This book by Karl Ove Knausgård is a rumination on the life and art of Edvard Munch, Norway's most famous painter. Not a work of biography, the author engages Munch as both a viewer of art and as a professional artist of sorts himself. Knausgård obviously has great respect for Munch, and it's inspiring to see how devoted he is to understanding Munch's life and work.
The book is divided into three uneven sections, each with a selection of Munch paintings. In the first section, Knausgård gives some background on Munch's life and times, including providing the inspirations for some of Munch's most iconic paintings. Knausgård also provides interpretations, meditations, and theories about some of Munch's subjects, motifs, and thoughts. In the second and third sections, the author details his struggles to choose a selection of Munch's paintings for an exhibition and finishes out the book with a heartwarming recount of his purchase of a Munch print.
The first thing I noticed about Knausgård's treatment is his intense love for Munch's work. Knausgård ponders Munch's life and works the way many religious people ponder holy works. He ruminates on certain paintings, reads texts speculating on them, and compares what he knows about Munch to what he knows about other artists, such as Francis Bacon. He really seriously wants to understand Munch. Knausgård explains that in college he studied art history, which explains his greater-than-average knowledge of painting and art in general.
Another thing that struck me quickly was Knausgård's interesting writing style. It's somewhat similar to Joyce's style in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He often omits punctuation, allowing his topics and thoughts to flow into each other much as one does when trying to speak quickly.
“Time is the space in which our lives unfold, life is one long continuous movement, it never comes to rest, never pauses. Even when we sleep, our eyes move beneath our eyelids, our ribcage rises and falls, our heart beats and thumps, our blood trickles and gurgles, and even while we are sitting still on the sofa, exhausted by the day's work, our thoughts glide through our consciousness, never the same, never identical, as our days are never the same, never identical.”
It's not really stream-of-consciousness, but it does share something with that style of writing. Knausgård ties multiple concepts together in a single sentence, often with little more than a verbal segue rather than a comma or semicolon. I think the writing style works quite well, although every now and again it can lead to a little confusion in reading.
However, for all the praise I can give Knausgård over his treatment of Munch, I did find his writing slightly melodramatic in places. I'm not sure I can point out any particular instances of it from the book, but at times he seems to be using such dramatic verbiage to describe such quotidian occurrences that it's just offputting. This doesn't happen much at the beginning of the book, but closer to the end as the book takes on a more autobiographical tilt this kind of language begins seeping through. In particular, I noticed it when he was describing purchasing a Munch print near the end of the book and any time he described his children. Having this complaint, I worry about reading the rest of Knausgård's work. His breakthrough work My Struggle is a work of autobiography, and his Seasons Quartet of books is also autobiographical in nature. The parts of Longing I disliked were the most autobiographical parts. So perhaps I won't fare so well with his other works.
Overall I enjoyed the book, but I think it was more due to simply enjoying Munch and anything connected to him than it was to anything Knausgård contributed. Knausgård's treatment is certainly novel, and I find value in that. Just be aware that this is not a work of biography and you won't get a scholarly interpretation of Munch or his life from this book.
Finally, a few books that are now on my reading list due to this book. One that was already on my list but now has added weight is John Berger's The Ways of Seeing. ContraPoints has pointed out this book, I believe Cuck Philosophy has referenced it, and it has come up in several books. Now Knausgård has endorsed the book, I think I really should read it already. Another book is Sue Prideaux's Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, a biography of Munch that Knausgård read in preparation for his own work. If you're a Munch fanatic, that might be a good book to read. And the last book I found interesting was one by Gilles Deleuze entitled Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. This book is (from what I know) a philosophical treatment of art through an examination of the works of the painter Francis Bacon. Ever since I was a kid I've been a little fascinated with Francis Bacon, especially a painting by him modeled after a Velázquez painting of Innocent X, entitled Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. When I was probably 12 or so I remember seeing this painting in a book of art and finding it really intriguing, so I looked up some of his other stuff and it was all quite fascinating. So, a book about him from a philosophical perspective would probably be right up my alley. Here's a link to the Wikipedia page for his painting, which also shows the Velázquez version next to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_after_Vel%C3%A1zquez%27s_Portrait_of_Pope_Innocent_X