In the land of the cyclops Essays

Karl Ove Knausgård, 1968-

Book - 2021

"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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Subjects
Genres
Essays
Published
Brooklyn, NY : Archipelago Books 2021.
Language
English
Norwegian
Main Author
Karl Ove Knausgård, 1968- (author)
Other Authors
Martin Aitken (translator), Ingvild Burkey, 1967-, Damion Searls
Edition
First Archipelago Books edition
Physical Description
342 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 21 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781939810748
  • All That Is in Heaven
  • Pig Person
  • Inexhaustible Precision
  • Fate
  • Welcome to Reality
  • America of the Soul
  • At the Bottom of the Universe
  • Tandaradei!
  • Michel Houellebecq's Submission
  • Feeling and Feeling and Feeling
  • Idiots of the Cosmos
  • In the Land of the Cyclops
  • The Other Side of the Face
  • Life in the Sphere of Unending Resignation
  • Madame Bovary
  • To Where the Story Cannot Reach
  • The World Inside the World
  • Ten Years Old.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this dense and thought-provoking essay collection, Knausgaard (My Struggle) once again displays his knack for raising profound questions about art and what it means to be human. While Knausgaard brings complexity to his studies of paintings and photographs, analyzing the function of myths in German artist Anselm Kiefer's paintings and wondering "how are we to understand" Francesca Woodman's mid-20th-century photographs, the essays pick up when Knausgaard writes about literature. Among the most successful pieces are "To Where the Story Cannot Reach," which contains his musings on craft and his relationship with his editor (whom Knausgaard has "absolute trust in"); the title essay, which asks, "What is literary freedom?" when writers are told "what they should and shouldn't write about"; and an exploration of Flaubert's Madame Bovary ("If were published today, there is no doubt in my mind that tomorrow's reviews would be ecstatic"). In "All That Is Heaven," he eloquently compares art to dreams, writing, "art removes us from and draws us closer to the world, the slow-moving, cloud-embraced matter of which our dreams too are made." Though unevenly paced, the volume tackles knotty subjects and offers nuggets of brilliance along the way. These wending musings will be catnip for Knausgaard's fans. Photos. (Jan.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The acclaimed author of the My Struggle series offers essays on fine art, classic literature, and his own work. In this wide-ranging, sometimes labored collection, Knausgaard argues that art is at its most effective when it destabilizes our understanding of the world. Photos by Cindy Sherman that satirize the human body, for instance, grab the author's attention because they spark the same "discomfort, nausea, anger" he experienced while working in a mental institution. Similarly, the moody, provocative black-and-white photos of Francesca Woodman reveal the "constraints of our culture and what they do to our identity" while Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission succeeds because it suggests how easily disillusioned people might accept political upheaval, asking "What does it mean to be a human being without faith?" Knausgaard approaches his subjects indirectly, often bemusingly so. (How did we get from the northern lights to Roberto Bolaño's 2666?) The throughline is the author's keen, almost anxious urge to understand the artistic mind. He is fascinated by Ingmar Bergman's workbooks, how a simple jotting can expand into a classic film like Fanny and Alexander, and how Knut Hamsun's sensibility shifted over time. Knausgaard also gives his own work close scrutiny, celebrating the crucial role of editors and sounding boards in supporting his work and psyche--he reports that he read every word of My Struggle, some 5,000 pages, to a friend over the phone--and letting fly at narrow-minded critics who "can't handle ambiguity." The book's three translators all reckon with the author's rhetorical switchbacks and run-on sentences with admirable grace, though Knausgaard is at his best with a wide canvas. These pieces at times feel compressed and fussy, lacking some of the considered grace of his Seasons Quartet or the essayistic longueurs of My Struggle. Knausgaard's intelligence is on full display here, if sometimes in strained ways. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

ALL THAT IS IN HEAVEN. A few days ago a picture appeared in a number of newspapers online, it was from a medical examination, an ultrasound image of a man's testicles; there was a face in there as clear as day, with eyes, a nose and mouth, a child gazing disconcertedly out of its darkness in the depths of the body. The phenomenon is not uncommon and has often been associated with Christ, perhaps because only his face makes such occurrences noteworthy enough to report on. The face of Jesus can appear in a marble cake, a slice of burnt toast, a stained piece of fabric. Last autumn I was stopped by a woman on the street in Gothenburg, she wanted to give me a photograph of Christ seen in a rock face somewhere in Sweden. These viral images are not vague schemata filled in by vivid imaginations, but utterly convincing; the face staring out of the man's testicles is incontestably that of a child, and the male figure in the rock face, his hand held up in a gesture of peace, is incontestably an image of Jesus Christ exactly as he has been iconised. This is so because the forms that occur in the world are constrained in number, and the human face and body are one such form. They can just as easily appear in a pile of sand as in a pile of cells. If you lie on your back and look up at the sky on a summer's day, hardly a few minutes will pass before you see a recognisable shape in the clouds. A hare, a bathtub, a mountain, a tree, a face. These images are not constant; slowly they transform and turn into something else, as opposed to the person lying there looking at them, whose face and body remain unchanged, and to the natural surroundings from which they are observed: the ground with its grass and trees, they too remain unchanged. But the immutable is only seemingly so, for the face, the body, the grass and the trees change too, and if we return to the same spot, this clearing in the forest, fifteen years later, it will be completely different and the face and body will also have changed, albeit not unrecognisably so. However, in the greater perspective of time they too will change; over a two-hundred-year period the face and body will have arisen, formed, deformed and dissolved in sequences of change not unlike those undergone by the clouds, though far more slowly since they take place in the denseness of the flesh rather than in the vaporous firmament. That we do not see the world in this way, as matter at the mercy of all-destructive forces, is only because that perspective is not available to us, our being confined within our own human time as it were, viewing all change from that vantage point only. We see the changes in the clouds, but not the changes in the mountains. On this basis we form our conceptions of the immutable and immutability, of change and changeability. We retain in our minds the form of the mountain as it appeared to us the day we stood in front of it, but not the forms of the clouds that were above the mountain at that same moment. Our body exists somewhere in between these monitors of mutability that measure the speed of our lives. Our own time, the change we are able to register as we stand here in the midst of the world, is, apart from the movements of the body, almost always bound up with water and wind. The raindrops that drip from the gutter, the leaf whirled into the air, the clouds that slip over the ridge, the water that trickles towards the stream, the river that runs into the sea, the waves that form and break apart in an ever-changing abundance of unique forms. We can see this, for the time in which such movement occurs is synchronised with that of our own existence. We refer to that time as the now. And what happens within us in the now is not dissimilar to what happens outside us, a continual formation and breaking apart that never ceases as long as we live: our thoughts. On the sky of the self they come drifting, each unique, and over the precipice of oblivion they vanish again, never to return in the same shape. 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 the earth. That which is fleeting, ethereal and free has always been eternal; that which is firm, material and bound has always been transient. With the breakthrough of modern science in the seventeenth century, which pushed back the limitations of the human eye with the invention of the microscope and the telescope, an era in the western world in which the human body began to be systematically dissected, one of the greatest challenges to arise concerned the nature of thought in this system of cells and nerves. Where was the soul in this mannequin of muscles and tendons? The French philosopher Descartes performed dissections in his apartments in Amsterdam, striving to find the seat of the soul, which he believed to be found in one of the glands, and to trace human thought, which he believed to be conducted through the tiny tubes of the brain. Science has come no closer to pinning down these concepts in the three hundred or so years that have passed since Descartes made his investigations, for the distinction between the I who says I think, therefore I am, and the brain in which that sentence is conceived and thought, and from which it is then issued, that biological-mechanical welter of cells, chemistry and electricity, is immeasurable, as one of Descartes' contemporaries only a few city blocks away, the painter Rembrandt, demonstrates in one of his dissection pictures where the upper part of the skull has been removed, held forth like a cup by an assistant while the physician himself cautiously cuts into the exposed brain of the corpse. No thought, only the tubes of thought; no soul, only its empty casing. What were thought and the soul? They were what stirred inside. In his essay collection Descartes' Devil: Three Meditations, a substantial and near-fuming apologia for Descartes, the German poet Durs Grünbein writes about one of the Baroque philosopher's dissections of an ox in whose eye Descartes claimed to have seen an image of what the ox itself had seen in its final seconds of life. Descartes writes: "We have seen this picture in the eye of a dead animal, and surely it appears on the inner skin of the eye of a living man in just the same way." Of this strange idea, Grünbein writes: "Descartes, who imagines the retina as a sheet of paper, as thin and transluscent as an eggshell, really believes that something seen is, as it were, imprinted on it." Excerpted from In the Land of the Cyclops by Karl Ove Knausgaard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.