Conversations with Tyler - Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

What is Karl Ove Knausgård's struggle, exactly? The answer is simple: achieving total freedom in his writing. "It's a space where I can be free in every sense, where I can say whatever, go wherever I want to. And for me, literature is almost the only place you could think that that is a possibility." Knausgård's literary freedom paves the way for this conversation with Tyler, which starts with a discussion of mimesis and ends with an explanation of why we live in the world of Munch's The Scream. Along the way there is much more, including what he learned from reading Ingmar Bergman's workbooks, the worst thing about living in London, how having children increased his productivity, whether he sees himself in a pietistic tradition, thoughts on Bible stories, angels, Knut Hamsun, Elena Ferrante, the best short story ("Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"), the best poet (Paul Celan), the best movie (Scenes from a Marriage), and what his punctual arrival says about his attachment to bourgeois values. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded March 15th, 2019 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Email us: [e-mail] Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercadis.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit Conversationswithtyler.com. Hello, I'm here today with Carl Uve Canalscourt, one of the great writers of our civilization, and he also has a new book coming out, which I enjoyed very much,

so much longing in so little space, the art of Edvard Munch. Carl, thank you for coming. Thank you for inviting me. In book six of my struggle, you mentioned Rene Gerard and that Mimesis is a useful concept for understanding human behavior. How do you think about who or what you're trying to copy? Who I am trying to copy? Yes, if you believe in Mimesis.

There was a tough first question I have to say. How can I hook on to that? I think to several level you could reply that, you know, that question. First level would be whatever's related to literature, to the art of fiction, how to tell a story, which is something you learn through reading, and you have to have that for writing. There are just several ways to tell a story, several ways to enter a scene, several ways to write realistic prose. And for me, almost all reading I've done has, I think, subconsciously sunk into me in my own world and in my own writing. So when I, for instance, read Marcel Proust for the first time, I absolutely loved it.

And I read it like, you know, like I was drinking water or something. But I wasn't aware of me soaking it up at all. and I couldn't write at that time. Two years later, I wrote a novel. It is incredibly many similarities with Marcel Proust, but I wasn't aware of it. It was just something that happened. That's one level of memises.

The other level is the opposite, is unlearning everything you know to be able to access what I like to think of as the world, the world we live in, because sometimes fiction can be so mechanical. It is so, locked into certain ways to look at the world, that it's more like you look into literature than

to the world. And that was what I was struggling with in my struggle, trying to find a language for my experience of the world, you know, not, I didn't, I wasn't interesting in writing a novel. I was interesting in trying to get a language for my experience of the world. And I think that is the key to Edward Monk, what he did as a painter. Very much so, because he grew up in Norway at the end of 19th century, in a kind of a certain pictorial language, which was realism, which was naturalism, and which was a national romanticism,

you know, the glossy images of, you know, mountains and fjords and that kind of things. That was what he had available when he started. He wanted to paint. That was what he had available. And he described his art as an act of confession, as you know. Is that true of yours? Are you fundamentally in the confessional tradition?

Yeah. I think so. But what Monk wanted, I think what Monk had was some experiences, very strong experiences. He lost his mother when he was very young. And then he lost his older sister, which was even harder for him. And I think he, what he lacked when he started to paint was a language to express that. Couldn't do that through glossy national romanticism, you know. So he had to break down everything he knew about painting to try to get that through what he had experienced.

And that's the same thing with writing. That's what you want to do. Get that personal experience. The thing that only you feel, the thing that only you see, the thing that you see, the thing that, you know, get that true. And if you do that, you realize, no, that's how everyone sees it. That's where everyone's feels. But that's kind of the thing you have to try to reach, to tap into.

And when I started to write my struggle, I didn't know that existed. I just wanted to do it for my own sake, you know, more or less. And, yeah, it was confessional. It was. I reread a lot of your work in the last few months. And what struck me more is what, in a sense, conservative writer you are. At first I thought of you as a radical. But if you think of this long-standing,

pietistic religious tradition of self-scrutiny, you know, you have Rousseau, Gertrte, even Swedenborg, August Stringberg. I now see you as very much in that tradition that you're the next Nordic confessional and quite religious as a writer in a way. Would you accept that characterization? Pietistic, I will accept,

and a part of that Nordic tradition, I will very much accept religious. that's a bit more difficult to relate to a book about angels and it's striking sweden morgue strinberg they were obsessed with angels yes true obsessed with angels why the combination of angel obsession and confessional from the nordics including you what's the unity there is that um the obvious thing in regard to that is that you know a pietistic christianity and and is um it's a very personal relation to God, very intimate relation to God, much more than a collective play-like religion-less Catholicism would be,

much more internal than external. And as a novelist, that's, yeah, that's the professional path, so to speak. But these things you don't think about, these things you just do. And if you're born into a culture, that culture becomes part of you, that language becomes part of you and something of that you have to challenge something of that you are not aware of you just it's just part of part of you

but I have you know there's certain writers I do really love and I think that is part of my culture and I think I'm similar to them because of many different things but these things you're talking about is kind of more a cultural deep layered

things you know the beatism these are not things you think about. This is things that just happens, I think. It's very unmodern, that's true. It's very old-fashioned, that's true. Yeah. Arnold Weinstein has a book on Nordic culture,

and he argues that the sacrifice of the child is a recurring theme. It's in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. It's in a number of Ibsen plays, Bergman movies. Has that influenced you? Are you a rejection of that? Are you like Edvard Munch,

but with children? And that's the big difference between you and Munk, the painter? I told you we asked different questions. Yeah, yeah. You didn't say different, you didn't say difficult. Yeah, because there was a lot of group in together. You had Kierkegaar and the sacrifice of Isaac,

the biblical story, which basically is a story about faith and what it is to believe in God and what it demands to believe in God, the completely irrational level. it takes to believe in God. I'm very the leap out in the unknown, which you have to take. It's an interesting thing going on in that essay,

which is a wonderful essay about Abraham sacrificing Isaac, is that it also has some small parts about breastfeeding in between, which is incredibly strange. I was thinking, I've been thinking a lot about that. What is that? But it's moving away from something. It's going from a mother into society, and the leap of religion is going from the society

and into the unknown, into the things we don't really know about, the things we don't have language for. There is another very interesting Nordic poet called Inge Christensen. She brought a collection of essays, which is really brilliant, and she talks about those kind of border areas is a matter of language, what we can express and what we're not

can express. And those in science, those are, you know, the string theories, or it's, that's the things we don't know, that's unknown. And the border is the language. We don't have language for it. We can't really. And she also said that, like a letter

in a book cannot read what's around it, cannot read the book. We are the same in the world, you know. We cannot read the world. a part of it. But that's, that was, that was Kierkegaur. And I don't, yeah, I find it hard to connect Kierkegaur in regard of children, the sacrifice of children and Bergman.

Bergman is a completely different. Children are abandoned, both in his life and in the movies. I know. There is, uh, Bergman's work books just came out in Sweden. So it's not his diaries and it's not his place, but it's kind of in between state. All notes it took when he was working with things. It's incredibly interesting because you can see how a film surfaced from almost nothing and just become a film and you see all his struggles and you see all of that.

But in one particular passage he wrote about a film he wants to make and then he said, today my grandchild died and that was it, you know, just a little passage like he did. really didn't care. And a normal person, he would have filled that person completely. And then that little episode turns up in his next film that the child is drowning. And there is another episode from Bergman's life that when his son was lying on his deathbed, he refused to have his father to come there. And that's a very, very strong statement. Sure. So you have this almost archetypical artist putting his art before his, his children before his family, before everything.

And as you have also, Doris Lessing did the same, abandoned her children to move to London and to write. And I've been kind of confronted with that as a writer. And I think everyone do, because writing is so time-consuming and so demanding. And when I got children, I had this idea that writing was a solitary thing. I mean, I could go out to small islands in the sea,

could go to lighthouses, live there, try to write in complete, you know, be completely solitaire and alone. So when I got children, there was an obstruction, you know, for my writing, I thought. But it wasn't. It was the other way around. I've never written as much as I have after I got the children, after I started to write at home,

after I kind of, I established writing in the middle of life. It was a crawling life everywhere. And what happened was that writing become less important. It become less precious, it become more ordinary. It become less religious or less sacred. It becomes something ordinary. And that was incredibly important for me because that was eventually where I wanted to go into the ordinary, mundane even,

and try to connect to what was going on in life, you know, life isn't, sacred life isn't. You know, uplifted, it is ordinary and boring and all the things we know. So you have these myths, they work for some, they don't work for some. It's like it's, but you can relate to them. I have a friend, he's a brilliant writer and he always says, yeah, this is the, when you want to create something, you have certain, I don't know the English word, you have certain things that's fixated, what we would call them, premises or,

Assumptions or axioms. Yeah, you just have to accept them and work inside of them. That's the only way. So if you can't write, then you have to start to write out from that fact, you know. And I think that's the best advice I ever got to accept everything that happens. So if you have many children, it's a good thing. If you don't have children, it's a good thing. You know, it's like you have to embrace it because that's your life.

That's where you are. And writing should be connected to that or painting or whatever it is. Your focus on Nazi history and part of Volume 6 of my struggle, is that a kind of confessional for Norway and Newt Hampson, or the parts of Norway that were attracted to Nazism? How is that connected to the fact that you wrote a confessional about your own life? Yeah. So clearly you have no sympathies for a Nazi regime at all, but there's a connection from your culture, history. Yeah, it's many connections. One would be that when my grandmother died, we found Minkamp in the chest in the living room.

What was that book doing there? You know, had they read it? And I realized it was kind of common thing in order to have that book. It was kind of common thing to cooperate with the Nazi regime. When I grew up in Norway, the story we were told at school was the heroic one, you know, the resistance. and how evil civilian resisted. But the fact is that no, the wheels were rolling and the society was working,

and it has to be a lot of cooperation with the Nazis. My other grandfather, he befriended an Austrian officer that was posted where he lived. And when I grew up, there was reminiscence from the war like bunkers where we were playing at and it was like war was in one sense incredibly distant but when I started to think about it incredibly close it was my grandparents' parents' world really

but that wasn't the reason why I started to write the reason was coincidental basically because I called my book My Struggle which is the English translation of Mind Kampf and then I had to read it And then I realized Hitler's book is kind of his writing about his own self. I'm writing about my own self. This is the same title.

I started to read him and I got incredibly intrigued by what I read because it was so much, not that he was lying, but it was so much that was unsaid, so much that, you know, he twisted his life into something completely different. It couldn't be true. And I just dived into that and started. to read more about it and try to find out what kind of man he was and how all this could happen. Well, it started out like it started in the book. It's a reflection about names because I couldn't use my father's name in the book.

That was, you know, my family forbid me that. So I started to be interested in and look around what names really are, what I signify. and then I stumbled across a German, a Romanian poet wrote in German called Paul Salaan. His parents died in Holocaust and he was Jewish, and he wrote post-war in the language of the Nazis. Best poet of the 20th century, perhaps. Yeah, yeah.

And there is this... Maybe Wilka. No, I think Paul Silan, yeah, maybe. But anyway, he wrote his incredible, incredibly, incredibly intriguing poem where almost nothing can be named. There's no names. And it's like it's almost impossible to say anything. It's like the language is completely broken.

So there's no connection between the element in the language. And I read that and I wrote about it and I realized this is, and it's about Holocaust, of course. And this is the end of what started with my struggle. And then that was the movement in the book and that was the movement in, you know, because Hitler also wrote in German and he also wrote, you could read it, you know. It's bad, but you could say whatever you want. But the fact that you could actually read him is intriguing and you can see, you could see everything he wants to do is in the book.

So I wanted to describe that path from. Hitler to Ceylon and it's the only part in the book that's not about me but it is of course about me and it's the only part that's not about our time it's about it's about the past so it's kind of a place kind of a dark mirror in the book where where you could see everything be you know get a perspective to to everything and it's the only part I found really you know pleasure in writing because it was so much I discovered during writing that, and it wasn't about me, which is a burden to do, but that was different. It's about the generation, the generation that grew up with the First World War and made Second World War happen.

So many great Norwegian writers, Ibsen, Sigurdunzat, Newtamson, there's nationalism in their work. Yet today, liberals tend to think of nationalism as a kind of unspeakable evil of sorts. So how do we square this with the evolution of Norwegian writing? And if one thinks of your own career, arguably it's your extreme popularity in Norway at first that drove your later fame, what's the connection of your own work to Norwegian nationalism? Are you the first non-nationalist great Norwegian writer? Is that plausible? Or is there some deeper connection?

I think so much writing is done out of a feeling of non-national. not belonging. If you read Knew Thompson, he was a Nazi, I mean, he was a full-blooded Nazi, we have to be honest about that. His best book might be his Nazi book, right? He wrote, and he was, what, 90? Yeah. On overgrown paths? To me, it's much more interesting than the novels, which are a kind of artifice that hasn't aged so well. Yeah. But you read on overgrown paths, you feel like you're there. Yeah. It's about self-deception. It's true. It's a wonderful book. But I, I, I think Hampsons' theme, his subject is rootlessness. It's kind of in a very rooted society, you know, in a rural society,

in a family-orientated society like Nova has been, a small society. He was like a very ruthless, very urban writer. He went to America and he hated America, but he was America. you know he had that in him he was there in in late 19th century and he wrote a book about it which is a terrible book but

but still he was there and and he had he had that modernity in him and he he never wrote about his parents never wrote about where he came from you know all his characters just appears you know and and then then something happens with them

but there's no past there's no and I found that incredibly intriguing just because he become the Nazi, he become the farmer, he become the one who sang the song about growth, what do you call it, Markenskru. Yeah, exactly. And it's like he's fighting himself doing that. He's not your nationalist. He's incredibly complex.

And the interesting thing is that you can see that struggle. in his writing. Is your own American travelogue a revision of Newt Hampsons in some way? Like, well, Norway's going to get it right this time. No, but I do actually have thought about doing that, go in his footsteps, because he was for quite long time. He, he drove 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 is so complex that he's not a nazi in his writing but in his essays and in his speeches there's a big distance there is a nazi and that what

literature can do is to get you so close that these things like nationalism just disappears because they don't exist on that particular level you know it's you have to move away from the world to be able to have established a distance to be able to you know talk about these things at all so But Norway is a nationalistic country, but it's not in a, I don't think it's in any bad way at all, really. It's a very innocent, no, it's a very innocent country. What's the worst thing about living here in London? The worst thing? The worst thing.

I think it's, to me, being an outsider, it's both the worst and the most interesting. And that's the, that's a huge difference between. the classes it's the extreme poverty and then you just you know you walk up a hill and it's incredibly rich and it's also very very much um it's not only a matter of classes but it's you know in the area i live the poor there's a rather poor area it's a black area and then you go up the hill and it's this is a white area and it's those kind of things are i think it's presumably of kind of hopelessness, really, to be here because you can't do anything about it. It's in the structure and the society.

But then also it makes it incredibly, the variation incredibly, and the richness incredible. And so it's very much an alive city. Being coming from Norway, it's very different. You know, it's like all kind of things going on simultaneously, which is incredibly interesting and nice to, at least, I'm not not only for that part of it, but to see and to be, you know, But it has that backside with the privilege being, you know, going around and around and around and around in the same kind of class and under privilege the same. And there's no kind of way they connect.

You can't move from one to the another. That's the Scandinavian society is a much more egalitarian in that sense. As you well know, Hans Yeager was a seminal influence on Edvard Munch. And you can think of him as a highly intellectual cynical nihilist. Monty knew him in his early years. Has there been a Hans Jaeger figure in your life who's a formative influence? It doesn't come through in your books. You mean personally or through reading?

Who's your Hans Jaeger? I don't have a Hans Jaeger, but I have this writer I really admire, and he's really something. Who's that? He's called Tuverick Lund. He's not translated into English. He's very wild. Wild as a person, while as a writer, he's like, he has inspired me a lot. and, you know, showed me what's possible to do in writing.

And it's, but he's so particularly that it's hard to translate him. But, like, you know, it could be like, if it had been writing in English, it would have been, I guess, the level of, you know, Thomas Pynchon or whoever he's that good. But he's so idiosyncratic that it's hard to translate him. Yeah, but he's not my Hans Eager, but he's an influence. Ervard Munch, he was known for beating his paintings, abusing them, not treating them very well. have you ever done the same with your books? Yeah, I'm kind of a careless person,

so I have, and I don't, you know, don't take backups, and I have, you know, a window open is raining on my computer. I've lost a computer down on the tracks with trains, and I've lost them, and, you know, it's, but it always turns out well, but it's, that's, that's not the same, but I, I don't care about how to book, do I book look, I don't deal with that part of it at all. And when I'm done with a book, it's hardly no editing.

I just leave it and publish it. And I want to move on because it's a process of doing this that interests me, not the result. And I really hate it when a book is done because then I know it will take a few years before I will get into something else. So in that I can, you know, recognize Monke. He hardly finished a painting in his life. He just, you know, and he was very reckless with his painting. things and it is a certain aesthetic in that as well. It's the like I'm in writing that book. It's like the difference between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky really didn't care. He could just,

you know, 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, you know, the intensity of something he was looking for. Tolstoy, you know, he wrote about everything and painted it fully and ended so wonderfully, but it's completely different aesthetics, and they reach completely different places. And when I was young, I thought Dostoevsky was the primary, the one that had reached the far. Now I'm older, it's Tolstor, really. Edward Munk, he stuck with Dostoevsky as an influence. Very much so. I realized the day he died, the afternoon the day he died, he read Dostoevsky, and then he died. So he also just followed him

throughout his life. And I think Dostoevsky was part of his forming his identity as a painter exactly what's unfinished. Is the scream a self-portrait of Munch? And is he wearing a mask or a death mask? Yeah.

The scream is based upon an experience he had, walking up the hill outside of Oslo, seeing what you see in that painting, hearing the nature's scream. So it's in a way, It's a self-biographical painting and the radicality of that painting is hard to get a gripper now, I think.

We're very much used to that kind of distorted ways of depicting the world. But what it... It's a long story about it. A lot about it in the book because it was fun because that's a painting that everyone knows and everybody has thought about. And I tried to write about it afresh. What is this? What did it do? And I can talk about it if you like, but it's a long and complicated story. I don't know if I can do it.

Let me ask you about between the clock and the bed. So Jasper John's paintings are often mysterious, but he chose to redo between the clock and the bed. And what is John's on about? What is Munch on about in that painting? I don't know about it. Jasper John is using the pattern on the bed, isn't it? Right, yes. Yeah. Monk made some remarkable self-portraits. I think he did so throughout his life and he started in 18, 19. And they were all very differently and I think they're all very good. And this is one of the very last one. And the thing with this is it's so incredibly simple. It's just a man standing there. And it's like he's showing us that. This is it's, it's, you know. know, it's, there's no posing, there's no, it's like it's, there's no defense. And Monk was a man full of defense. And I think painting was a way for him to get under the defense and reconnect with the world. And in this painting, that's what it do.

It's like the guard is down. This is what it is. Is autobiography a kind of defense or protective? strategy for you, a way in which life cannot be a disappointment. There's always something happening you can write about. And that sense your portfolio, so to speak, is very diversified. Yeah, it is a place I hide. That's, that it is. I mean, that's obvious. There was a wonderful sentence in a Vittal Gombrovich, a Polish writer who wrote. His diaries are, I'm thinking amongst the masterpiece of the last century. It really is brilliant,

but he published his own diaries when he was alive. And when they were published, he said, you know, I just have to take one step. Retreat one step inside myself. And that's what you do when you reveal so much about yourself. It's like you could just take a step back and it's all right. I mean, it's not even connected to you if you do that. It's like, okay, I'd never think about what people know about me. It's the act of writing is like for me a place.

can go to and where I am protected somehow. Publishing books is a different thing, of course. But I try to disconnect from that. Don't think about it is the publication of it. So what I want to do is to be in that space where I'm writing. And it's also a way of me to understand what's going on, to see things that I normally don't see, because I'm very much enclosed in myself and in my own space,

and I don't really notice things. and I'm coming close off to the world so writing is a way of opening up also there's a lot of things but I've been writing for so long now that is it feels like a place I can go to go into that place and sit down and I will be at peace

as long as I'm there even though I write about terrible and heart-breaking things it still is a place of peace and I do find reading the same thing and I always done that I think that was why I read so much when I was little and when I grew up. And I think I became a writer the moment I realized that that space is the same. The reading space and the writing space is basically the same.

And you do the same things there in those spaces. Why does Munch have so many mediocre paintings? Some might even say bad paintings. I think he didn't really care, I think. he wanted to capture something and if he didn't do that at first instant he moved on but he kept all the bad paintings too

I found it also very interesting Is that a model to emulate or a cautionary tale for you? I saw, I was creating a monk exhibition in Oslo at the Monk Museum so they gave me access to the magazine in the basement and I was shocked because it was you know you pulled out these enormous kind of walls and it was like maybe 10 paintings or five paintings or seven paintings or 15 paintings on them and it was a completely mix up with masterpieces terrible paintings sketches mediocre things

old things new things and it was like you know being in work of progress. If you go to the museum, you see it's everything finished, everything is almost stylish, and everything is, you know, art. This was completely different. This was entering into a process, because the painting they have is the paintings monk had when he died, everything he kept, everything he didn't sell, you know. And when I did that exhibition, I thought that that's an opportunity to try, because in nowhere at least you can't really see a monk, because you've seen it, he's so big and you see all the paintings so many times that you can't really experience them. So I tried to use the other paintings to give a new access to Monk what he was doing.

And amongst them was also bad paintings. You've bought a Monk, right? Head of a woman? Yeah. Why buy only one? Why not buy a second? What is your thinking on the matter? Yeah, it's expensive.

You enjoy it, right? They're capital assets. You can resell it someday. You're airs. Yeah, no, no. I know I really, I was hard for me to buy that one. So I mean, having a monk in no way is very bourgeois and very, you know, you're very settled when you do that.

But I thought my excuse was that I got a fee for the creation of the exhibition and I thought I could use the fee for buying a monk. So that's what I got. And it's not a, you know, it's just a drawing. It's just a, yeah. So it's nothing really, but it's incredibly nice. To see, and the thing with the good work of art is that you can't, you can see it's every day and you don't get tired.

It's like it gives endlessly, and it's very simple, extremely simple, but it still comes something from it every day, actually, which is what you want from piece of art. You showed up seven minutes early for this interview. Do you think of yourself as ultimately a defender or a critic of bourgeois culture and bourgeois culture? virtue i have um when i was um when i was teenager i was very much in a position to it and and but that's the typical pattern yeah yeah yeah yeah but i you know i i i don't really care

that's true i you know i'm i'm too busy raising children and too busy trying to survive that i can't really afford i mean think in those terms i remember when i got my first daughter i thought you know, when I, and I was full-time with her, I thought, I was, you know, this is very unmasculine and this is, you know, taking away my identity and, and then I had three children and then four children and who cares? I mean, you just deal with them and try to be good and go on. And it's the same now. It's, it's, it's about that. I mean, if that's bourgeois, if that's what it is, I don't care. I mean, you've written in great detail about raising your children, but looking back, what is it you feel you understand now that you didn't then if you were to add in a footnote?

Because retrospective memory is quite different from experience in the way. That's hard. I mean, there's so many things I did that I wish I hadn't done. But that's, you know, that's life. But most of them don't matter, right? Yeah, yeah, but that's life. That's how it is. And you can't undo it.

And you do have to experience thing and learn a thing. And you can't, you know, I can't tell a young fellow. what to do, what to not to do. You know, you have to find out yourself. And the thing about the book, which I'm happy about, is that it covers a process. And I wasn't aware of that, really. But a very short period of time, really.

I wrote it in two years. And as you say, have I forgotten everything now in my head? But it's in the book. It's captured in the book. You see how I was thinking. You see, yeah, you know, what mistakes I did or not did or whatever. But it's still like a slice of life that's in those books. Is it possible at all to enjoy your works on audiobook?

Or is the use of voices different from yours too discordant for stories that are so personal, that are so you, so confessional? No, I don't read my books and I don't listen to them. But I have in Germany, they have readings very different from here. It's readings. So you have like an interview with the writer for maybe five minutes and then it's just like one hour of reading. And I have, when it's a foreign writer, they have actors reading. And that has been some incredibly nice experiences if there is a good actor reading. It's like it's like he makes the book into, has nothing to do.

Is it better than you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, it's like, then it becomes proper storytelling and it becomes literature, you know. And that's very strange to witness, but also very nice. You're obviously very fluent in English. What do you feel the English language reader loses in the translation? from the Norwegian? I think the translations are excellent.

Donald Bartlett, he translated five and a half of the six books, Martin Aitken, the last part of book six. He asked me in the beginning if I wanted to, you know, how hands on I wanted to be the translation. And I said I don't want, you know, you can do whatever you want to. I don't want to have anything to do with it. And then I remember getting book five in the mail and almost accidentally I started to read, you know,

and I just kept on reading because it was so well done. And it was in English who was kind of removed from me, but still I recognized everything. And I think it's a world-class translator, Donald Bartlett. But an interesting thing in that regard is that I have another translator for my other books. She's a poet. She's half-Novician, half-American. called Ingville Burke.

She translates my language completely different. He's a completely different feeling of her language and his language. Both are brilliant, but in very different ways. He's much more translated it into an English novel, and she's much more translating into a Norwegian feeling English, and she's much more close to my language, and he's much more above. And both comes from the same writing, very different, both very good,

but you see the one yeah they have different qualities so to speak why do we put dead bodies in the basement rather than the attic yeah good question you asked it yourself in book one yeah that was a long time ago to pursue your father's question

how many people in solo car accidents are actually suicides yeah exactly are all swedes crazy not all not all which ing bar bergman film has influenced you the most and why sitting here with you I can't

really think of anything in my background film. You once said Wild Strawberries was your favorite, but the favorite may not be the same as influence. No. I think since from a marriage is an incredibly good TV series. That's the best movie ever made if you watch the whole thing through, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's his richest and best. And yeah, I think so. I love persona. And I do actually, even, I know, Las Montrere hates it, I do like Fanel Alexander also. Such a, yeah, it's such a fairy tale touch to it, which I like. But no, it seems from marriage, I think.

I like smiles of a summer night very much. The Mozartian feel, the Shakespeare connection. It's a very alive movie for me. Yeah. Peter Handke, what kind of influence have his novels had on you? That's hard. I'm discussing him and his influence in book six, actually. because he is a writer I absolutely admire,

and I think my writing is, you know, this doesn't reach up to his niece, his writing's niece. But my year in the No Man's Bay is a book that I read. I must have been in the 90s when it came out before being a writer myself, or was it exactly at the moment I started to be a writer, I think? And that was very influential,

and his writing, you know, about the things that not belong in a story and the things that really don't belong in a landscape you know the the areas between the city and outside of the city you know the railway tracks the grass the fences the kind of the world as it is outside of the story i think and he's yeah it's just um i can't i don't know but but i always and the book about his mother is is absolutely fantastic i think is elina for Rante, the main contender for having bested your achievement. If we're handing out Lifetime Achievement Awards for contemporary serious fiction. I've only read one Ferranti book, and there was days of abandonment.

Yes. And I would have, you know, cut off my left arm to write that book. I think it was so absolutely brilliant. Try the Neapolitan. I know, I know, I know, I know. I know. I have a problem with things I know is very good to enter it because I'm not a jealous type, but I feel, you know, I will in the end.

But that book, Days of Abendement, was really, really outstanding, good. And luckily, there's no competition here. So there's nothing to, I mean, I do what I can do. And then you have incredibly good writers everywhere in every country. So, and when I'm, you know, outside of a novel, I just look at them. And I think it feels so hopeless, you know, how, how, how. How are they doing this? How are they managing to do this?

And if you think like that, you can't really write. It has to come, you know, has to be person, has to come from the inside, has to be within something without looking out. And what you're talking about is that's outside of books. And then you can start and be jealous and think, oh, you know, or why did he get that grant and I not and why did I get so bad reviews and stuff? That's worthless. It's completely worthless.

And I try to stay away from it as much as I can. But we know Ibsen was obsessed with medals and honors, right? Yeah, he was. Was that a character flaw? It was very funny, a very funny flaw, I think. When you share or not? I don't share that, no. But he had also a mirror in his hat,

so he could take out his hat and look himself, which is also very funny. And it was a very little, very little man, loving medals and having a mirror in his hat. That's funny. from another literary tradition take calvino borges cortez are they in your view in some ways overrated and is your objection to them ultimately a political one no they're running away from life in a way correct no i i feel i'm quite a contrary because i think he's superior i think he's

he's a master really a master and a one a writer i've learned a lot from not in ways of telling the story but what the story tells you about the world he has been very influential in my world view basically especially one called clon akbar as a short story sure it's just the best shot story I've written I think we agree on that actually yeah yeah I think it's it's it's you know calvino is less uh calvino had yeah cortazari is also very good but he's not boris I think and and calvino I love I mean The Baron in the Tree, what is called, is one of my favorite books. So, you know, if I could write like them, I would, but I can't.

Every time I have something fantastic, not right, I mean, in that sense, something that really could happen. I try to write it. I can't make it work. Just don't have it in me. It has to be some sort of realism. I have to believe in it myself. And the magic with Boris is that you believe it completely. He makes it completely believable.

And his essays are, you know, absolutely wonderful. And in every little essay, every short story almost, you could pull something out of value. So he's absolutely one of my favorites. Is Magnus Carlson going to withdraw from the World Chess Championship cycle? Chess is not my world. Has liberalism exhausted itself? Maybe not liberalism, maybe capitalism. There's something about the aesthetic.

People in the early 20th century, Hamson included, seemed to think that a vital sense of the aesthetic, maybe it didn't quite have to be fascist, but it had to move the artist somewhat in a direction which we today would mostly consider unpleasant. Do you think a strong notion of the aesthetic and liberalism are totally compatible? Good question.

T.S. Eliot would be another example of someone who moved in a quite unsavory direction. Yeah. I don't know really. I wonder if, you know, of fascist literature, if that's even possible. I can't It's like those are You know Those two concepts are not able to But liberalism in literature is also tricky

So you take Romaine Rolande Who is a great classical liberal He wrote books that everyone read at the time But they're mostly forgotten They're seen as a little flat Yeah I don't know what do you mean by liberalism In this

The notion of a particular neutrality Across Values Which government then forces by having impartial laws and people believe strongly in some underlying notion of neutrality. Doesn't that clash with the aesthetic impulse at some level? Yeah, of course. Yeah. That was meant.

Yeah. And in your own thought, how do you reconcile those two things? What I'm striving for in my writing is what I call literary freedom. And it's a space where I can be free in every sense where I can say whatever, go wherever I want to. For me, literature is almost the only place you could think of that that is a possibility. And my fear is that that space is coming closing down. And you're closing it down yourself and you're becoming more afraid for what you're saying. Can I say this? Can I do this?

And these powers are so strong, you know. It's so hard to go somewhere, you know, this is wrong. Or this is, you know. I mean, I did it with my struggle because I wrote about. my family and I knew of course I shouldn't do this and I really it is immoral to do this and then I did it because I wanted to say what I wanted to say and I wanted to be free and to talk about, to write about my own life in a complete and in a free way. That's also why I admire writers like, you know, Petta Hanke.

We had a, had the Yugoslavia controversy around him and you have a lot of controversies are on him. But what he does is he is there, his his hardcore saying what he thinks and stands for it, no matter how ugly it looks from the outside. And that's what you can do in literature, no other place, I think.

This is an internal struggle in every writer, I think. And it goes in almost all levels of society. I find it hardest to go into the private places that belong to my family and my life. But you can have all the other political topics. You have a lot of things you can think of. But it's good that is a struggle and it's good that there's an arena

where we can have these fights and that, yeah. But the notion that literature should be good, I mean, in a moral sense or that I find, you know, ridiculous. That's useless. As a boy, which were your favorite comic books? You've written that you loved comic books growing up. Yeah, when I was little, it was Lee Fox Phantom. He was, that was really big in Norway. A bit older, it was Modesty Blaze. But I, I've, read absolutely everything. And what are the politics of those comic books that young boys tend to read? The politics, the implicit politics. Then in the 70s it was very, it was very sexist, very racist and all kinds of things. My mother discovered what I actually was reading,

so she said, she forbid me to read comics, which was a very harsh punishment it felt at that time, but it made me start to read books. So it was a good thing in the end. But she was completely shocked by what I was reading and it was common. But I was the 70s. I think it has changed. Maybe, I don't know. Now you've spent some time in a creative writing program. Is that correct?

Yeah. Did you learn much there or was it just a waste of your time? I learned a lot. What can I say? I was like running into a wall. I was running full speed into a wall and I fell down and I lay down for like six, seven years. I couldn't write after that.

I was completely, I was so young when I started. I had all this illusion about myself and about literature and what I could do. And I couldn't do anything. And I felt like they were ridiculous, ridiculing me, and they were, actually. And then it took many years, and then I could write. And what I learned, I met, you know, the world literature there. And I met also a writer that his, yes, his Norway's best writer, it's called Jun Fossa.

And he was 29 at the time, and he was a teacher there. His notion of quality is absolute. And he was very, very important to me. just because he showed me where the level should be. I haven't reached that level, but I'm above where I was when I was 20 at least. And it was very good to know that. This is literature.

This is what literature can do. But it was completely terrible for me at the time. And I'm in years afterwards because I couldn't. I had no self-confident. They took away all my self-confidence. I couldn't write. The creative writing program took away your self-confidence. Yeah, yeah.

And that was a good thing. In the end, it was a very good thing. Yeah. How did you get your self-confidence back? I haven't got it back. Haven't got it back. But I have helped us to help me. So my, the one who picked me up from nothing, and he's still my editor.

I really couldn't write when he saw something I've written and believed in me. He still believes in me, and he has to tell me that every week. What I'm doing is interesting, what I'm doing is good, and that he believes in me. And he's done so for 20 years. Without him, I wouldn't have been a writer. And I have also friends who do the same thing, said, okay, this is good, don't give up, keep on writing. I need it, because if not, I wouldn't have the strength to do it. Maybe I would, but it makes my writing life much easier to help us.

Your first book in English, but I think your second book overall, a time for everything. Why did you write a whole book about angels? I really don't know. I've always been interested in the physicality of man, the matter, the brain itself, the physicality of the brain, the way we are, you know, animals, the way we eat and the way we have taken the world in and the primitiveness of us.

And then, you know, the heaven above all the things we dream of. And when I read the Bible, something that occurred to me was the physicality of the angels. That's such a wonderful image. And I thought, okay, they were eating. they're eating in the Bible and they're walking, you know, with God in the Bible. And I thought, what if I read the Bible from that perspective? What happened to the angels?

Where are they? Because they saw angels before. We don't see them. And then I thought, okay, maybe they have been tempted to be in the physical world too much and then kind of been almost centrifuged into the world and being part of the world and can't escape and they're still here around us. That was the thought. And it's in a kind of a way, it's a matter of.

of what happened with religion? Why, you know, why we're not, many of us don't believe anymore? Why does no heaven above us except, you know, commercials and TV programs and stuff? What happened? What happened with religion? What happened with God? What happened with heavens? You know, how come we are all down here now and what's that about?

And that was not why I read it, but that was the outcome of, I would write it, but that was outcome of the writing of that. And why the fascination with the Cane and Abel story? It's... Right, it's family struggle, it's rivalry. Yes, it's true. And it's only like eight lines or something in the Bible. It's almost nothing.

And it's so rich and it's like it's bottomless. They have been discussing that and reading that for thousands of years and you can still say something new about it. That simple story. The brother killing another brother. One... Yeah, I'm just reading about Gnosticism now. and they take a liking some of them for Kain,

which is they like to turn everything upside down, so God is really the dead devil, and this really is hell, and Kyn is really the good one, the one to look into it. And, you know, it's just an endlessly fascinating thing, and it means so much, so many layers of meaning in that simple, simple story,

and that's the best part of the Bible, those very short stories, incredibly rich and layered with meaning. To close, why don't we return to your new book? Again, it's called So Much Longing and So Little Space and Give Us Your Take on Munch, the Scream. You referred to this earlier. My take on Scream, you know, that's what happens when you're writing.

You just start, I just sat down with a monk book. So I don't know, okay, write a book about Munk. Let's see where this goes. And then you just enter it. and then come something back and then two months later you have a book. And The Scream is one of the most iconic paintings there is. Everyone I think has seen it. It's so recognizable and it's so almost we have an intimate knowledge of it.

We see it, you know. But the painting is about the opposite. It's about something very strange. It's about something, as how to do this in English, but it's about the world being almost unrecognizable. It's just seeing how strange the world is. And we do this in that painting that we instantly recognize. And it's a painting about anxiety.

And anxiety is incredibly painful. So it is a painting about pain. But we see, you know, we see a million dollars. We see its fame. We don't see that. But the interesting thing for me was when I wrote about it was what kind of paintings Mook had access to and what kind of how they painted at that time. Because no matter how painful things were, they were always taking place in a space, in a room.

And having that space, having that room, you know that the events in that room will one day be over, something new will take place there. You know, if Madame Bavari is very painful the ending, but you know that world will continue. And there is a kind of a comfort in that. There isn't any acuteness in it. You could see it, you know, it will pass, and you observe it from the outside.

So you see it at the distance, you know, you see something painful, a sick girl at a distance, and it's in another room, and it will pass. So there is a comfort in that. But Monk does, that I did in that painting, is to remove that room, to remove that space, Because all the landscape is subdued to the person in the paintings. So it's his landscapes.

There's no room in it. There's no neutrality. It's when that person is gone, the landscape is gone. So there is no space and there is no time. It's instantly painting. It's acute. It's like it's happening now. And we share the space with the painting.

And in that is the radicality of the painting. that there's no space and there's no comfort. It's an acute thing. It's instant. And you have to relate to it. You can't see that painting without relating to it. No, I mean, when you saw it for the first time. And the interesting thing now, I think, is that that's a fair description of the world how it is now.

It is an instant world. We get access to painful things that happens when it happens. I mean, today there was a massacre in New Zealand. The minute it happens, we know about it. We relate to it. we feel the pain, we see the pictures. That didn't just happen. That didn't happen at Monk's time.

It was unheard of, you know. Now that's the world. We live in the world of Scream. There's no space between us and the world. Everything comes bombarding us, you know. So what the art has to do now is the opposite. It is to create spaces. It is to recreate rooms.

And I was thinking about that and also writing in the book. But I was in an exhibition with Anselm Kiefer here in London as White a Cube. It was absolutely magnificent. but there was no people in it, it was only space, this only room. And it was kind of mythological rooms. It was like it was giving space to events that wasn't even there back somehow. And I think both Kiefer and Monk are great artists. But they live in different times and they had different missions.

And for Monk it was very important to give access directly to the pain and to distorted vision of the world. and to give a more true account of how it is to be, I think he wanted to do. And now it's the opposite, because now we need space and we need comfort and we need time and we need, you know, something. I'm not sure if artists would do that, but that's what I thought when I started to write about. Monka, another interesting thing is that exactly the same thing is going on in the literature at that time, you know. You have the epic novel with all the characters, all the rooms, Tolstoy.

It's a very good example because that is a book about rooms. And then you have, for instance, then, Knew Thompson in Hunger, which is just one person and his distorted version of the world that exists. And when he dies, the world disappears, you know. Carl, thank you very much for coming by. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the podcast in Ones.

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