NWR: Karl Ove Knausgaard reviews Michel Houellebecq

[Sharon Bowman]

In the NYT today there is a review of Houellebecq's latest novel by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. I read it this morning, and the thing made me angry right from the start. Knausgaard begins from a stance of awe and admiration for Houellebecq, whom he has never read.

The review goes on through the supposed issues, etc., raised in H's work. And in doing so lays out that the reviewer is unfamiliar with Huysmans, an important figure to the current H novel, apparently.

In any event, what made me want to bash things was that this was someone reading a French novel in Norwegian translation (he says so in his review) and writing about it for an American audience (the review was written in Norwegian and translated into English for the Times), who are going to read it in its English translation.

As though the book were an essence and not also, coincidentally, the ragged cross between its initial rendering in French and what the American translator has shaped it into.

Whither prose in a novel?

Knausgaard asks, referring to the novel's opening sentence:

"What kind of a sentence is it? It is not in any way spectacular, more distinctly literary, certainly not the opening of a blockbuster — and not just because it concerns a man whose youth was dismal and his relationship to what the vast majority of people would consider a highly obscure author of the 19th century, but also because the sentence in itself (at least as I read it in the Norwegian rendering, which I sense perhaps is closer in style to Houellebecq’s original than Lorin Stein’s graceful English translation) is anything but impressive, rather it is strikingly ordinary, sauntering in a way, slightly disharmonious and irregular in rhythm, untidy even, as if the author lacks full mastery of the language or is unused to writing."

How can you even say this about something you're reading in a different version? And he posits—out of the blue—that the English version (which is what his audience is going to read, if anyone does so on the strength of his thoughts on the book) is "graceful," and therefore not as "close in style" to the original as the Norwegian.

What a colossal mess.

Also, Houellebecq is a poor writer, and cheap thinker.

/rant

 

[Cole Kendall]

I agree that reviewing a novel in a different translation is pretty poor form; even more, Knausgaard's discussion of why he never read Houellebecq is disturbing.

(I tried to read Knausgaard and abandoned him twice, as the intense description of the various unpleasant episodes in his life was ultimately not very interesting.)

Huysmans is a key part of Houellebecq's novel, in that the main character is so devoted to him (living in the same neighborhood, visiting the Madonna of Rocamadour etc.). So it made sense of K to read (at least some) H before reviewing H. And if nothing else, H (assisted by you) will lead me to try some Huysmans once I finish the Rougon-Macquart novels (I am enjoying Le Ventre de Paris, more for the food than for the revolutionary intrigue).

 

[Jonathan Loesberg]

I wasn't that bothered by the review. It is more wandering than reviews generally found in the Times, more about Knausgaard in parts than about Houellebecq, which is exasperating. But he does get to reviewing the novel and most of what he says seems unexceptionable. I haven't read the English translation, so I don't know if the quoted sentence is the same or if it has been translated out of Norwegian into different wording. It seems to me a very close rendering of the French, indeed one that might be made by any competent reader of French who was sight translating. I think K makes more of it than is there, but, like Sharon I am not a great fan of Houellbecq and certainly not of him as a prose stylist, so I don't think there is much to make of it one way or another. Submission, for the record, is the best of his three novels I have read, though largely only as a political satire. Like K, the only Huysmans I have read is A Rebours. Reading Submission did not give me the urge to read more so maybe I missed as much as Knausgaard did, but I doubt it. This review doesn't compare with the badness of Kakutani's review of Les Bienvaillants, which was clearly unaware of who Les Bienvaillants were and thus missed the framing of the novel around the Eumenides. If anything like that was going on in Submission, I will admit that I missed it.

 

[Cliff]

I agree that it's weird to talk about versions of a book the reviewer doesn't seem to have read. At the same time, his take on H's style jibes with my reading. While I am no fan of H's politics, I thought Submission was extremely well done. I'm not familiar with the other work. Here it was interesting to see a world weary, clash-of-civilizations Christian conservative writing such drab prose, on purpose. Usually one can count on them to put a sentence together. But you have to hand it to him that he knows his wine.

 

[Sharon Bowman]

originally posted by Cole Kendall:
I agree that reviewing a novel in a different translation is pretty poor form; even more, Knausgaard's discussion of why he never read Houellebecq is disturbing.

I completely agree about the second half, too. I know it was done in an attempt at self-critical "openness," but that is starting to feel a bit gimmicky. Have you read the multi-part travelogue he wrote for the NYT that began in Newfoundland and went to Minnesota? I had had it up to my eyeballs with him by the end. Though I wasn't bored, per se.

(I tried to read Knausgaard and abandoned him twice, as the intense description of the various unpleasant episodes in his life was ultimately not very interesting.)

Interestingly, this is how I find Houellebecq. His prose (and subject matters) are so dire that I just can't slog through it.

Style matters a lot to my enjoyment of fiction. I could read Proust for eons, or Musil, despite the lack of "moment," as it were.

And if nothing else, H (assisted by you) will lead me to try some Huysmans once I finish the Rougon-Macquart novels (I am enjoying Le Ventre de Paris, more for the food than for the revolutionary intrigue).

Do, do! I know À rebours is de rigueur, but Là-bas is my favorite.

I have always meant to read Le Ventre de Paris, I will say.

 

[Jonathan Loesberg]

I don't share Cole's enthusiasm for Ventre de Paris. The stuff about the food market was less intrinsically interesting to me than the stuff about advertizing and department stores in Au Bonheurs des Dames, which can teach you (or at least me) more about retail capitalism then much of the stuff I read in the business pages of the NY Times.

 

[Cliff]

I finally got around to the review, which I found oddly faithful to the book, and interesting. It seemed like a complete fraud for the first couple of hundred words, but then it picked up steam.

I am not a huge fan of Le ventre de Paris, either.

 

[Cole Kendall]

Perhaps I am alone in my enjoyment (thusfar) of Le Ventre de Paris, but I like the description of the markets and the behind the storefront view of how the sausage is made. And it is far more fun than Un page d'amour, a book that had me rethinking my Zola project.

I did read the first installment of K's travel diary in the Times and it was a perfect synthesis of his work; as flat stylistically as possible and the plot (as it were) centered on problems with excretory systems. He is never boring but in the end one wonders if there is not a better use of one's time.

In contrast, there was a plot in Soumission though Houellebecq's tics flourish. As opposed to La Possibilité (the only other one I have read) that takes a single idea and recycles it again and again, to little end.

I have tried Musil and Proust and drift off after a while onto something else, perhaps because I am too attached to something happening. Now that I am reading more French I may try Proust again in the original. But only after Huysmans.