*Arnold voice*: Everywhere I go I’m cumming
mickey
Jun 9, 2025 11:44 AM
“I was the tramp.” About halfway through the fourth installment in Karl Ove’s 6-part novel/autobiography/autofiction he gives the line that I think is the key to the cipher that he’s spent nearly a decade by this point working on. In a moment of drunken dancing he likens himself to Charlie Chaplin’s protagonist from Modern Times (1936). Both are battered by the strange humiliating comedy of finding a space to exist between the gears and mechanisms of the modern world.
Knausgaard’s oscillating path in the world throughout this book moves between the poles of numbed alcoholism and overstimulated premature ejaculation; between childish rebellion and bourgeois responsibility. He has moments that seem to give great meaning to his life and clearly stick with him to the time of writing, and also moments of supreme bare-chested embarrassment. He discovers literature and colors his skeptical love of art with his constant interactions with books and music. A soundtrack featuring Talking Heads, the Church, and Talk Talk weaves through a young man’s public discovery of his own taste. He writes reviews for local papers, alienating as many as he can along the way while he figures out how to describe what music means to him, all while squarely in the public eye.
Beyond his taste in music we’re treated to a short bibliography of books that he reads and references throughout his adolescence. But the fun kicker is that it seems like almost all of them are likely fabricated by the man in his 40’s writing the book rather than truly remembered from the brain of the 18-year-old protagonist. He mentions at one point having to re-read The Lord of the Rings after 2 years in his youth because of his inability to remember almost anything from it. This in the midst of dozens and dozens of literary references that seem to draw on specific plot points of books he claims to have read decades ago in his youth.
