BOOKS BOUGHT:
- Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of “ The Great Gatsby”—Sarah Churchwell
- Detroit: An American Autopsy —Charlie LeDuff
- The Fever—Megan Abbott
- My Salinger Year—Joanna Rakoff
- Swing Low: A Life—Miriam Toews
- The Blue Room—Hanne Ørstavik
BOOKS READ:
- A Man in Love—Karl Ove Knausgaard
- Traveling Sprinkler—Nicholson Baker
- My Salinger Year—Joanna Rakoff
- Crooked Heart—Lissa Evans
I am a father, so I know something about the pain of childbirth: it didn’t look too bad to me. Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, however, is an act of heroism, and only those who have been through the experience are really entitled to talk about it. I bought A Man in Love, the second book in the series, pretty much the moment I’d finished the first, A Death in the Family, but after a couple of months of reading shorter, less intimidating, and, frankly, much more fictional novels—Knausgaard doesn’t make stuff up, and you know that if he spends three pages describing the peeling, cutting, and frying of an onion, that onion actually was fried, in real life—I began to wonder whether I had another Knausgaard in me.
I was lured back partly because I missed the sound of Knausgaard’s voice, and partly by the title of this second volume. I wanted to know about his marriage, partly out of prurience: how many novelists are prepared to offer up every single narrative beat of a relationship in an attempt to make sense of it? A recent piece entitled “How We End Up Marrying the Wrong People” in the Philosophers’ Mail, an online newspaper set up by the writer Alain de Botton, suggested that “a standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’” What we normally do, of course, is reveal our own madness and discover the madness in our spouses over a period of years, by which time the information isn’t as much help to us as it might have been in the first flush of romance.
Well, nobody could accuse Knausgaard and his wife of burying their eccentricities. Karl Ove met Linda at a writers’ conference (and as Karl Ove really did meet Linda at a writers’ conference, the present tense usually employed for synopses seems inappropriate). He told her that he was attracted to her; she told him she wasn’t interested; and he went back to his room, drunk. He smashed the bathroom mirror, “took the biggest shard I could find and started cutting my face. I did...
You have reached your article limit
Sign up for a digital subscription and continue reading all new issues, plus our entire archives, for just $1.50/month.
Already a subscriber? Sign in
contributor
contributor
Nick Hornby is the bestselling author of eight novels, including High Fidelity, About a Boy, and, most recently, Just Like You. He has also published several works of nonfiction including his ground-breaking debut, Fever Pitch, and has written numerous award-winning screenplays for film and television including Brooklyn, Wild, and State of the Union.
