Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is over. The sixth and final volume will be published in English later this month. James Camp takes stock: “Perhaps a lack of self-awareness is precisely what makes writing such a book possible. It requires a style cramped by nothing, not even literature itself, and a freedom that only cutting ties with others can truly bring. It’s well known that, not long after he finished My Struggle, Knausgaard and Linda, its dedicatee, divorced. ‘This novel has hurt everyone around me,’ Knausgaard writes in Book Six. ‘It has hurt me, and in a few years, when they are old enough to read it, it will hurt my children. If I had made it more painful, it would have been truer.’ That the true is also the painful is a problem for which Knausgaard doesn’t offer a solution. He started writing My Struggle when he was enraged and in despair and by the end of it he felt bad in a new way. ‘Unfortunately it was me who had to go up,’ he notes of winning the Brage Prize for Book One. ‘The statuette was as heavy as a murder weapon.’ In Book Six, he quotes Henry James: ‘In art, the emotions are the meaning.’ In Knausgaard, the meaning is volatile; these emotions will never rest. The exhilaration of confession becomes the angst of remorse, the drunkenness of setting it all down in print becomes the hangover of seeing the book in stores. My Struggle is a monument to candor with few precedents in human history, but then so is Keeping Up with the Kardashians. What makes My Struggle so compelling is that Karl Ove will never forgive himself for it. Is it the unforgivability of these books that makes them great art?”
Village Voice to close: “Three years after buying The Village Voice, and a year after the paper shut down its print edition, owner Peter Barbey told the remaining staff today that the publication will no longer be posting any new stories.”
Brazil’s National Museum was gutted by a fire yesterday: Much of its “archive of 20 million items is believed to have been destroyed.” Rod Dreher found this on Twitter.
Clive James has published an epic poem called The River in the Sky. Rather than wait for reviewers to cover it, James writes about it himself in The Guardian: “Heaven is here in the way my granddaughter seems continually to pick up speed when she drives my wheelchair, as if she were heading for Andromeda, which is in the poem, too: zillions of light years away but on its way here, unless we’re on the way there. Scientists, I understand, are divided on the subject.”
In praise of Joan Aiken’s mostly forgotten but magical children’s books: “Aiken’s favorite literary terrain was the blurred border where nineteenth-century realism begins to slip into folklore and fantasy. This is a realm of absurd stock characters and hoary narrative devices: cruel governesses, kindhearted orphans, counterfeit wills, hidden passageways, long-lost relations, doppelgängers, clues hidden in paintings, castaways, coincidences, sudden returns from the dead. But instead of abashedly sneaking in one or two of these elements, as another writer might do, Aiken piled them one atop the other, in the same teetering plots. One wrongly disinherited orphan might be irritating, but two wrongly disinherited orphans in the same novel is something else—and it’s in exploring that something else, its silliness and its surprising depth, that Aiken’s novels become so rich and so strangely moving.”
A previously unknown recording of Rachmaninov playing his Symphonic Dances to be released: “Rachmaninov refused to allow his live performances to be recorded or broadcast; the recordings we have of him were all made under tightly controlled studio conditions. So the discovery of a recording of the great composer and pianist playing through his recently composed Symphonic Dances – almost certainly recorded covertly, literally behind the pianist’s back – is a major landmark.”
Why baseball endures: “Even if, as many traditionalist fans worry, baseball management has been overrun by stat-headed bureaucrats and wealthy owners, with unsubtle play dominated by hard-swinging sluggers and hard-throwing fireballers, we need not fear that the sport will cease to be itself. Baseball’s endurance does not come from internal consistency in styles of play or a stable set of rules—though the sport has often benefited from both—but from a close connection to American culture, history, and values.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Times Literary Supplement, Roderick Conway Morris writes about a painting and a private art collection of former yeoman farmers that once rivalled that of the Medici family:
“‘The Paston Treasure’ is an extraordinary painting of a unique English collection. One of the largest known still-lifes in the Netherlandish tradition, it shows a table heaped with precious gold and silver objects, intricately mounted seashells, musical instruments and other valuables, along with fruits, flowers and a giant lobster. Also depicted is a richly dressed black boy with a monkey and a young girl with blonde ringlets, holding a musical score with a parrot on her wrist.
“Yet what is recorded here was just the tip of an iceberg of a collection once consisting of hundreds of gold and silver vessels, dozens of mounted shell cups, jewels, precious stones, statuary and table bronzes, tapestries, paintings, miniatures, drawings, clocks and timepieces, books and manuscripts, which filled the eighty rooms of Oxnead Hall in Norfolk. The collection was unparalleled in Britain at the time and on a par with the so-called Kunstkammer of such rulers as the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Vienna, Prague and Innsbruck, and the Medici Dukes in Florence.
“‘The Paston Treasure’ was donated to the Norwich Castle Museum during the 1940s and provides a wonderful window onto a lost world. It has recently been intensively studied by a team of more than forty scholars in various disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic in a joint project between the Norwich Castle Museum and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. And it now forms the centrepiece of a fascinating exhibition at Norwich Castle, curated by Francesca Vanke and Andrew Moore.”
Photo: Rod Fai Market
Poem: Nicholas Friedman, “Saint Matthew and the Angel”
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