacred, life isn't uplifted it is ordinary and boring and all the things we know. So you have these myths and they work for some, they don't work for some. It's like it's, but you can relate to them. I have a friend. He's a brilliant writer and he always says, yeah, this is the When you want to create something, you have certain I don't know the English word you have certain things that fixated what we would call them, premises or assumptions.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when I got children had this idea that writing was a solitary thing, I mean I could go out to small islands in the sea, could go to lighthouses, live there, try to write in complete, you know, be completely solitary and alone. So when I got children, that was an obstruction for my writing, I thought. It wasn't. It was the other way around. I've never written as much as I have after I got the children, after I started to write at home, after I established writing in the middle of life. There was a crawling life everywhere. And what happened was that writing become less important. It become less precious. It became more ordinary. It became less Religious or less sacred, it becomes something ordinary, and that was incredibly important for me because that was”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He wrote about the film he wants to make, and then he said, today my grandchild died, and that was it, you know, just a little passage like it really didn't care. And a normal person would have filled that person completely. And then that little episode turns up in his next film that the child is drowning. And there is another episode from Bergmann's life that when his son was lying on his deathbed, he refused to have his father to come there. And that's a very, very strong statement. You have this almost archetypical artist putting his art before his children, before his family, before everything. And as you have also Doris Lessing did the same, abandon her children to move to London and to write. And I've been kind of confronted with that as a writer. And I think everyone do because writing is so time consuming and so demanding.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is Bagman's workbooks just came out in Sweden. So it's not his diaries and it's not his place, but it's kind of in-between state. All notes it took when he was working with things. It is incredibly interesting because you can see how a film surfaced from almost nothing and just become a film. And you see all his struggles and you see all of that. But in one particular...”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the leap of religion is going from the society and into the unknown into the things we don't really know about, the things we don't have language for. There is another very interesting Nordic poet called Inge Christensen. She wrote a collection of SS, which is really brilliant. And she talks about those kind of border areas is a matter of language, what we can express and what we can express. And those in science, those are the string theories or that's the things we don't know. That's the unknown. And the border is the language. We don't have language for it. We can't really. And she also said that like a letter in a book cannot read what's around it, cannot read the book. We are the same in the world. We cannot read the world. We're part of it. But that was Kirkegaard. And I don't find it hard to connect.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which basically is a story about faith and what it is to believe. God and what it demands to believe in God, the completely irrational level it takes to believe in God. I'm very... In downtown, which you have to take. It's an interesting thing going on in that essay, which is a wonderful essay about Abraham sacrificing Isaac, is that it also has some small parts about breastfeeding in between, which is incredibly strange. And I was thinking, I've been thinking a lot about that. What is that? But it's moving away from something. It's going from a mother into society.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. You didn't say different. You did say difficult. Yeah, because there was a lot of grouping together. You had Jerkegor. And the sacrifice of Isak, the biblical story.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deep layered things, you know, the pietism. Is anything you think about? This is things that just happen, I think. It's very unmodern, that's true. It's very old fashioned.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The obvious thing in regard to that is that apiotistic Christianity is a very personal relation to God, very intimate relation to God, much more than a collective play like religion as Catholicism would be much more internal than external. And as a novelist, that's the professional path, so to speak. But these things you don't think about, these things you just do. And if you are born into a culture, that culture becomes part of you, that language becomes part of you. And something of that you have to challenge, something of that you are not aware of. It's just part of you. But I have, you know, there's certain writers I do. Really love, and I think that is part of my culture. And I think I'm similar to them because of many different things. But these things you are talking about is kind of more a cultural...”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What he lacked when he started to paint was a language to express that. Couldn't do that through glossy national romanticism, you know. So he had to break down everything he knew about painting to try to get that through what he had experienced. And that's the same thing with writing. That's what you want to do. Get that personal experience. The thing that only you feel, the thing that only you see, the thing that you know get that through. And if you do that, you realize, no, that's how everyone sees it. That's how everyone feels. But that's kind of the thing you have to try to reach, to tap into. And when I started to write my struggle, I didn't know that existed. I just wanted to do it for my own sake, you know, more or less. And yeah, it was confessional.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think so. But what Monk wanted, I think what Monk had was some experiences, very strong experiences. He lost his mother when he was very young. And then he lost his oldest sister, which was even harder for him. And I think”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't interested in writing a novel. I was interested in trying to get a language from my experience off the world. And I think that is the key to Edward Monk, what he did as a painter, very much so, because he grew up in Norway at the end of the 19th century. In a kind of a certain pictorial language, which was realism, which was naturalism, and which was national romanticism, you know, the glossy images of mountains and fjords and that kind of things. That was what he had available when he started. He wanted to paint. That was what he had available.”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At all, and I couldn't write at that time two years later. I wrote a novel. It is incredibly many similarities with myself prost, but I wasn't aware of it. It was just something that happened. That's one level of nemesis. The other level is the opposite is unlearning everything you know to be able to access What I like to think of as the world, the world we live in, because sometimes fiction can be so mechanical, it is so locked into certain ways. look at the world that it's more like you look into literature than to the world and that was what I was struggling with in my struggle trying to find a language for my experience of the world you know not”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a tough first question, I have to say. How can I hook on to that? I think to several levels you could reply that. That question. First level would be whatever's related to literature, to the art of fiction, how to tell a story. Which is something you learn through reading, and you have to have that for writing. There are just several ways to tell a story, several ways to enter a scene, several ways to write realistic prose. And for me, almost all reading I've done has, I think, subconsciously sunk into me, in my own world and in my own writing. So when I, for instance, read Marcel Proust for the first time, I absolutely loved it and I read it like I was drinking water or something. But I wasn't aware of me soaking it”
2019-05-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source