"Frågan om varför jag skriver kan synas enkel, men enkelheten är förrädisk." Så börjar Oavsiktligt - om att läsa och skriva av Karl Ove Knausgård. Han berättar om varför och på vilket sätt han började skriva, om varför skrivandet för honom handlar om att undersöka platsen och vad som där sker, om att se världen med okunnig och försvarslös blick. "Jag vill komma till det oavsiktligt, eller så måste det komma till mig oavsiktligt", skriver han.
Essän beställdes ursprungligen av Yale University till deras exklusiva föreläsningsserie Why I Write.
Nominated to the 2004 Nordic Council’s Literature Prize & awarded the 2004 Norwegian Critics’ Prize.
Karl Ove Knausgård (b. 1968) made his literary debut in 1998 with the widely acclaimed novel Out of the World, which was a great critical and commercial success and won him, as the first debut novel ever, The Norwegian Critics' Prize. He then went on to write six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle (Min Kamp), which have become a publication phenomenon in his native Norway as well as the world over.
Re-read, Sept 2024, searching for and finding plenty of specific reference/reinforcement for statements I make in long review of The Third Realm -- a seemingly automatic perceptual attraction to dynamics related to the inside and the outside, reality and consciousness, writing intuitively versus trying to write so-called literature.
First read, October 2018: Reads almost like a re-mixed excerpt from My Struggle Book Five’s parts about writing. A typo on page 7 (“than” instead of “that”) on a page about trust made me distrust this one’s publication at first, thinking it a little money-grubby, but that slight initial sense fell away as the old familiar voice and progress through internal and external worlds established themselves. No one mentions KOK in the same breath as Kerouac, even if both were deeply inspired by Proust and KOK's "inadvertent" method echoes Kerouac's essentials of spontaneous prose. KOK also doesn't acknowledge that under-prestigious author with the tripthong surname -- he talks about canonical biggies Hamsun, Tolstoy, Borges, Cervantes, Joyce. Large print, 92 pages, a nice little red hardback if you take the dust jacket off. Interesting how effective even the slightest formal restraint is for him. What he writes is the inadvertent intuitive result of the form he imposes from the beginning. The form reveals the content instead of being something he reveals. Mostly worth it for completists, probably, although also maybe the best introduction to his thought processes, style, approach? I also liked that he reveres W&P, which I took a day's break from to read this. And I like how he talked about books as places where readers can go. Which reminds me of Frank Conroy banging the table, saying something like "we don't care about ideas or situations -- listen, this is coming from a lifetime of reading -- we care about worlds!" And furthermore I liked reading about KOK's failures, not only his early failed attempts, the novel his friend told him that wasn't good enough, but also the failed attempts (800 pages) of writing about his father's death, among other projects that he ultimately decided were not working. In all cases, when it does work for him, it's effortless, in that it's immersive and intuitive, more like reading, like he's following what he's creating.
"Thoughts are the enemy of the inadvertent, for if one thinks about how something will seem to others, if one thinks about if something is important or good enough, if one begins to calculate or pretend, then it is no longer inadvertent and accessable as itself, but only as what we have made it into." - Karl Ove Knausgaard, Inadvertent
The second book published in the Windam-Campbell and Yale Press series 'Why I Write'. This short book is the lecture Knausgaard gave at the 2017 Windam-Campbell Prize ceremony at Yale. Knausgaard reflects on why he writes and his approach to writing. He travels a lot of the same ground he has traveled in his fiction, auto-biographical fiction, and his writing about art. He describes his motivations, inspiriations, frustrations, and theories of literature, art, life, form, and writing.
Some of my favorite gems from this book:
"Literature is not primarily a place for truths, it is the space where truths play out." (pg 2).
"That is what writing is: creating a space in which something can be said." (pg 3).
"All language casts a shadow, and that shadow can be more or less apprehended, but never quite controlled" (pg 13).
"Writing is about making something accessable, allowing something to reveal itself." (pg 27).
"This is because I have hit upon it inadvertently, or it has to hit upon me. It is one thing to know somehthing, another to write about it and often knowing stands in the way of writing." (pg 40).
"Yes, I write because I want to open the world." (pg 46).
"What we seek in art is meaning. The meaningful carries an obligation. With obligation comes consequences." (pg 65).
"This was what I had been longing for. This was writing. To lose sight of yourself, and yet to use yourself, or that part of yourself that was beyond the control of your ego. And then to see something foreign appear on the page in front of you." (pg 81).
مقالة طويلة من سلسلة لماذا أكتب التي تصدر من ييل... يتحدث كناوسغارد عن ذكرياته الأولى مع القراءة والكتابة. عن روايته المنشورة الأولى وقراءاته الأولى وكيف غيّر حياته تلقيه كتاب أورسولا ك. لي غوين "A Wizard of Earthsea|ساحر إيرثسي" كهدية في طفولته قدمتها له والدته.
أنا قارئة متحيزة لقلم كناوسغارد لأني سأقرأ مهما كان ما يكتبه كارل أوفه كناوسغارد وسأحبه أيضًا. هذا الكتيب مناسب لمن يريد التعرف على قلمه .
‘İstemsiz’ Karl Ove Bey’le yarım saat karşılıklı kahve içip onun edebiyatını ve yazma tutkusunu bizzat onun ağzından keyifle dinlemek gibiydi. 6 ciltlik ‘Kavgam’ serisinin üzerine cila niyetine de okunabilir, “Kim bu adam? Nedir olayı?” diye tanışma merasimi de olabilir. Ama bence ‘Son’dan sonraya daha çok yakışır...
Karl Ove Knausgårds ‘Uforvarende’ er en smuk refleksion over, hvordan det at læse og skrive er en konstant uforudsigelig proces, der hverken lader sig indfange af såkaldte regler for skrivning eller guidelines for den “gode litteratur”.
I poetik-serien ‘Lese, skrive’ har det norske forlag Forlaget Oktober inviteret udvalgte forfattere til at reflektere over egen skrivning og læsning. I den forbindelse har Karl Ove Knausgård skrevet essayet ‘Uforvarende’. Her bliver læseren ikke bare præsenteret for svarene på, hvorfor Knausgård skriver, men får lov til at følge forfatterens erindringer om læsning og skrivning helt fra barnsben, op igennem ungdommen og frem til i dag. Inkluderet er endda skriveprocessen bag essayet.
“Spørgsmålet om hvorfor jeg skriver, høres enkelt ut […]”, men det er muligvis det spørgsmål, Knausgård har sværest ved at svare på. For enkeltheden er forræderisk, og det er netop denne problemstilling, Knausgård forsøger at skrive sig ud af i ‘Uforvarende’. Dette er ikke en nem opgave, og han beretter ærligt, om hvordan han har siddet og stirret på det blanke dokument på computerskærm i flere dage, før ordene i begyndte at flyde.
Det at skrive er altså sjældent en dans på gloser for Knausgård, tværtimod betegner han processen som en konstant kamp. Et ord, der vækker genklang hos den erfarne Knausgård-læser. Det er nemlig svært at sige Knausgård uden at nævne det omfattende romanprojekt ‘Min kamp’, som består af seks voluminøse bind, der ligesom ‘Uforvarende’ tager sit afsæt i Knausgårds eget liv.
Knausgårds bøger er ved anledning blevet sammenlignet med cigaretters virkning på teenagere. Det tager tid at vænne sig til smagen, men når man først er hooked, så kan man ikke stoppe igen. Det samme gør sig gældende med ‘Uforvarende’. Knausgårds sprog flyder med essayformens strøm og gør det nemt for læseren at nyde bogen i ét træk. Flere steder skriver Knausgård smukke og sigende passager omkring det at skrive, som har den effekt, at man stopper op og bliver nødt til at vende tilbage for at læse dem igen og igen. Særligt bemærkelsesværdig er en passage, hvor Knausgård illustrerer det uforvarende med fænomenet pindsvin i haven:
"Det er som med pinnsvinene i hagen her, det er to av dem, og vil jeg se dem slik de er for seg selv, må jeg sitte helt stille i en stol og vente til skumringen faller og de kommer ut fra skjulestedet sitt [...] Det omvendte kan også hende, at jeg på vei over tunet i mørket plutselig sparker til en av dem, da ruller den bortover steinleggingen som en ball. "
Knausgårds ‘Uforvarende’ er altså langt fra et essay om, hvordan man skriver godt, eller om hvordan man bliver en god forfatter. Det er derimod et intimt og yderst velskrevet essay om, hvordan det at skrive er en konstant venten - en venten på inspiration, på gennembruddet, på pindsvinene i haven - ja, på det uforvarende.
Af Christine Dimke, Mads Holm og Kristine Strandsby, studerende ved AU.
okuduğum ilk knausgaard kitabıydı. çok sevdim anladığım kadarıyla sevenin sevme, sevmeyenin sevmeme sebebi olan "aklına eseni yazar" üslubunu. kütüphaneden "kış" kitabını da edindim, onu da yakında okuyacağım.
Reread: February 2022 I still love this little essay.
Reread: May 2020 5/5 Inadvertent was lodged in my head for more than a year. I'm glad to see it lives up to the memory of the first read, and exceeds it.
Original Review: January 2019 The honesty on display here is raw, real, and appreciated. Because as interesting as the highs are—the success stories, breaking out as an author and gaining acolytes—to me, the creative lows are just as fascinating. And Karl Ove Knausgaard doesn’t hold back. He goes into detail about the years that went in between projects. Talks about how he labors, churning out page after page and yet still the story wouldn’t work. How he almost reinvents how he writes to get it to where he wants. This isn’t something we hear from many modern authors without the word, or feeling, of ‘failure’ closely associated. And to hear it come from a big name writer is refreshing.
Between this and his essay in Light the Dark, I’m beyond ready to check out his longer works. 4.5/5
▫️INADVERTENT by Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey, 2017/2018.
This short essay looks at KOK's writing process, craft, and literary inspirations. It's a book lover's book. He talks about his love of Le Guin and comics in childhood (this warmed my heart, naturally...), and many other writers that he has appreciated in his life.
In sharing his process, he reveals a lot about himself, his shyness, social awkwardness, his inner life. Best known for his autofictions, this little peek into his family life and personality probably won't be a surprise, but still quite lovely to read.
Varoluştaki başka her şey ile yan yana olmamın neşesi. Böyle bir şey gördüğümde veya aynı duyguyu uyandıran bir tablonun karşısında bunun için bir kapı bulmam, onu içinde dile getireceğim bir biçim oluşturmam gerekiyormuş gibi yazma arzusuna kapılırım. Deneyimin kendisinden değil -onun hiçbir anlamı yok- söz konusu deneyimi oluşturan dünyada bulunma arzusundan söz ediyorum. Ve dünyayı açmaktan. Evet, yazıyorum çünkü dünyayı açmak istiyorum.
Read this short book on writing and you just might become, if you aren't already, an instant fan of Karl Ove Knausgård. The quotations below give unguarded insight into the gems included in this lengthy essay. Greatness never came easy for KOK, and the anecdotes in this book prove his dismal failure at first and finally the relevant reasons he finally succeeded in writing meaningful words on the page. It is not surprising that the act of reading was instrumental in his finding his own voice.
...It wasn’t until I started breaking the rules, showing how something was and should be understood, very precisely and with no room for doubt, and describing people in psychological terms, that my writing came alive…
...It wasn’t until I discovered this, that the distance of form and language created a space into which I could pour my self, where I lost ownership and control over it and where what was me was transformed into “me,” that I became a writer…
...the essential thing about the books, I think, was that they constituted a place in the world where I could be, where nothing was demanded of me, where on the contrary I got what I wanted…
...writing is precisely about disregarding how something seems in the eyes of others, it is precisely about freeing oneself from all kinds of judgments and from posturing and positioning. Writing is about making something accessible, allowing something to reveal itself…
...Thoughts are the enemy of the inadvertent, for if one thinks about how something will seem to others, if one thinks about whether something is important or good enough, if one begins to calculate and to pretend, then it is no longer inadvertent and accessible as itself, but only as what we have made it into…
...and one day the body too will take the final step into the world of things, becoming a thing among other things, like a fallen leaf, a stick, a mound, and go on existing as separate elements of a mute reality…
...Yes, I write because I want to open the world. But when I sit down at my desk and switch on my computer, there is no way to get there, for language carries its own meaning, form carries its own meaning, and that which seemed so evident within me, so luminously clear and simple, and so near to me, to what I am, changes radically as soon as I begin to write, it is no longer near, it is no longer mine, and the meaning which language and form carry within them creates a distance, turns it into something else, at best a text which refers to an experience but does not itself contain it, at worst a text full of pretension written by a man unable to contain his emotions…
...this is why the step from reading to writing was such a short one when I turned eighteen: I wanted to be there, in that state of utter absorption where everything else vanished and you were, in a sense, out of the world…
...What we seek in art is meaning. The meaningful carries an obligation. With obligation come consequences…
...To create a fictional space requires either great strength or great ignorance…
...if I just wrote things down exactly the way I had experienced them, in my own name, it was as if all my worries about style, form, literary means, characterization, tone of voice, distance, all this vanished at a stroke, as if the literary side of it suddenly became mere make-believe, and superfluous: I could simply write. But it wasn’t just this sudden freedom which lent it force, it was also that there was something unheard-of about it, that it was in a sense forbidden...
Another dip in Knausgaard's universe. Previously I only read his excursion on Munch and the present booklet could be read as a corollary to the former. Because the question why Munch painted, and why he did as he did, is basically the same as the one that is on the table here: why does one write? Here as there we are intrigued and revitalised by the reading, but unsure what exactly has been said. Very present is the soothing voice of an intelligent and affable man, a perfect stranger, but vulnerable enough to confide in his reader. We feel oddly buoyed by that attention. That man tells us he wanted to be a writer for the longest time, but couldn't. He put tons of words on paper but couldn't bring himself to really write. It was a writerly pose he struck. Only after he gave up, launched himself in a late academic career and read through the whole of Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' (in Norwegian translation), something happened. He was able to create a space between himself and his language, a fissure in which he was able to lose himself and in which narratives started to find their natural shape and texture. That's the 'inadvertent' of the title: genuine writing requires that you are able to cut loose from extrinsic motivations, from role models and designs. Relinquish control. Let the story find its own logic and pacing. Transcribe the first fifteen lines of a conversation overheard in the library and see where that takes you. One has to be able to really live in another world, just as we readers suspend judgment and inhabit foreign territory when we yield to a story told by someone else. Given this writing ethos, it is understandable why Knausgaard books read as they do. The author feels his way into the story, meanders between the descriptive and the ruminative, discharges deep, quasi-philosophical thoughts in the process, and leaves these reflections unmoored. There is no reasoning that strings together these sometimes evocative thoughts. The end comes but it's somewhat arbitrary, not a finely calibrated modulation into a final resolving chord.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . "Literature is not primarily a place for truths, it is the space truths play out." 2 "... literature by its very nature always seeks complexity and ambiguity, and that monologic claims of truth about the world are antiliterary" 12 "When I was a boy I read an enormous quantity of books, my sole object being to get away from the reality I was living in -- in other words, pure and simple escapism. "15 "The mere fact that he knew what he liked impressed me. I liked what I had been taught to like. " 53 "...so if we were to visualize a quality scale based on this view of literature, at one end, to the far left, we would place the novel that offers not the slightest hint of resistance so the reader glides through it like a hot knife through butter, what was once known as pulp fiction but is now sold in bookstores in hardcover editions, books in which everything is familiar, nothing is worth stopping to consider, nothing has value in itself. "61-62 "... it would seem that literary quality excludes reader address -- why, how?" 64 "Nothing of what I read or experienced was I able to convert into literature, I was twenty-five years old and I wanted more than anything to be a writer, but I couldn't write. So I gave up. "78
In a literary nonfiction class I took last semester, we read all varieties, genres, types of nonfiction essays (and fragments of larger nonfiction works), and I found myself gravitating toward the few Knausgaard pieces we were assigned, which were excerpts from his Seasons Quartet (“Water”!!). I've owned a copy of the first volume of My Struggle for a while but haven't started it--but I'm in Norway now and figured I couldn't leave a bookstore without picking something of his up, so I grabbed "Inadvertent" which, at 100-ish pages, will fit into my luggage better than any of his characteristically over-600-page novels.
"Inadvertent" is the lecture Knausgaard gave in response to the "Why I Write" prompt after winning a 2017 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. The instant I finished reading the essay cover-to-cover I started again from the beginning with a pencil in hand so I could mark all the passages I never wanted to forget. I planned to include a few quotes here, but really I'd be rewriting most of the piece :) I'd recommend this to literally anyone at all who has ever loved reading or thought about writing themselves.
This is a book that attempts to answer the question as to why Karl Ove Knausgard writes, written by Karl Ove Knausgard himself.
Well, he doesn't really answer the question definitively as it's impossible for anyone to do so. He does provide some examples from his writing career where he's been put down, criticised, and provided with negative feedback. It's great to read this, knowing that he believed in himself enough to persevere and continue to write. There's a lesson for every reader.
To read is to be the citizen of another country, in a parallel realm which every book is a door to. What we seek in art is meaning. The meaningful carries an obligation. With obligation comes consequences.
The only writer who could remain his angsty 20 year old self and pull it off. Thats impressive. But nothing can forgive calling Kundera the 20th c. greatest essayist.
Quality for the quotes (see Darwin8u review) but largely a rehashing of ideas much better expressed in his other works.
A man who embodies the idea of modernism coming alive and starting to self-consciously mumble about form and the beauty of the transient.
Inadvertent is Karl’s attempt to answer the very complex question about why he writes and it was an absolute delight to read and gave me an insight into his beautiful writing albeit translated. In this discussion he touches upon reading and why we read too and I’m onboard with all the reasons. ~ This man is very talented. I’ve watched some videos of him speak on stage. This essay would come to life and would be been a whole different experience if he actually gave it as a speech. Nonetheless i was very happy reading this books and I now want to read his books soon.
"For many years I followed these rules of writing, that one shouldn't psychologize and that one shouldn't tell, but show. ... It wasn't until I started breaking the rules .... that my writing came alive." An ambiguous and multifaceted statement about the choice to write.
a more honest review of this book would have at three and a half stars, as it's currently hovering between three and four for me. i began reading it 7/7/21 at 1:40 pm, and finished 9/13/21 at 1:30 in the morning
this book is one of yale university press's why i write series, a string of short craft books which a small amount of googling has told me originally derived from something called the windham-campbell lectures and which, delightfully, also includes works by writers i've been wanting to get into like eileen myles, samuel r. delaney, and patti smith. the stated purpose of this book is obvious, from the first page of knausgård's book and from the series's title, and has a particular added meaning for the controversial norwegian writer given his most famous work: mainly, his "autobiographical" novel cycle project
i would say that in terms of the goal of the project knausgård delivers, for the most part. i read this book over the span of a couple months—mostly in a mad but pensive dash on a long car trip down to georgia, before knocking the last thirty pages or so out in a fell swoop randomly one night weeks later—and, although i am familiar, in broad strokes, with his work, his concerns, and the controversy around all those things, i have not read any of the books in the my struggle novel cycle, and am not planning to until oberlin college finally sends me the first of those mammoth tomes. all of that is to say, this is really my first exposure to his work, and, as such, while i was reading this i was very much trying to familiarize myself with him and his whole deal. due to this fact, and because i read the book in two distinct chunks pretty far apart, my overall appraisal is a little foggy. because this book, and the others in the series, are so short, i might try to give it a read through again before the library wants it back (so look forward to more obnoxious words to this end, maybe)
to actually get to the book, though: i said knausgård delivers, and because i said that i would say he does. early on in the novel he presents a metaphor about writing a short story vs. writing a novel: writing a novel, he says, is like waiting in the garden as the sun sets for the hedgehogs to come out from the plants and reveal themselves to you; writing a short story is like crashing through the underbrush, kicking the creatures beneath your feet as you go. reading this book felt like following knausgård through the brushes and watching as he, on accident, runs over and into the mammals; or, a little more accurately, it kind of feels like following your grandfather, who is probably too old to be doing this, through a jungle he's cutting through with a machete, and being at turns concerned for his health, disappointed and annoyed with his antics, and amazed at the beautiful flowers that turn up in his wake, as he tries to figure out where the hell he's going
that last extended metaphor is maybe a little harsh, and maybe my reading of the book is flavored by a torrey peters' interview i half-read before my second stint with the text, which includes a line about how the norwegian author "famously edits very little, doesn’t plan his books in advance, and doesn’t even believe in 'craft,' that ubiquitous dogma of the American M.F.A. program" (although the title of his volume, which he never makes a proper point about in the text, doesn't help). still, like peters, i can't help but have a begrudging interest/respect/fascination in and with and for this man, this "Nordic-dad dude" with his gargantuan and distrubing and strange novels. and i can't pretend i didn't enjoy this book either; knausgård's claims have an emergent property, as if he is always writing towards something and he never knows what he's going for when he sits down. there are many moments, per my overwrought jungle metaphor, where he'll stumble on an idea or phrase that is simply profound, in both senses of the adverb. this style at times delighted and annoyed me: sometimes i found his little earnestnesses pithy and faux-deep; othertimes they felt legitimately insightful and meaningful. it's clear knausgård is interested in literature as space: of the lived lives of mundane, ordinary people; of the objects that make up those lives; of menial things; and of the distance between literature and reality, of what is inside and out. if, and probably when, i read this more clearly, i want to go back in with a pencil and trace the strands he's running through here; at times i feel like i'm not giving him enough credit. maybe he is operating on a level deeper than just crashing through the bushes. reading this simply, though, in the emergent and perhaps inadvertent way i for some reason feel like he wants me to, you do, or, at least, i do get a lot out of this book. it's weird, it's meandering, it's discursive, and there are moments where it doesn't seem to be saying anything at all—but at the same time it has this pull that i can't put my finger on, and, perhaps relatedly, has the feeling of a book i'll think of often for a long time from now. you can ask for a lot worse from ninety two pages
önceleri ciddiye almadığım sonra eşinin yazdığı kitapları beğendiğim için denemek istediğim sonra da denediğime pişman olduğum bir yazar
ancak editörler hakkında yazdığı bir makaleye rastladıktan sonra en azından denemelerinin okunmaya değer olduğunu düşündüm, bu nedenle bu kitabı da denedim, genelde yazar olarak yetenekleri olmasa da yazar olmakta ısrar eden insanlar yazmak, yazar olmak gibi konularda epey kafa yoruyor ve ortaya bir şeyler çıkarıyor, kendisinin de kabul ettiği gibi yazmakta ısrar etmek dışında yazar olması için geçerli bir neden yok...
en azından insanlar inadını ödüllendirdiler ve bana bile o uzun sıkıcı kitap dizisinin birincisini okutmayı başardılar...