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In the Land of the Cyclops de Karl Ove…
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In the Land of the Cyclops (edició 2021)

de Karl Ove Knausgaard (Autor)

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843318,069 (4.13)5
"In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English. He explores art, philosophy, literature, or something as simple as a trip to the beach with his kids, with piercing candor and intelligence. Paired with full-color images throughout, his essays render the shadowlands of Cindy Sherman's photography, illuminate the depth of Stephen Gill's eye, or tussle with the inner-workings of Ingmar Bergman's workbooks. In one essay he describes the speckled figure of Francesca Woodman, arms coiled in birch bark and reaching up toward the sky - a tree. In another, he unearths Sally Mann's photographs of decomposing corpses, drawn to the point at which branches and limbs, hair and grass harmonize. Each essay bristles with Knausgaard's searing honesty and longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world"--… (més)
Membre:Jotamac
Títol:In the Land of the Cyclops
Autors:Karl Ove Knausgaard (Autor)
Informació:Archipelago (2021), 350 pages
Col·leccions:La teva biblioteca, Llegint actualment
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In the Land of the Cyclops de Karl-Ove Knausgaard

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Not sure Knausgaard is entirely ready to claim the mantle of Norway’s premier intellectual. Good on Flaubert ( unsurprisingly) , unconvinced by his meditations on art & existential angst ( )
  P1g5purt | Mar 26, 2024 |
In the Land of the Cyclops is a wonderful collection of essays from Karl Ove Knausgaard. Varied in both style and content, they still hold together as an insightful whole.

The last book of his I read was several years ago, So Much Longing in So Little Space, which looked at Munch's art and, as one would expect, Knausgaard's life. I thoroughly enjoyed that work and hoped to be equally pleased with this one. I was.

Whether looking at life in general, artwork specifically, the intersection of these, or, as always, how they speak to his life, this collection offers the reader both insight and ways to view and understand one's own life in relation to whatever surrounds us. Seeing how he engages with an idea, a work of art, or the journey from one place to another sheds light on ways of doing so we may have never considered. I don't always see things the same as he does but I sure can appreciate why they speak to him as they do and, by extension, I think I fine tune how I perceive things as well.

I would recommend this to readers who like to think about both the big picture and the minutiae of everyday life and how they inform each other. Like any collection, you will connect with some essays better than with others, but on the whole I think you'll come away with a better appreciation of what is all around you.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )
1 vota pomo58 | Dec 5, 2022 |
The reviews of Knausgaard’s first essay collection published in this country have not all been glowing, but that is quite common for this famous and very controversial writer. Opinions are always skewed when it comes to him. I could care less. With In the Land of the Cyclops, I had a collection of his essays that previously I could only occasionally find in periodicals.

As opposed to my bookstore-owning days when we literally invested in quantity in an author’s newest book, deciding how much of our limited funds to risk. Now, as a “civilian,” my investment is for only a single copy, a few hours of my time, and my hopes for a great read. This book delivered in every way I’d hoped for. To start with, it’s published by a quality publisher, Archipelago Books, who have created another class act of a book, with paper that’s thick and glossy, showcases a number of rich photographs, has a quality binding, and a very tasteful book jacket. It’s a book that clearly oozes fine publishing and feels great to hold and turn each page.

When it gets around to the book’s contents, I have to confess I am a true groupie, a Knausgaard-head, so to speak. There are writers that I feel such a strong connection with, where the writing takes me to a special place, a place that I can’t always explain in words, but I know it when I get there. I think I’ve read and reread everything he’s had published in this country, and I’ve loved every book but for two, his book on soccer (Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game) and an older book on angels (A Time for Everything), two subjects that I have never believed in.

But his other books have always captured something that made them very special. He has become one of those writers for whom I am very impatient for his next book. This all started years ago—when I was a Knausgaard virgin—and I read all these teasing articles about this enormous 3,600-page, six-volume work being slowly published by some Scandinavian writer with an unusual name. As his work is very hard to describe, it was easy to catch wind of something very different coming my way. I kept finding myself leaning forward in my chair, dying to experience this nearly indescribable writing style. At the time, I had no idea that it would take so many years for the entire work to be written, translated, and finally published here.

I will try something different for the actual essays in the collection. The following are all drawn from my notebook entries for the book’s different essays. Granted they are mostly Knausgaard quotes and my brief comments, but if they interest you, I recommend you read the book.

In the first essay, “All That is in Heaven,” I found a strong, fascinating work about how we relate to things and people. The following line jumped off the page at me. “Seamlessly, art removes us from and draws us closer to the world, the slow-moving, cloud-embraced matter of which our dreams too are made.” I also discovered the word somnambulant, spelled somnambulent in the book, but hell, he’s Norwegian. The word is defined as resembling or characteristic of a sleepwalker; sluggish.

In “All That Is in Heaven” the piece focuses on art, our bodies, the clouds in the sky and was beautifully bizarre. “The idea of a connection between our thoughts and the clouds, between the soul and the sky, is ancient and has always been opposed, or restrained, by the connection between the body and earth.” He also relates an odd story about how the face of Jesus was found in the ultrasound of a man’s testicles.

The strange and provocative world of Cindy Sherman’s photography is explored in “Pig Person.” The concept of image is visited again with “Inexhaustible Precision,” where he drops the following curious lines. “Whenever I see a new picture I immediately seem to like and find aesthetically pleasing, I am suspicious. This cannot be good, I think to myself. This cannot be art. It feels like the spontaneous pleasure, the immediate sense of aesthetic satisfaction I derive in such instances is too easy and too shallow to be called true artistic experience. “

In “Fate” he enters the world of our dreams. “One morning, almost fifteen years ago, I woke up from a dream that was so vivid and powerful that I knew it must be true. I still remember both what happened in the dream and the feelings it left me with.” He then goes on to write about how dreadful it is to listen to people describe their dreams. “Dreams in literature are monstrosities: whenever I come across one, it takes a lot for me to not flip past it or shut the book altogether. It tells me that the writer has failed to understand his responsibility to reality, or else has not understood the role of the imagination in real life.”

In “Welcome to Reality” he writes about a photographer who took her first photo at age thirteen and committed suicide at age twenty-two. “The first time I saw a Francesca Woodman’s pictures was in a random photo book I picked up without knowing anything about her.” “The first image was of a naked woman seated on a shabby chair with her legs apart and a plate of glass pressed to her stomach and her hairy crotch, head tilted forward, veiled by her long hair.”

Knausgaard writes about Knut Hamsun and his 1927 novel Wayfarers in “America of the Soul.” “Hamsun’s characters do not ponder morals, they possess them. Good or bad, meaningful or meaningless, is never an issue”

“At the Bottom of the Universe” contains the following. “November 23, 2010, 7:20 p.m. I’m feeling low. It goes away when I write, which is the reason I’m writing, to escape myself—even if it’s myself I’m writing about.” And then he writes about his ex-wife Linda, who he was married to for around ten years. “Her writing is so incredibly good, though strange to me. I have trouble connecting her with the fantastic sentences she writes, they come from a place I don’t know.”

My notes for the piece “Tándaradéi!” mention his subject, the painter, photographer, and sculptor Anselm Kiefer, and the following line. “Painting after painting of women in sexual ecstasy, set against radiant flowers, against water, against sky.”

Knausgaard makes a confession in “Michel Houellebecq’s Submission,” when he admits to a reviewer’s fault. “Before I begin this review, I have to make a small confession. I have never read Michel Houellebecq’s books. This is odd, I concede, since Houellebecq is considered a great contemporary author, and one cannot be said to be keeping abreast of contemporary literature without reading his work.”

While writing about Ingmar Bergman in “Feeling and Feeling and Feeling” he showed how important Bergman’s workbooks were to his creations. “The workbook was in other words a kind of ladder leading from the writer to his work. Usually, the writer will take that ladder away once the work is done, allowing the work to stand alone, isolated as it were from its creative context. Bergman’s workbooks are the ladder left in place.”

When I read “Idiots of the Cosmos” the following struck me. “The northern lights compel the eye to look up, they are impossible to ignore, and while the phenomenon is simple, rays striking the atmosphere, no more mysterious than torchlight, it brings with it more than its physics, namely the feeling of finding oneself at the very edge of the world, staring out into the infinite, empty, meaningless universe through which we hurtle.” He also wrote about discovering Roberto Bolaño’s novel, 2666, and then wrote the following. “When I first read it, it was as if all other contemporary literature was at once consigned to the shadows. It was relevant, that was the feeling I had.”

Using their one-eyed limited vision was very useful for Knausgaard’s essay “In the Land of Cyclops.” “The cyclops don’t want to know about areas of reality that aren’t as they think they should be.” “The cyclops get angry and hurl rocks at those who say something they don’t like or don’t understand.” He then relates that to the world of literature with the following. “Writing a novel about something that happens isn’t the same as condoning it.” “Surely no one thinks crime writers condone murder just because they write about it? I exploited a thirteen-year-old girl by using her in a novel, but she exists only in the novel, so of what exactly does the exploitation consist? And where’s the danger?” “But there’s no other country I know of where literature professors call their writers pedophiles and tell them what they should and shouldn’t write about. That could only happen in the land of the cyclops.”

Once again, I contribute very little of my own for the piece “The Other Side of the Face.” “When I consider the neck, the first thing that springs to mind are guillotines, beheadings, executions. Which does seem a little strange, since we live in a country where executions do not take place, there are no guillotines, and beheadings is thus an entirely marginal phenomenon in our culture. Nevertheless, if I think neck, I think, chop it off.” I was interested in his historical explanation of our society’s fading practice of bowing, it was exposing your neck to harm, as a sign of trust and/or respect.

My notebook’s briefest entry is for the essay “Life in the Sphere of Unending Resignation.” Beirut.

I love contradiction and confession, which are both reflected in the following line from his essay on “Madame Bovary.”
“Countless are the critics and writers who have held up Madame Bovary as the perfect novel—the best novel that has ever been written, at that. Personally, I am no fan of perfection when it comes to literature; for me writing and reading are all about transgression, whereas perfection is all about faultlessness. And yet I agree: Madame Bovary is the perfect novel, and it is the best novel that has ever been written.” [Allow me to say that my late wife, Vicky, hated talk of that unattainable state … perfection.]

In “To Where the Story Cannot Reach” he goes into the world of authors and their editors, always a deeply curious world to the readers who only see the finished words. “The work of the literary editor is conducted in a kind of shadow, cast by the name of the author. A few editors have stepped out of the shadow, becoming perhaps more infamous than famous, for the label “editor” and “famous” seem like a contradiction in terms, essentially incompatible.” He mentions the most famous: Gordon Lish (Captain Fiction) known for his substantial editing of Raymond Carver, Maxwell Perkins (Editor of Genius) for his work with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound’s paring down of T.S. Elliot’s “The Waste Land.” Knausgaard wrote about his own relationship with editing. “There are many misconceptions about writing. One of the most common is that it’s a lonely business, something writers do on their own. I can’t see myself in that. On the contrary, in all the fifteen years I’ve made my living as a writer I’ve been dependent on the help of others in order to write.” “When I was writing My Struggle, I read every word of it out loud to a friend, Geir Angell Øygarden, I called him on the phone every single day and read him what I had written, some five thousand pages in total. Why? Because someone had to tell me it was good enough, that was one thing, but also what it actually was that I was doing, and, importantly, what it might become, in what directions I could proceed.”

My brief, just-the-facts-ma’am note for the essay, “The World Inside the World,” only contained the following line. “Seven years ago, I bought a house in Österlen, in Glemminggebro, a village of some four hundred inhabitants.”

I will spare you entirely my quote about vomiting for his piece “Ten Years Old.”

This was an experiment in converting my brief notebook notes on a book. I hope that informed or entertained or made you want to experience the source. ( )
2 vota jphamilton | Mar 15, 2021 |
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"In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English. He explores art, philosophy, literature, or something as simple as a trip to the beach with his kids, with piercing candor and intelligence. Paired with full-color images throughout, his essays render the shadowlands of Cindy Sherman's photography, illuminate the depth of Stephen Gill's eye, or tussle with the inner-workings of Ingmar Bergman's workbooks. In one essay he describes the speckled figure of Francesca Woodman, arms coiled in birch bark and reaching up toward the sky - a tree. In another, he unearths Sally Mann's photographs of decomposing corpses, drawn to the point at which branches and limbs, hair and grass harmonize. Each essay bristles with Knausgaard's searing honesty and longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world"--

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