Karl Ove Knausgård: evaluation

Transcript context

…Peter Handke — what kind of influence have his novels had on you? That’s a hard . . . I’m discussing him and his influence in book six, actually, because he is a writer I absolutely admire, and I think my writing doesn’t reach up to his knees, [laughs] his writing’s knees. But My Year in the No-Man’s Bay is a book that I read — must have been in the ’90s when it came out — before being a writer myself. Or was it exactly that moment I started to be a writer, I think. That was very influential. And his writing about the things that don’t belong in a story and the things that really don’t belong in a landscape — the areas between the city and outside of the city — the railway tracks, the grass, the fences, kind of the world as it is outside of the story, I think. He’s just . . . I don’t know, and the book about his mother is absolutely fantastic, I think. Is Elena Ferrante the main contender for having bested your achievement? For handing out lifetime achievement awards for contemporary serious fiction.…

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