In “My Struggle,” his six-volume autobiographical novel, he achieved an acute, piercing psychological closeness that at times felt suffocating or maddening and at other times utterly sublime. Knausgaard, in particular, strived for a micro-level re-creation of the events that shaped him. So-called autofiction is the social novel turned inside out in the hands of an autofictionist, one’s own life is a little world. The contemporary iteration of Sebald’s impulse is a little different insofar as it is vested in a dense, gravitational solipsism. Sebald was interested in the subjective nature of history and in the tension between the macroscale at which world historical events are understood in retrospect and the individual scale at which they are lived. Sebald, whose work derived its force from the uneasy and, at times, fleeting truce between fact and fiction. For much of the past decade, the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard has been part of a cohort of writers trailing in the long backdraft of W.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |