# Karl Ove Knausgaard Looks Back on “My Struggle”  ## Metadata - Author: [[Joshua Rothman]] - Full Title: Karl Ove Knausgaard Looks Back on “My Struggle” - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses Karl Ove Knausgaard's reflections on his book series "My Struggle." Knausgaard talks about his writing process, the themes in his books, and the challenges he faced in representing his life authentically in his novels. He highlights the idea of using literature to confront life instead of escaping from it, and the struggle to bridge the gap between fiction and reality. The text also touches on the exploration of self, emotions, and the impact of storytelling. - URL: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/karl-ove-knausgaard-the-duty-of-literature-is-to-fight-fiction#:~:text=Yorker%20www,%E2%80%9D - Source File: web-only ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > When I wrote my first novel—I was nineteen—I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you’re entering something not yet familiar—a world rather than thoughts about the world. The novel was crap, unbelievably silly and stupid, but at some point speed-writing became like reading, a place where I disappeared. When the novel was rejected, I lost belief both in myself and in speed. I started to polish the car instead of driving it—and, obviously, when you polish your car, you don’t get anywhere, no matter how nice the car looks. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jm0k8vreqrp19c04n3wbbceh)) > An important part of my books is that they want to find out how a particular view of the world comes into being. For Heidegger, the mood or state of mind always came first, because that is what you think through—your mood is always there. No document states it, it’s in no archive, you can try to describe it, but the point is that we don’t think about it, it’s just there. In these books, by writing about so much that I don’t control, I hoped that all this would somehow become visible. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jm0mg7vdnjxj6yqeb6q1qfer)) > Jesus says you should be like the birds, and then you can enter the kingdom of God. And Kierkegaard writes about how if a bird’s nest is destroyed, the next day he’s happily rebuilding it. The future just doesn’t exist if you’re a bird. And I read this with, you know, such an incredible desire. A friend of mine has wood pigeons who build a nest, lay eggs, have chicks, and there’s a hawk that comes and takes them. That’s happened four years in a row. But the pigeons still go to the same place because, for them, the future doesn’t exist. Maybe they’re in what Kierkegaard would say is the kingdom of God. > And then you’ve got Heidegger’s view on the birds, which is that they have a poor existence—they don’t really know anything. Two positions about being in the world. I mean, your baby is in the world. [Ed. note: He’s four months old.] He’s not aware of himself or who he is. It’s probably wonderful to be him! But would you go back there and renounce everything you know now? We’re not in the world—we’re looking at the world, longing for it. Do we want in there? Is that where God is? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jm0mkkfacz73f3yab4pcw6da)) > **In Book 6, you describe how, at your father’s funeral, the priest drew a lesson from your father’s life: “One must fasten one’s gaze.” You write, “Everything is there, the houses, the trees, the cars, the people, the sky, the earth, and yet something is missing because their being there means nothing . . . We have not fastened our gaze, we have not connected ourselves with the world, and could just as well, taking things to their logical conclusion, depart from it.” You write that we all have an “obligation” to find meaning in the world—even though, “objectively,” it’s meaningless**. > My father, I think he always wanted to be in another place—always wanted to be another person, to have another life. He had no presence, and sometimes, it seemed, even no awareness of us. I think it must have been painful to be him, and drinking was a way of getting away, of getting out. > And there’s also a pull in me—away from home and into art, for instance—that I fear. It’s much better now—I think I’ve managed to fasten my gaze somehow—but [I’ve struggled with that throughout my life](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-is-the-struggle-in-my-struggle). Because nothing is as defined in life as it is in literature or in art. If everyone fastened his gaze on life, there would be no art. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jm0msb2x0n6d7bv41jrdepnn))