Karl Ove Knausgård: preference

Transcript context

…Have you ever done the same with your books? Yeah, I’m kind of a careless person. I don’t take backups, and I have window open — it’s raining on my computer. I have lost a computer down on the tracks of trains, and I have lost them, you know, but it always turns out well. But that’s not the same. I don’t care about how a book looks. I don’t deal with that part of it at all. When I’m done with a book, there’s hardly no editing. I just leave it and publish it, and I want to move on because it’s the process of doing it that interests me, not the result. I really hate it when a book is done because then I know it’ll take a few years before I will get into something else. In that I can recognize Munch. He hardly finished a painting in his life. And he was very reckless with his paintings. It is a certain aesthetic in that as well. It’s like in writing. It’s like the difference between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky really didn’t care. He just didn’t have to describe it fully. Just a few sentences, done with that, and go on and go on and go on, looking for something, like a flame or something burning or something, the intensity of something he was looking for. Tolstoy — he wrote about everything and painted it fully and did so wonderfully, but it is completely different aesthetics, and they reach completely different places. When I was young, I thought Dostoevsky was the primary, the one that had reached the front. Now, I’m older, it’s Tolstoy, really. Edvard Munch — he stuck with Dostoevsky as an influence.…

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