Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello. I'm here today with Carl-Uwe Knausgård, one of the great writers of our civilization, and he also has a new book coming out, which I enjoyed very much, called So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch. Carl, thank you for coming.

Thank you for inviting me.

You know, in Book 6 of My Struggle, you mention René Girard and that mimesis is a useful concept for understanding human behavior. How do you think about who or what you're trying to copy?

Who I am trying to copy?

Yes, if you believe in mimesis.

Hmm, that was a tough first question, I have to say. How can I hook onto that? I think there's several levels you could reply that, you know, that question. First level would be whatever's related to literature, to the art of fiction, how to tell a story. Which is something you learn through reading and you have to have that for writing. There are just several ways to tell a story, several ways to enter a scene, several ways to write realistic prose. And for me, almost all reading I've done has, I think, subconsciously sunk into me in my own world and in my own writing. So when I, for instance, read Marcel Proust for the first time, I absolutely loved it, and I read it like I was drinking water or something, but I wasn't aware of me soaking it up at all. And I couldn't write at that time. Two years later, I wrote a novel. It has incredibly many similarities with Marcel Proust, but I wasn't aware of it. It was just something that happened. That's one level of mimesis. The other level is the opposite, is unlearning everything you know to be able to access what I like to think of as the world, the world we live in. Because sometimes fiction can be so mechanical, it is so locked into certain ways to look at the world that it's more like you look into literature than to the world. And that was what I was struggling with in my struggle trying to find a language for my experience of the world, you know, not— I wasn't interested in writing a novel, I was interested in trying to get the language from my experience of the world. And I think that is the key to Edvard Munch, what he did as a painter, very much so, because he grew up in Norway at the end of 19th century, in a kind of a certain pictorial language, which was realism, which was naturalism, and which was a national romanticism, you know, the glossy images of, you know, mountains and fjords and that kind of things. That was what he had available when he started. He wanted to paint. That was what he had available.

And he described his art as an act of confession, as you know. Is that true of yours? Are you fundamentally in the confessional tradition?

Yeah, I think so. But what Munch wanted— I think what Munch had was some experiences, very strong experiences. He lost his mother when he was very young, and then he lost his older sister, which was even harder for him. And I think he— what he lacked when he started to paint was a language to express that. Couldn't do that through glossy national romanticism, you know. So he tried, he had to break down everything he knew about painting to try to get that through what he had experienced. And that's the same thing with writing. That's what you want to do. Get that personal experience, the thing that only you feel, the thing that only you see, the thing that, you know, get that through. And if you do that, you realize, no, that's how everyone sees it. That's how everyone feels. But that's kind of the thing you have to try to reach, to tap into. And when I started to write My Struggle, I didn't know that existed. I just wanted to do it for my own sake, you know, more or less. And yeah, it was confessional. It was—

I've reread a lot of your work in the last few months, and what struck me more is what a, in a sense, conservative writer you are. At first, I thought of you as a radical, but if you think of this long-standing pietistic religious tradition of self-scrutiny, you know, you have Rousseau, Goethe, Even Swedenborg, August Strindberg. I now see you as very much in that tradition, that you're the next Nordic confessional and quite religious as a writer in a way. Would you accept that characterization?

Pietistic, I will accept, and a part of that Nordic tradition, I will very much accept. Religious, that's a bit more difficult to relate to, I think.

You wrote a whole book about angels, and it's striking, Swedenborg, Strindberg, they were obsessed with angels.

Yes, true.

You're obsessed with angels. Why the combination of angel obsession and confessional from the Nordics, including you? What's the unity there?

It's that the obvious thing in regard to that is that, you know, a pietistic Christianity is a very personal relation to God, very intimate relation to God, much more than a collective, you know, play like religion, as Catholicism would be, much more internal than external. And as a novelist, that's the confessional path, so to speak. But these things you don't think about, these things you just do. And if you are born into a culture, that culture becomes part of you, that language becomes part of you. And something of that you have to challenge, something of that you are not aware of, it's just part of you. But I have, you know, there's certain writers I do really love, and I think that is part of my culture, and I think I'm similar to them because of many different things. But these things you're talking about is kind of more cultural, deep-layered things, you know, the Pietism. These are not things you think about, these are things that just happen, I think. It's very unmodern, that's true. It's very old-fashioned.

Exactly. Arnold Weinstein has a book on Nordic culture, and he argues that the sacrifice of the child is a recurring theme. It's in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. It's in a number of Ibsen plays, Bergman movies. Has that influenced you, or are you a rejection of that? Are you like Edvard Munch, but with children, and that's the big difference between you and Munch, the painter? I told you we ask different questions.

Yeah, yeah. You didn't say— you said different. You didn't say difficult. Yeah, because there was a lot of grouping together here. You had Kierkegaard and the sacrifice of Isaac.

Yes.

And the biblical story, which basically is a story about faith and what it is to believe in God and what it demands to believe in God, the completely irrational level it takes to believe in God. I'm very leap out in the unknown, which you have to take. It's an interesting thing going on in that essay, which is a wonderful essay about Abraham sacrificing Isaac, is that it also has some small parts about breastfeeding in between, which is incredibly strange. And I was thinking, I've been thinking a lot about that. What is that? But it's moving away from something. It's going from my mother into society. And the leap of religion is going from the society and into the unknown, into the things we don't really know about, the things we don't have language for. There is another very interesting Nordic poet called Inge Christensen. She wrote a collection of essays, which is really brilliant. And she talks about those kind of border areas is a matter of language, what we can express and what we cannot express. And those in science, those are the string theories, or it's— that's the things we don't know, that's unknown. And the border is the language. We don't have language for it. We can't really. And she also said that like a letter in a book cannot read what's around it, cannot read the book, we are the same in the world. We cannot read the world. We're part of it. So that was Kirkegaard, and I don't, yeah, I find it hard to connect Kirkegaard in regard of children, sacrifice of children, and Bergman. Bergman is a completely different someone.

Children are abandoned both in his life and in the movies.

I know. There is Bergman's workbooks just came out in Sweden, so it's not his diaries and it's not his you know, his place, but it's kind of in-between state. All notes he took when he was working with things. It's incredibly interesting because you can see how a film surfaced from almost nothing and just become a film, and you see all his struggles and you see all of that. But in, in one particular passage, he wrote about the film he wants to make, and then he said, today my grandchild died, and that was it, you know, just a just a little passage, like he really didn't care. And a normal person, it would have filled that person completely. And then that little episode turns up in his next film, that the child is drowning. And there is another episode from Bergman's life that when his son was lying on his deathbed, he refused to have his father to come there. And that's a very, very strong statement. Sure. So you have this almost archetypical artist putting his art before his children, before his family, before everything. And as you have also Doris Lessing did the same, abandoned her children to move to London and to write. And I've been kind of confronted with that as a writer. And I think everyone do because writing is so time-consuming and so demanding. And when I got children, I had this idea that writing was a solitary thing. I mean, I could go out to small islands in the sea, could go to lighthouses, live there, try to write in complete, you know, be completely solitary and alone. So when I got children, that was an obstruction, you know, for my writing, I thought. But it wasn't. It was the other way around. I've never written as much as I have after I got the children, after I started to write at home, after I kind of, I I established writing in the middle of life. It was a crawling life everywhere, and what happened was that writing become less important. It become less precious, become more ordinary. It become, you know, less religious or less sacred. It becomes something ordinary, and that was incredibly important for me because that was eventually where I wanted to go into the ordinary, mundane even. And try to connect to what was going on in life. Life isn't sacred, life isn't, you know, uplifted, it is ordinary and boring and all the things we know. So you have these myths and they work for some, they don't work for some, but you can relate to them. I have a friend, he's a brilliant writer, and he always says, "Yeah, when you want to create something, you have certain I don't know the English word. You have certain things that's fixated. What do you call them?

Premises or assumptions or axioms?

Yeah, you just have to accept them and work inside of them. That's the only way. So if you can't write, that's the base. Then you have to start to write out from that fact, you know. And I think that's the best advice I ever got, to accept everything that happens. So if you have Many children is a good thing. If you don't have children, it's a good thing. You know, it's like you have to embrace it because that's your life, that's where you are, and writing should be connected to that, or painting, or whatever it is.

Your focus on Nazi history in part of volume 6 of My Struggle, is that a kind of confessional for Norway and Nytåmosen, or the parts of Norway that were attracted to Nazism? How is that connected to the fact that you wrote a confessional about your own life? Clearly you have no sympathies for a Nazi regime at all, but there's a connection from your culture, history.

Yeah, it's many connections. One would be that when my grandmother died, we found Mein Kampf in the chest in the living room, you know. What was that book doing there? You know, had they read it? And I realized it was kind of common thing, you know, to have that book. It was kind of common thing to cooperate with the Nazi regime. Regime. Um, when I grew up in Norway, the story we were told at school was the heroic one, you know, the resistance and, and, and how every evil civilian resisted. And but the fact is that Norway was— no, the wheels were rolling and, and the society was working, and, and it has to be a lot of cooperation with, with, with the Nazis. And, and my other grandfather, he befriended an Austrian officer that was posted where he lived. And when I grew up, there was reminiscence from the war, like bunkers where we were playing at, and it was like war was in one sense incredibly distant, but when I started to think about it, incredibly close. It was my grandparents' world, really. But that wasn't the reason why I started to write. The reason was coincidental, basically, because I called my book My Struggle, which is the English translation of Mein Kampf. And then I had to read it, and then I realized Hitler's book is a kind of— he's writing about his own self, I'm writing about my own self, there's the same title. I started to read him, and I got incredibly intrigued by what I read because it was so much Not that he was lying, but it was so much that was unsaid, so much that, you know, he twisted his life into something completely different. Couldn't be true. And I just dived into that and started to read more about it and try to find out what kind of man he was and how all this could happen. Well, it started out like it starts in the book. It's a reflection about names because I couldn't use my father's name in the book. That was, you know, my family forbid me that. So I started to be interested in and look around what names really are, what they signify, and then I stumbled across a Romanian poet who wrote in German called Paul Celan. His parents died in Holocaust and he was Jewish, and he wrote post-war in the language of The best poet of the 20th century, perhaps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the rest is—

maybe Rilke.

No, I think Baudelaire. Yeah, maybe. But anyway, he wrote this incredibly, incredibly, incredibly intriguing poem where almost nothing can be named. There's no names, and it's like it's almost impossible to say anything. It's like the language is completely completely broken, so there's no connection between the element in the language. And I read that and I wrote about it and I realized this is the— and it's about Holocaust, of course— and this is the end of what was started with my struggle. And then that was the moment in the book and that was the moment in, you know, in— because Hitler also wrote in German and he also wrote, you could read it, you know, it's bad, but you can say whatever you want, but the fact that you actually read him is intriguing, and you can see everything he wants to do is in the book. So I wanted to describe that path from Hitler to Celan, and it's the only part in the book that's not about me. But it is, of course, about me. And it's the only part that's not about our time, it's about the past. So it's kind of a place, kind of a dark mirror in the book where where you could see everything, get a perspective to everything. And it's the only part I found really pleasure in writing because it was so much I discovered during writing that, and it wasn't about me, which is a burden to do, but that was different. It's about the generation, the generation that grew up with the First World War and made Second World War happen.

So many great Norwegian writers, Ibsen, Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun, there's nationalism in their work. Yet today, liberals tend to think of nationalism as a kind of unspeakable evil of sorts. So how do we square this with the evolution of Norwegian writing? And if one thinks of your own career, arguably it's your extreme popularity in Norway at first that drove your later fame. What's the connection of your own work to Norwegian nationalism? Are you the first non-nationalist great Norwegian writer? Is that plausible, or is there some deeper connection?

I think so much writing is done out of a feeling of not belonging. If you read Knut Hamsun, "Hivos en osse," He was a full-blooded Nazi. We have to be honest about that.

His best book might be his Nazi book, right? He wrote when he was, what, 90?

Yeah.

On Overgrown Paths.

Yeah.

To me, it's much more interesting than the novels, which are a kind of artifice that hasn't aged so well.

Yeah.

But you read On Overgrown Paths, you feel like you're there.

Yeah.

It's about self-deception.

It's true. It's a wonderful book. But I think Hamsun's The theme, his subject is rootlessness. It's a kind of a— in a very rooted society, you know, in a rural society, in a family-oriented society like Norway has been, a small society. He was like a very rootless, very urban writer. He went to America and he hated America, but he was America, you know, he had that in him. He was there in late 19th century, and he wrote a book about it, which is a terrible book, but still he was there, and he had that modernity in him, and he never wrote about his parents, never wrote about where he came from. You know, all his characters just appears, you know, and then something happens with them, but there's no past, there's no— and I found that incredibly intriguing just because he become the Nazi, he become the farmer, he become the one who sang the song about, you know, growth, the— what do you call it?

"Machenskröte." "The Fruit of the Soil." Yeah, exactly.

And it's like he's fighting himself doing that. He's not your national— nationalist. He's incredibly complex and And the interesting thing is that you can see that struggle in his writing.

Is your own American travelogue a revision of Knut Hamsun's in some way? Like, well, Norway's going to get it right this time?

No, but I do actually have thought about doing that, going in his footsteps, because he was there for quite a long time. He drove tram in Chicago, did a lot of things, and it's an exciting story really. But anyway, the thing with writing in his case is that he's getting so close to the world and to the people in his writing. It's so complex that he's not a Nazi in his writing. But in his essays and in his speeches, there's a big distance. There he's a Nazi. And that what literature can do is to get you so close that these things like nationalism just disappears because they don't exist on that particular level, you know. It's— you have to move away from of the world to be able to have established a distance to be able to, you know, talk about these things at all. So, but I— Norway is a nationalistic country, but it's not in, um, I don't think it's in any bad way at all, really. It's a very innocent— Norway is a very innocent country.

What's the worst thing about living here in London?

The worst thing?

The worst thing.

I think it's, to me, being an outsider, it's both the worst and the most interesting, and that's the huge difference between the classes. It's the extreme poverty, and then you just, you know, you walk up a hill and it's incredibly rich. And it's also very, very much, it's not only a matter of classes, but it's, you know, In the area I live, the poor— there's a rather poor area. It's a black area. And then you go up the hill, and it's just a white area. And those kind of things are— I think it's a kind of hopelessness, really, to be here, because you can't do anything about it. It's in the structure in the society. But then also, it makes it incredibly— the variation incredibly, and the richness incredible. And so it's very much an alive city. Coming from Norway, it's very different. You know, it's like all kinds of things going on simultaneously, which is incredibly interesting and nice to— at least I'm not part of it— but to see and to be, you know, around. But it has that backside with the privilege being, you know, going around and around and around and around in the same kind of class and the privilege the same. And there's no kind of where they connect. You can't move from one to the another. That's— Scandinavian societies are much more egalitarian in that sense.

As you well know, Hans Jaeger was a seminal influence on Edvard Munch, and you can think of him as a highly intellectual, cynical nihilist. Munch knew him in his early years. Has there been a Hans Jaeger figure in your life who's a formative influence? It doesn't come through in your books.

You mean personally or through reading?

Who's your Hans Jaeger?

I don't have a Hans Jaeger, but I have this writer I really admire and he's really something.

Who's that?

He's called Tove Eriklund. He's not translated into English. He's very wild. Wild as a person, wild as a writer. He's like— he has inspired me a lot and, you know, shown me what's possible to do in writing. And it's, but he's so particularly, that is, it's hard to translate him. But like, you know, it could be like if he had been writing in English, he would have been, I guess, the level of, you know, Thomas Pynchon or whoever, he's that good. But he's so idiosyncratic, that is hard to translate him. Yeah, but he's not my Hans Jaeger, but he's an influence.

Edvard Munch, he was known for beating his paintings, abusing them, not treating them very well. Have you ever done the same with your books?

Yeah, I'm kind of a careless person, so I have, and I don't, you know, don't take backups, and I have, you know, window open, it's raining on my computer. I've lost a computer down on the tracks with trains, and I've lost them, and you know, it's, but it always turns out well, but it's, that's not the same, but I don't care about how the book looks. I don't deal with that part of it at all. And when I'm done with a book, there's hardly no editing. I just leave it and publish it, and I want to move on because it's the process of doing this that interests me, not the result. And I really hate it when a book is done because then I know it will take a few years before I will get into something else. So in that, I can recognize Munch. He hardly finished a painting in his life. He just, you know, And he was very reckless with his paintings, and it is a certain aesthetic in that as well. It's like, I'm rewriting that, because it's like the difference between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky really didn't care. He could just, you know, didn't have to describe it fully, just a few sentences, done with that, and go on and go on and go on, looking for something like a flame or something burning or something, you know. Something, the intensity of something he was looking for. Tolstoy, you know, he wrote about everything and painted it fully and did so wonderfully, but it's completely different aesthetics and they reach completely different places. And when I was young, I thought Dostoevsky was the primary, the one that had, you know, reached the far. Now I'm older, it's Tolstoy, really.

Edvard Munch, he stuck with Dostoevsky as an influence.

Very much so. I realized the day he died and afternoon the day he died he read Dostoevsky and then he died. So it also just followed him throughout his life and I think Dostoevsky was part of his forming his identity as a painter. Exactly what's unfinished.

Is The Scream a self-portrait of Munch and is he wearing a mask or a death mask?

Yeah, The Scream is based upon an experience he had walking up the hill outside of Oslo, seeing what you see in that painting, hearing the nature scream. So it's in a way, it's a self-biographical painting. And yeah, the radicality of that painting is hard to get a grip on now, I think. We are very much used to that kind of distorted ways of depicting the world, but what it It's a long story about— I've written a lot about it in the book because it was fun, because that's a painting that, you know, everyone knows and everybody has a thought about. And I tried to, you know, try to write about it afresh. What is this? What did it do? And I can talk about it if you like, but it's a long and complicated story. I don't know if I can do it.

I'll ask you about Between the Clock and the Bed. So Jasper Johns' paintings are often mysterious, but he chose to redo Between the Clock and the Bed. And what is Johns on about? What is Munch on about in that painting?

I don't know about the Jasper Johns. He's using the pattern on the bed, isn't he?

Right, yes.

Yeah. Munch made some remarkable self-portraits. I think he did so throughout his life, and he started in 1819, and they're all very different, and I think they're all very good. And this is One of the very last ones. And the thing with this is it's so incredibly simple. It's just a man standing there. And it's like he's showing us that this is it. It's, you know, there's no posing. There's no— It's like there's no defense. And Munch was a man full of defense. And I think painting was a way for him to get under the defense and reconnect with the world. And in this painting, that's what it do. It's like the guard is down. This is what it is.

Is autobiography a kind of defense or protective strategy for you, a way in which life cannot be a disappointment? There's always something happening you can write about. In that sense, your portfolio, so to speak, is very diversified.

Yeah, it is a place to hide. That it is. I mean, that's obvious. There was a wonderful sentence in a Witold Gombrowicz, Polish writer who wrote his diaries are, I think, amongst the masterpieces of the last century. It really is brilliant. But he published his own diaries when he was alive. And when they were published, he said, you know, I just have to take one step, retreat one step inside myself. And that's what you do when you reveal so much about yourself. It's like you could just take a step back and it's all right. I mean, it's not even connected to you if you do that. It's like, okay, I'd never think about what people know about me. The act of writing is like for me a place I can go to and where I am protected somehow. Publishing books is a different thing, of course, but I try to disconnect from that, don't think about it, the publication of it. So what I want to do is to be in the space where I'm writing, and it's also a way of me to understand what's going on, to see things that I normally don't see, because I'm very much enclosed in myself and in my own space, and I don't really notice things and what— and I'm kind of closed off to the world, so writing is a way of opening up also. There's a lot of things, but I've been writing for so long now that it feels like a place I can go to. Go into that place and sit down, and I will be at peace as long as I'm there, even though I write about terrible and heartbreaking things. It still is a place of peace, and I do find reading the same thing, and I've always done that. I think that was why I read so much when I was when I was little and when I grew up. And I think I became a writer the moment I realized that that space is the same, the reading space and the writing space is basically the same, and you do the same things there in those spaces.

Why does Munch have so many mediocre paintings? Some might even say bad paintings.

I think he didn't really care. I think he wanted to capture something, and if he didn't do that at first instant, he moved on. But he kept all the bad paintings too. I found that also very interesting.

Is that a model to emulate or a cautionary tale for you?

I saw— I was curating an Munch exhibition in Oslo at the Munch Museum, so they gave me access to the magazine in the basement and I was shocked because it was, you know, you pulled out these enormous kind of walls and it was like maybe 10 paintings or 5 paintings or 7 paintings or 15 paintings on them and it was a completely mix-up with masterpieces, terrible paintings, sketches, mediocre things, old things, new things, and it was like being in a work of progress. If you go to museum, you see it's everything finished, everything is almost stylish, then it's everything is art. This was completely different. This was entering into a process because the painting they have is the paintings Munch had when he died. Everything he kept, everything he didn't sell, you know? And when I did that exhibition, I thought that as an opportunity to try, because in Norway at least, you can't really see Munch because you've seen it, he's so big and you see all the paintings so many times that you can't really experience them. So I tried to use the other paintings to give a new access to Munch, what he was doing, and amongst them was also Bad Paintings.

You've bought a Munch, right? Head of a Woman?

Yeah.

Why buy only one? Why not buy a second? What is your thinking on the matter? You enjoy it, right? They're capital assets. You can resell it someday.

Your heirs will have a value. Yeah, no, I really— it was hard for me to buy that one, so I mean, having a monkey in Norway is very bourgeois and very, you know, you're very settled when you do that. But I thought my excuse was that I got a fee for the curation of the exhibition, and I thought I could use the fee for buying a Munch. So that's what I got, and it's not, you know, it's just a drawing. It's just, yeah, so it's nothing really, but it's incredibly nice to see. And the thing with the good work of art is that you can see it every day and you don't get tired. It's like it gives endlessly, and it's very simple, extremely simple, but it still comes something from it. Every day, actually, which is what you want from a piece of art.

You showed up 7 minutes early for this interview. Do you think of yourself as ultimately a defender or a critic of bourgeois culture and bourgeois virtue?

I have— when I was a teenager, I was very much in opposition to it.

But that's the typical pattern. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I don't really care. That's true. You know, I'm too busy raising children and too busy trying to survive that I can't really afford, I mean, think in those terms. I remember when I got my first daughter, I thought, you know, when I— and I was full-time with her— I thought, you know, this is very unmasculine and this is, you know, taking away my identity. And then I had 3 children and and then 4 children, and who cares? I mean, you just deal with them and try to be good and go on. And it's the same now. It's about that. I mean, if that's bourgeois, if that's what it is, I don't care. I mean—

You've written in great detail about raising your children, but looking back, what is it you feel you understand now that you didn't then? If you were to add in a footnote, because retrospective memory is quite different from experience in the moment.

That's hard. I mean, there's so many things I did that I wish I hadn't done, but that's, you know, that's—

that's life, right?

Yeah, yeah, but that's life. That's how it is, and you can't undo it, and you do have to experience things and learn things, and you can't— you know, I can't tell a young father what to do, what not to do. It's, you know, you have to find out yourself. And the thing about the book which I'm happy about is that it covers a process and I wasn't aware of that really, but a very short period of time really. I wrote it in 2 years. And as you say, I've forgotten everything now in my head, but it's in the book, it's captured in the book. You see how I was thinking, you see, yeah, you know, what mistakes I did or not did or whatever, but it's still like a slice of life that's in those books.

Is it possible at all to enjoy your works on audiobook, or is the use of voices different from yours too discordant? For stories that are so personal, that are so you, so confessional?

No, that's— I don't, you know, I don't read my books and I don't listen to them. So, but I have in Germany, they have readings very different from here. It's readings. So you have like an interview with the writer for maybe 5 minutes and then it's just like 1 hour of reading. And they have, when it's a foreign writer, they have actors reading. And there has been some incredibly nice experiences if there is a good actor reading. It's like he makes the book into— has nothing to do with me.

Is it better than you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, it's like it then becomes proper storytelling and it becomes literature, you know? And that's very strange to witness, but also very nice.

You're obviously very fluent in English. What do you feel the English language reader loses in the translation from the Norwegian?

I think the translations are excellent. Donald Bartlett, he translated 5.5 of the 6 books, Martin Aitken did the last part of book 6. He asked me in the beginning if I wanted to, you know, how hands-on I wanted to be in the translation, and I said, "I don't want, you know, you could do whatever you want to. I don't want to have anything to do with it." And then I remember getting book 5 in the mail and almost accidentally I started to read, you know, and I just kept on reading because it was so well done and it was in English, it was kind of removed from me, but still I recognized everything. And I think he's a world-class translator, Donald Bartlett. But an interesting thing in that regard is that I have another translator for my other books, She's a poet, she's half Norwegian, half American, called Ingval Bergke. She translates my language completely different. It's a completely different feeling of her language than his language. Both are brilliant but in very different ways. He's much more translated into an English novel and she's much more translating into a Norwegian feeling English and she's much more close to my language and he's much more above. And both comes from the same writing. Very different, both very good. But you see the one— yeah, they have different qualities, so to speak.

Why do we put dead bodies in the basement rather than the attic?

Yeah, good question.

You asked it yourself in BookLab.

Yeah, that was a long time ago.

To pursue your father's question, how many people in solo car accidents are actually suicides?

Yeah, exactly.

Are all Swedes crazy?

Not all.

Not all. Which Ingmar Bergman film has influenced you the most and why?

Sitting here with you, I can't really think of any Ingmar Bergman film.

You once said Wild Strawberries was your favorite, but favorite may not be the same as influence.

No, I think Sins from a Marriage is an incredibly good TV series.

That's the best movie ever made if you watch the whole thing through, I think.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's his richest and best. And yeah, I think so. I love Persona, and I do actually, even though Lars von Trier hates it, I do like Fanny Alexander also. Such a, yeah, such a fairy tale touch to it, which I like. But no, it is Sins from Marriage, I think.

I like Smiles of a Summer Night very much. The Mozartian feel, the Shakespeare connection. It's a very alive movie for me. Peter Handke, what kind of influence have his novels had on you?

That's hard. I'm discussing him and his influence in book 6 actually, because he is a writer I absolutely admire and I think my writing is, you know, this doesn't reach up to his knees, his writing's knees. But "My Year in No Man's Bay" is a book that I read, it must have been in the '90s when it came out, before I was being a writer myself, or was it exactly at the moment I started to be a writer, I think. And that was very influential. And his writing, you know, about the things that not belong in a story and the things that really don't belong in a landscape, you know, the areas between the city and outside of the city, you know, the railway tracks, the grass, the fences, the kind of the world as it is. Outside of the story, I think. And he's— yeah, it's just— I can't— I don't know, but I always— and the book about his mother is absolutely fantastic, I think.

Is Elena Ferrante the main contender for having bested your achievement, if we're handing out lifetime achievement awards for contemporary serious fiction?

I've only read one Ferrante book, and that was Days of Abandonment.

Yes.

And I would have, you know, cut off my left arm to write that book. I think it was so Absolutely brilliant.

So try the Neapolitan.

I know, I know, I know, I know. It's the same. I have problem with things I know is very good to enter it because I'm not a jealous type, but I feel, you know, I will in the end. But that book, Days of Abandonment, was really, really outstanding good. And luckily there's no competition here, so there's nothing to— I mean, I do what I can do. And then you have incredibly good writers everywhere in every country. So, and when I'm outside of a novel, I just look at them and I think it feels so hopeless, you know, how are they doing this? You know, how are they managing to do this? And if you think like that, you can't really write. It has to come, you know, has to be personal, has to come from the inside, has to be within something without looking out. And what you're talking about is that's outside of books. And then you can start and be jealous and, "Oh, you know, or why did, you know, he get that grant and I not? And why did I get so bad reviews?" and stuff. That's worthless. It's completely worthless. And I try to stay away from it as much as I can.

But we know Ibsen was obsessed with medals and honors, right?

Yeah, he was.

Was that a character flaw?

It was very funny, a very funny flaw, I think.

One you share or not?

I don't share that, no. But he had also, you know, a mirror in his hat, so he could take out his hat and look himself, which is also very funny. And he was very little, very little man, loving medals and having a mirror in his hat. That's funny.

From another literary tradition, take Calvino, Borges, Cortázar. Are they, in your view, in some ways overrated? And is your objection to them ultimately a political one?

No.

They're running away from life in a way, correct?

No, no, I feel quite the contrary. Borges, I think, is superior. I think he's a master, really a master, and one, a writer I've learned a lot from, not in ways of telling the story, but what the story tells you about the world. He has been very influential in my worldview. Basically, especially one called Tlön Akbar. It's a short story. Sure. It's just the best short story I've ever written, I think.

We agree on that, actually.

Yeah, I think it's, you know, Calvino is less— Calvino has— yeah, Cortázar is also very good, but he's not Borges, I think. And Calvino, I love. I mean, The Baron in the Tree, or what it's called, is one of my favorite books. So, and I, you know, if I could write like them, I would, but I can't. I have— every time I have something fantastic, I mean in that sense, something that really could happen, I try to write it, I can't make it work. Just don't have it in me. Has to be some sort of realism. I have to believe in it myself. And the magic with Borges is that you believe it completely. He makes it completely believable. And his essays are, you know, absolutely wonderful., and in every little essay, every short story almost, you could pull something out of value. So he's absolutely one of my favorites.

Is Magnus Carlsen going to withdraw from the World Chess Championship cycle?

Chess is not my world.

Has liberalism exhausted itself?

Maybe not liberalism, maybe capitalism.

There's something about the aesthetic. People in the early 20th century, Hampson included, seemed to think that a vital sense of the aesthetic Maybe it didn't quite have to be fascist, but it had to move the artist somewhat in a direction which we today would mostly consider unpleasant. Do you think a strong notion of the aesthetic and liberalism are totally compatible?

Good question.

T.S. Eliot would be another example of someone who moved in a quite unsavory direction.

Yeah, I don't know really. I wonder if, you know, fascist literature, if that's even possible. I can't, it's like those are, you know, those two concepts are not able to.

But liberalism in literature is also tricky. So you take Romain Rolland, who is a great classical liberal. He wrote books that everyone read at the time, but they're mostly forgotten. They're seen as a little flat. Yeah.

I don't know what you mean by liberalism in this.

The notion of a particular neutrality across values, which government then enforces by having impartial laws, and people believe strongly in some underlying notion of neutrality. Doesn't that clash with the aesthetic impulse at some level?

Yeah, of course. Yeah, that's what you meant. Yeah, yeah.

And in your own thought, how do you reconcile those two things?

What I'm striving for in my writing is what I call literary freedom, and it's a space where I can be free in every sense, where I can say whatever, go wherever I want to. For me, literature is almost the only place you could think of that that is a possibility. And my fear is that that space is closing down, and you're closing it down yourself, and becoming more afraid for what you're saying. Can I say this? Can I do this? And these powers are so strong, you know. It's so hard to go somewhere, you know, now this is this is wrong, or this is, you know, I mean, I did it with my struggle because I wrote about my family and I knew, of course, I shouldn't do this and really it is immoral to do this. And then I did it because I wanted to say what I wanted to say and I wanted to be free and to talk about, to write about my own life in a complete and in a free way. That's also why I admire Writers like, you know, Peter Hanke. We had the Yugoslavia controversy around him, and we have a lot of controversies around him, but what he does is he is there, he's hardcore saying what he thinks and stands for it, no matter how ugly it looks from the outside. And that's what you can do in literature, no other place, I think. This is an internal struggle in every writer, I think. And it goes in almost all levels of society. I find it hardest to go into the private places that belong to my family and my life. But you can have all the other political topics, you have a lot of things you can think of. But it's good that it's a struggle, and it's good that there's an arena where we can have these fights. But the notion that literature should be good, I mean, in a moral sense, that I find ridiculous. —that's useless.

As a boy, which were your favorite comic books? You've written that you loved comic books growing up.

Yeah, when I was little, it was Lee Fox Phantom. That was really big in Norway. A bit older, I was Modesty Blaze, but I read absolutely everything.

And what are the politics of those comic books that young boys tend to read? The politics? The implicit politics.

Then in the '70s, it was very sexist, very racist, and all kinds of things. So my mother discovered what I actually was reading, so she said— she forbid me to read comics, which was a very harsh punishment, it felt at that time, but made me start to read books. So it was a good thing in the end. But she was completely shocked by what I was reading, and it was common, but that was the '70s. I think it has changed, maybe, I don't know.

Now, you spent some time in a creative writing program, is that correct? Yeah. Did you learn much there, or was it just a waste of your time?

I learned a lot. What can I say? I was like running into a wall. I was running full speed into a wall and I fell down and I lay down for like 6, 7 years. I couldn't write after that. I was completely— I was so young when I started. I had all this illusion about myself and about literature and what I could do, and I couldn't do anything. And I felt like they were ridiculous, ridiculing me, and they were actually. And then it took many years and then I I could write. And what I learned— I met, you know, the world literature. Yes. And I met also a writer that is Norway's best writer. He's called Jørgen Fossen. He was 29 at the time, and he was a teacher there. His notion of quality is absolute, and he was very, very important to me just because he showed me where the level should be, you know. I haven't reached that level, but I'm above where I was when I was 20, at least. And it was very good to know that this is literature, this is what literature can do. But it was completely terrible for me at the time and many years afterwards, because I couldn't— I had no self-confidence. They took away all my self-confidence. I couldn't write.

The creative writing program took away your self-confidence? Yeah. And that was a good thing?

In the end, it was a very good thing.

Yeah. How did you get your self-confidence back?

I haven't got it back. Haven't got it back. But I have helpers to help me. So the one who picked me up from nothing, and he's still my editor. I really couldn't write when he saw something I've written and believed in me. He still believes in me, and he has to tell me that every week, that what I'm doing is interesting, what I'm doing is good, and that he believes in me. And he's done so for 20 years now. Without him, I wouldn't have been a writer. And I also have friends who do the same thing, said, okay, this is good, don't give up, keep on writing. I need it because if not, I wouldn't have the strength to do it. Maybe I would, but it makes my writing life much easier to have helpers.

Your first book in English, but I think your second book overall, A Time for Everything. Why did you write a whole book about angels? I really don't know.

I've always been interested in the physicality of man, the matter, the brain itself, the physicality of the brain, the way we are, you know, animals, the way we eat and the way we take the world in, and the primitiveness of us. And then, you know, the heaven above, all the things we dream of. And when I read the Bible, something that occurred to me was the physicality of the angels. That's such wonderful image. And I thought, okay, they were eating in the Bible, and they're walking with God in the Bible. And I thought, what if I read the Bible from that perspective? What happened to the angels? Where are they? Because they saw angels before. We don't see them. And then I thought, okay, maybe they have been tempted to be in the physical world too much, and then kind of been almost centrifuged into the world and been part of the world and can't escape. And they're still here around us. That was the thought. And in a kind of a way, it's a metaphor for what happened with religion. Why, you know, why we're not— many of us don't believe anymore. Why there's no heaven above us except, you know, commercials and TV programs and stuff. What happened? What happened with religion? What happened with God? What happened with heavens? You know, how come we are all down here now? And what's that about? And that was not why I read it, but that was the outcome of writing it. But that was the outcome of the writing.

And why the fascination with the Cain and Abel story? It's family struggle, it's rivalry. Yes, true.

And it's only like 8 lines or something in the Bible. It's almost nothing. And it's so rich. And it's like, it's bottomless. They have been discussing that and reading that for thousands of years. And you can still say something new about it, that simple story. Brother killing another brother.— I'm just reading about Gnosticism now, and they take a liking, some of them, for Cain, which is, they like to turn everything upside down, so God is really the devil, and this really is hell, and Cain is really the good one, the one to look into. And you know, it's just an endlessly fascinating thing, and it means so much, so many layers of meaning in that simple, simple story. And that's the best part of The Bible, those very short stories, incredibly rich and layered with meaning.

To close, why don't we return to your new book? Again, it's called So Much Longing in So Little Space, and give us your take on Munch's The Scream.

You referred to this earlier. My take on Scream, that was, you know, that's what happens when you, when you're writing. You just start. I just sat down with the Munch book, thought, okay, write a book about Munch. Let's see where this goes. And then you just enter it, and then comes something back, and then 2 months later you have a book. And The Scream is, uh, it's one of the most iconic paintings there is. Everyone, I think, have seen it. It's so recognizable, and it's so— almost we have an intimate knowledge of it. We see it, you know. But the painting is about the opposite. It's about something very strange. It's about something— it's hard to do this in English— but it's about the world being almost unrecognizable. This is seeing how strange the world is, and we do this in that painting that we instantly recognize. And it's a painting about anxiety, and anxiety is incredibly painful, so it is a painting about pain. But we see, you know, we see a million dollars, we see You see its fame, you don't see that. But the interesting thing for me was when I wrote about it was what kind of paintings Munch had access to and what kind of— how they painted at that time. Because no matter how painful things were, they were always taking place in a space, in a room, and having that space, having that room you know that the events in that room will one day be over, something new will take place there. You know, if Madame Bovary is a very painful ending, but you know that world will continue, and there is a kind of a comfort in that. There isn't any acuteness in it, you could see it, you know it will pass, and you observe it from the outside. So, you see it at a distance, you know, you see something painful, so a sick girl at a distance, and, and it's in another room, and we will pass. So there is a comfort in that. What Munch does, or did, in that painting is to remove that room, to remove that space, because all the landscape is subdued to the person in the painting, so it's his landscapes. So there's no room in it, there's no neutrality. It's when that person is gone, the landscape is gone. So there is no space and there is no time. It's an instantly painting. It's acute. It's like it's happening now, and we share the space with the painting, and that is the radicality of the painting, that there's no space and there's no comfort. It's an acute thing. It's instant, and you have to relate to it. You can't see that painting without relating to it. No, I mean, when you saw it for the first And the interesting thing now, I think, is that that's a fair description of the world, how it is now. It is an instant world. We get access to painful things that happen when it happens. I mean, today there was a massacre in New Zealand. The minute it happens, we know about it, we relate to it, we feel the pain, we see the pictures. That didn't just happen, that didn't happen at Munch's time. It was unheard of. Now that's the world we live in, the world of scream. There's no space between us and the world. Everything comes bombarding us, you know. So what art has to do now is the opposite. It is to create spaces, is to recreate rooms. And I was thinking about that and also writing in the book about— I was in an exhibition with Anselm Key for her in London, as White Cube. It was absolutely magnificent, but it was no people in it. It was only spaces, only room. And it was kind of mythological room, so it was like it was giving space to events that wasn't even there. Back somehow. And I think both Kiefer and Munch are great artists, but they have— they live in different times and they had different missions. And for Munch, it was very important to give access directly to the pain and to the distorted vision of the world and to give a more true account of how it is to be. I think he wanted to do— and now it's the opposite because now —no, we need space and we need comfort and we need time and we need, you know, something. I'm not sure if artists should do that, but that's what I thought when I started to write about Munch. And another interesting thing is that exactly the same thing is going on in the literature at that time, you know. You have the epic novel with all the characters, all the rooms. Tolstoy is a very good example. Because that is a book about rooms. And then you have, for instance, then Knut Hamsun in Hunger, which is just one person and his distorted version of the world that exists. And when he dies, the world disappears, you know.

Carl, thank you very much for coming by. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. And if you like this podcast, please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review. This helps other people find the show.