Karl Ove Knausgård: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is your own American travelogue a revision of Knut Hamsun’s in some way? Like, “Well, Norway’s going to get it right this time”? [laughs] No, but actually, I have thought about doing that — go in his footsteps because he was there for quite a long time. He drove a 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. It’s so complex that he is not a Nazi in his writing. But in his essays and in his speeches, there’s a big dissonance. There, he’s a Nazi. And that’s what a teacher can do, is to get you so close to these things that 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. Norway is a nationalistic country, but it’s not in any bad way at all, really. It’s a very innocent country. What’s the worst thing about living here in London?…

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