Two Knausgaard bits

(I need to stop blogging and get off the computer, this is ridiculous! Going to leave Ferrante post for another day but wanted to close these two Knausgaard tabs.)

Ane Farsethås interviews KOK for the Paris Review. Here Knausgaard explains why Madame Bovary is the world's best novel:

I’ve read the novel many times, and its details are so vivid—the world is clear and crisp as a landscape after a heavy rainfall. And it has that incredible torrent of emotions and dreams and desires that gain even more force by being so fundamentally misplaced. I think it’s better than In Search of Lost Time. Proust doesn’t have that kind of concentration. Flaubert is interesting. I just read his letters, and they really go backstage. He writes about everything! The most obscene things, sex, prostitutes, what have you. They’re as chaotic as life itself. And then you see that perfectly constructed facade of the novel, which in a way contains it all, but indirectly—it’s highly controlled and composed. That made me realize the value of Bovary is much higher, a thousand times higher than the letters, even though the letters are livelier and closer to life. It’s about creating a universe that’s entirely self-contained and not just true, but actually valid. It’s that validity—which, in the best books, is endless—that is perhaps the true nature of literature.

And an interesting essay by Siri Hustvedt.

Closing tabs

Yesterday was a complex and rewarding day (got up at 5:45, rode my bike downtown for 7am boot camp at Chelsea Piers, then back uptown to teach Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden in the morning and Swift's Argument Against Abolishing Christianity and Johnson's Life of Swift in the afternoon, then musings on Helen Hill's film "The Florestine Collection" and a pizza party at my place afterwards for colleagues, friends and family, my own and Helen's, lay my head down on the pillow around 1am).

Today I am knackered!

Had a very productive afternoon appointment with a pulmonary specialist who has a number of thoughts on how I might tackle the exercise-induced asthma (he also recommends a mighty tome that I have ordered through BorrowDirect; it is prohibitively - comically! - expensive, it is for clinicians!), took a long nap and have spent the rest of the evening devouring Lee Child's The Affair.

I have some treats for upcoming days: the book party for Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods (here's a good interview at Bookforum, and I am delighted to say that Helen is also going to catsit for me next week while I am in Ottawa next week for a visit with Brent's parental units); a production of The Bald Soprano...

Miscellaneous linkage:

Benjamin Weiss defends the Cambridge History of the American Novel against Joseph Epstein's depredations. (These controversies make me throw up my hands in perplexity, I see that they are still 'live' in some sense but they bear no relation to my own personal lived experience of reading and writing and teaching in the academy, so it is hard for me to take them seriously as an account of true living intellectual controversies as opposed to some sort of late-stage playing-out of a long battle between ancients and moderns. I really am going to teach a class on the battle of ancients and moderns one of these days, by the way...)

B. R. Myers at the Atlantic on Peter Temple's crime fiction.