My Struggle

The critics love it; “Perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our time,” but after reading Book 1 (of 6) of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard I have to admit that I am not quite that enthused; I liked it; I didn’t love it.  And if it is the book of this century, then it joins Ulysses, the book of the last century,  as one of those books that only the critics and intellectuals love.  How many common people have read Joyce’s masterpiece, and how many understood it, let alone enjoyed it?

Still, there are parts of Book 1 that are brilliant, moments when the reader is in the mind of the writer, sharing all his thoughts, a kind of intellectual intimacy that is both uncomfortable and exhilarating. The book is described as an autobiographical novel, implying that it is fictional, but what is most likable in this book is its brutal honesty.  Now I’m about to start Book Two:  A Man in Love.  I’ll keep you posted.

I just finished reading The Age of Iron by JM Coetzee, an earlier work by one of my favorite authors.  It describes the last days of a woman in South Africa dying of cancer in the time of the last days of the white government, its doctrine of apartheid itself a type of cancer of the people of that country.  It is a forceful angry insightful book, as staggering as it is depressing.