427 pages. So 14 days should do it, I think.
Day 1 DDRD 2,577) November 20, 2024
Heh heh...Jonathan Hex. A few extra letters there. (t, a, and n if you're not familiar with this comic book.)
Back to Min kamp...though not without a little bit of my own struggle. There are so many other books that I want to read right now, and I'm still feeling very unsettled about this whole Karl Ove Knausgård wanting to fuck a 13 year old girl thing that I wasn't sure I wanted to read another word. Plus the whole He Can Be Such An ASSHOLE! Thing. But...here I am.
Read to page 40.
Interesting: this book was first published in Norwegian with the "sub-title" Tredje Bok, which you don't need to be multilingual to understand--but JiC, it's Third Book. So why Boyhood for us Yanks? I'm guessing for the same reason that they didn't title the movie George III (The Madness of King George): they feared Americans would think it was the last movie of a trilogy, the first two parts of which they had missed. We Americans have not impressed the world with out acuity.
As for today's reading...well, I was a bit put off by the shift to 3rd person for the first few pages. And even after that, everything just seemed to be moving in s l o w m o t i o n . I finally realized that I hadn't yet decompressed from Krasznahorkai...which also made me realize what a huge gap there was between Laszlo and Karl Ove. There have been some good moments in the first two books of My Struggle, for sure...but this work just can't compare with Herscht 07769. Sorry, KOK. Just sayin'.
Another bit of unneeded ballast: Patriot: A Memoir by Alexei Navalny just came in to the library, and I'm really wanting to dive into that Right Now. But I'm not up for another 2DDR session.
Hopefully this Book 3 will pull me in soon.
ADDENDUM: read a bit more...to page 70.
KOK's father is a cruel man. Seeing how he treats Karl Ove makes me feel sorry not only for the child, but also for the man that child becomes. No wonder KOK can be an asshole. But at least he's a little better than his father. Which makes me think of my father. He had a cruel and uncaring father himself, and so perhaps no surprise that I often found my father to be harsh, and never felt that he had any respect for me. I often say, as if in jest, that my younger sister is the son he never had, because she was so good at things that I never even cared about. I am a better father than he was--athough when I look back at my life with my children, I see plenty of mistakes, for sure. My son, however, is a better father than I am, so hopefully the spiral continues to go towards the light.
Read to page 160. Yep, 90 pages. Had some downtime (4 whole hours!) between dropping son off at work and picking him back up...though some of that time was spent in grocery shopping and doing laundry. At any rate, a good day's worth of reading.
"The very thought of dad, the fact that he existed, caused fear to pump through my body." (69)
I've been thinking about my dad a lot while reading this book. My dad was a good guy and I think he did his best to be a good father. I can remember things which showed his love quite clearly. For instance, as a young boy, I was very interested in astronomy. My mom found out that there was an astronomy class at the local community college (where they had a planetarium!), and she called and asked if there was any way that I could attend the class. She was told that I could if I was accompanied by an adult. It would have been easy for my mom to go with me as she was intellectually curious, a great reader, and nrave about being in situations where she wasn't comfortable, but it wasn't her who took me. It was my dad. My dad, who had dropped out of school in the eighth grade, almist never picked up a book, and never felt secure about his intellect. And yet he did this for me, he sat in a room where he must have felt intimidated every second. Because it was important to me. At the same time, however, thoughts of his harshness come back to me. I remember at a very young age being in the basement with him and he had me sit up on top of a workbench while he cut my hair. I remember him yelling at me that I was being contrary-- Damned, contrary!--and being really frightened as he wielded scissors close to my ear, and I don't know if I moved or if he miscalculated, but he clipped my ear with the scissors and then got mad at me and blamed me. I felt frightened and ashamed, and I cried.
In other news...
Heh heh...Jonathan Hex. A few extra letters there. (t, a, and n if you're not familiar with this comic book.)
Read to page 215. Don't take this the wrong way or anything, but...young KOK sure does cry a lot. If I had this book in e-format I'd do a word search to confirm it, but since I don't, I'll estimate. I'd say that the word "cry" has appeared in this bok (as of the halfway mark) at least 100 times. I shit thee not. Maybe even two hundred times. And he's mentioned his buck teeth and bubble butt at least a dozen times each. It's a little distracting.
I'd like to read some more, but I'm not sure u have time. Going to see Wayne "The Train" Hancock at Headliners in 90 minutes. Woo-hoo!
Read to page 248. Again, I'd like to read more, but it's 53 minutes until Tosca, so we'll see if i have the energy for more after that. ( Pretty tired because I didn't get home from the concert until after midnight and got my wake up call at 4:30 AM as usual.)
Read more: to page 278.
Read to page 343.
KOK listens to an album called Play by a group called Magazine. It goes like this:
Didn't do much for me, but since it was KOK's celebration of his father leaving to study abroad for most of the next year, it must have been chock full of meaning for KOK.
Btw, he's still crying A LOT.
Read to page 427, The End.
"The problem is not so much that the world limits your imagination as your imagination limits the world." (365)
I decided to give the Magazine album (👁⬆) another shot while heading into the last twenty pages of this book, and just as I was starting to think, "This isn't that bad," I heard this:
As the day stops dead
At the place where we're lost
I will drug you and fuck you
On the permafrost
I was sure I had heard wrong, but a minute or so later it repeated. But these guys are Brits, right? Nobody can understand them. So I looked up the lyrics. And?
I will drug you and fuck you
Holy shit. That is way beyond not okay. Lost interest in that band, didn't I? Yes, I did.
This was an unpleasant volume. The constant crying, the violence of the father. The sequel abuse KOK and his friends committed against the girls in their class--pulling up their tops and grabbing their naked breasts...and one group of boys who held a girl down and penetrated her with a finger. KOK throwing rocks at cars on a highway, hitting one. KOK and his friend setting fires in the woods, one of which got out of control. I know all kids do stupid and shitty things, but this is way beyond that. These are felonies, for fuck's sake. I don't know if I even want to read the fourth volume.
I do know that it won't be my next DDR, though.
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