Karl Ove Knausgaard -- That Slow Storm That Blows Through Our Lives

Knausgaard   That Slow Storm

Here are the best passages in the wonderful Conversation Scott Esposito conducted with Karl Ove Knausgaard online and published in Tin House Summer 2014 Volume 15, Number 4: 88-105.

What I’m interested in are the feelings.  Not the thoughts or the reflections, they are wildly overrated.  But the complexity of feelings.  Everything we see, everything we think, everything we hear, all our experiences, are filtered through our feelings.  . . . . so what I tried to do was to get into the situations, into their concreteness and idiosyncrasy, and try to evoke the feelings from them, that slow storm that blows through our lives.  (104)

It has nothing to do with masochism.  It has to do with the thrill of the forbidden, crossing that line between what you are and are not supposed to do.  But I would say that it also has a comic element to it.  Writing involves irony, no matter what kind of writing--and by irony I mean basically the differences between the author, the writer, and the protagonist.  . . . . Something’s comic when it’s seen differently from the outside and inside at the same time.  And I do find this ‘I’ in these books comic---it wasn’t funny when it happened in real life, but the text gives everything a certain perspective, and that irony, that gap, that double self, it isn’t masochistic but deeply and fundamentally literary.  (105)

It’s the offspring, the in-between thing, the arrow that misses its target, that is the real thing.  (92)

I almost never let thinking interfere with writing, or at least, I try to avoid it.  (95)

One of the subjects of these books is the feeling of losing the world, that the world has changed into images of the world-- (96)