Review by New York Times Review
"WRITERS MUST NOT underestimate the painter's labor and study, that effort which is so like an effort of thought and which allows us to speak of a language of painting." This sentence from the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty might serve as an epigraph for a new book on the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. Merleau-Ponty was deeply engaged in the silent meanings of painting and their relation to the human body and its gestures, meanings that he argued are different from and prior to words. Knausgaard does not mention MerleauPonty, but from the beginning, he wrestles with the mute language of the canvas and the difficulty of translating his experience with it to the page: "Sometimes it is impossible to say why and how a work of art achieves its effect. I can stand in front of a painting and become filled with emotions and thoughts, evidently transmitted by the painting, and yet it is impossible to trace those emotions and thoughts back to it and say, for example, that the sorrow came from the colors, or that the longing came from the brushstrokes, or that the sudden insight that life will end lay in the motif." The passage may be rephrased as a question : What exactly happens when a person looks at a work of art? After the preamble, Knausgaard's essay becomes an elastic exploration of Munch that combines three elements, each of which is freely woven into the text: details about Munch's life and painting; the writer's private and public experiences with the art - which include canvases he cares about, giving a speech on the painter, curating an exhibition, "Towards the Forest: Knausgaard on Munch," at the Munch Museum in Oslo, talking to scholars, artists and a film director with whom he makes a documentary about the work; and finally, philosophical musings about art and literature. As the daughter of a Norwegian woman and a Norwegian-American man, I cannot remember when I discovered Munch because he was always there. Nearly every art book on the shelves in my childhood house was devoted to the work of one man: Edvard Munch. Rivaled only by Ibsen, and perhaps Hamsun, Munch exists in Norwegian culture as a sign of greatness, and it may be helpful for readers in English to understand this reality as a point of departure. " 'Munch,' " Knausgaard writes, "is a static entity, so great and autocratic that it is barely in contact with anything but itself." He also notes rightly that "The Scream" has been lost to viewers. He doesn't say that the canvas is so famous that people around the world may recognize it without knowing Munch painted it, but that is the truth. As with the "Mona Lisa," whatever it may have meant to those who first saw it, the canvas has been buried under layer upon layer of cultural excrement. In "So Much Longing in So Little Space" (translated by fngvild Burkey), Knausgaard's ambition is to whittle away at the legend to arrive at insights about the genesis of the art itself, and not only Munch's art, but all art. The painter's life appears in fragments. The reader is told about Munch's early losses - the death of his mother when he was 5, and of his beloved sister Sophie when he was 13, the early diagnosis of his sister Laura's mental illness, the subsequent deaths of his father and brother - but not much about the painter's own mental collapse in 1908. The influence of Norwegian artists on Munch is included, but there is little about his life in France and Germany and its profound significanee on his development. The urgency of Knausgaard's project lies elsewhere. To my mind, Knausgaard is best when he is narrating his own pleasures and doubts as a museum curator and in his conversations with others on his subject. His exchanges with Munch aficionados appear in the book as personal accounts or actual transcripts of what was said. The German artist Anselm Kiefer is tight-lipped and critical. The Munch scholar Stian Grogaard is learned and precise. His mordant language acts as a foil to Knausgaard's more searching, languid prose. Grogaard's scholarly certitudes about Munch are countered by the Norwegian artist Vanessa Baird, who declares a painting Grogaard praised highly "embarrassing" and demolishes one art piety after another with an invigorating demotic sharpness. Knausgaard's response to the varying opinions of those he encounters is at once measured, insightful and tinged with comedy. He has walked into the land of the experts and visual artists and is afraid of looking like an "idiot" when the exhibition is mounted. His analysis of his own feelings is bracing: "The spineless fear which a couple of critical voices produced within me, can perhaps serve as an indicator of the power of social mechanisms, how they force everything into the channel of consensus, and what it must cost not just to oppose them, but to work within them ... as an artist, what forces are present even before one picks up the brush." The "channel of consensus" forged by invisible social mechanisms, what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus - gestures, perceptions and thoughts so deeply embodied in us they come to seem natural - is formidable. AND IT IS AFTER this thought that Knausgaard moves into a poetic meditation on how art belongs to ordinary life, with potato peelings in the sink and cats running across a lawn and children shouting at one another "somewhere in the house," which culminates in an eruption: "And the breakdown which 'The Scream' represents," he writes, "is just terrible, terrible." I am convinced that the writing of this passage and the associative movements of memory made it possible for Knausgaard to see "The Scream" in its naked form - as terror. The writer enacts on the page exactly what he hopes to convey. Art can sometimes break through the blinding conventions that dictate our perceptions. Such superb moments are offset by less successful passages. When he is at a loss to explain a painting's effect on him, Knausgaard periodically lapses into clichés: "The painting is alive. It has a resonance ... it is almost like music." He displays confidence about theories he has misunderstood. After telling the reader that Michel Foucault's "The Order of Things" came as a "revelation" to him, that he still believes in it, he argues in the same breath that "the true is always the same." Foucault would not have been pleased. There are many sources to which Knausgaard could turn to bolster his position on truth, but they are not in the book. The error is important rather than incidental because the writer frames his questions as ultimate ones about the making of art and ushers philosophy into the book. The irony may be that Knausgaard has been "forced" into the very "channel of consensus" he recognizes so clearly, a consensus that has elevated him to a status that, if not autocratic, is surely heroic. The fact that the consensus arrived with the publication of "My Struggle," a voluminous novel of automatic writing, may have had its dangers. Its many strengths do not lie in its intellectual rigor. That said, Knausgaard never underestimates the painter's labor and study, and this book stands as a sincere, often lyrical and penetrating attempt to enter the world of another artist. Knausgaard has walked into the land of the art experts and is afraid of looking like an 'idiot.' SIRI HUSTVEDT'S seventh novel, "Memories of the Future," was published in March.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Knausgaard, the prolific author best-known for My Struggle (2009-11), enters unfamiliar territory: art criticism. But his approach is no different from that in prior works, for his meandering stream-of-consciousness puts him squarely at the center even though here his subject is purportedly the early-twentieth-century Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. This allows Knausgaard to contemplate creativity and the life of an artist more generally and subtly undoes the myth of the critic's supposed objectivity. But it also makes the book difficult to follow as Knausgaard jumps between Munch paintings (many of which are reproduced), contemporary artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Vanessa Baird, and his own forays into the art world. Knausgaard tends to avoid using traditional chapters, thus immersing the reader in his rich mind and experiences. Here such text-dividers would have usefully structured his frequently compelling insights, helping to transform them into actual arguments. Knausgaard is attentive to how composition, color, and brushstroke can elicit in the viewer unanticipated emotions, but it's hard to stay with him long enough to get there. Primarily for fans of this high-profile writer.--Maggie Taft Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Norwegian modernist painter Edvard Munch, whose masterpiece The Scream is one of art's best-known depictions of an unhinged psychological freak-out, is a prosaic yet mysterious figure in this knotty aesthetic-biographical study. Norwegian novelist Knausgaard (My Struggle) ponders many Munch paintings (he includes reproductions), delves into his lonely life-the deaths of family members in early life left him gun-shy about relationships and perpetually alienated, Knausgaard writes-and conducts lengthy interviews with artists about Munch's influence and legacy. The results are uneven, by turns illuminating and obscure. Knausgaard's analysis of The Scream shows how it evokes a world subsumed in a crazy, distorted perspective without any sane vantage point to shelter viewers, an example of Munch's ability to visually capture emotions. Often, though, Knausgaard lapses into murky art-crit pensAces, as in his assessment of The Sick Child as "a picture which at one and the same time comes into being and is destroyed." Knausgaard inserts his own droll, hang-dog psychic travails-asked to curate a Munch exhibition, he feels like a failure for showcasing subpar paintings-as a much-needed relief from high-falutin' theory. Unfortunately, his sometimes turgid and baffling passages on the art exemplify how difficult it is to convey in words the visceral impact of images. Photos. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Although a fine primer on Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944), this book is more about the experience of wandering into the world of art and being consumed by its confluence of history, narrative, and sublimity.Munch, who created more than 1,700 paintings, is the perfect match for the prolific Knausgaard (My Struggle: Book Six, 2018, etc.), who teases out a history and critical reading of the artist that resonates with his own literary work. Fans of the author's acclaimed autobiographical novels will find this book to be of Rosetta Stone-like importance as he delves into Munch's exploration of memory and how the artist rendered the past in a way that still feels both intimate and universally relatable. Munch was a painter of the realm between depiction and feeling; his work simultaneously re-creates a representational vision along with the emotions associated with those memories. "The space in which the story unfolds is as important as the story," explains the author. Munch's paintings capture both a likeness and an essence and are often imbued with inescapable themes of longing, nostalgia, and anxiety. His work "invites reflection about what painting meant" to him and prompts contemplation on not just the depicted image and the artist's history, but the empathetic connectivity between the two. Knausgaard admits he is not "in favor of a biographical approach to art," and it shows: He jumps among paintings, biographical fragments, and interviews with other artists with disregard for traditional narrative flow. A section following the author's curatorial foray at the Munch Museum is followed by an interview with filmmaker Joachim Trier. This all may seem baggy and misdirected, but it is in fact appropriate when discussing Munch, who saw patterns in his own chaos and assembled a body of seemingly-unrelated work into what became known as his celebrated "Frieze of Life." Knausgaard's chaos, too, finds a striking vitality.An immersive, impassioned history that illuminates both subject and author. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
