Reblogged this on Kafka's Ruminations and commented:
“In some places time seems to want to linger…”
I’ve been reading Knausgaard’s My Struggle, which is about as embodied a written work of fiction as one is liable to find. In yesterday’s installment his wife has just given birth to their first child; in the aftermath, he spends most of his time at his office obsessively laboring over — giving birth to? — his second novel. I’ve not read it, but it turns out that this second novel deals extensively with embodied angels manifesting themselves in Norway. I wonder if Wenders’s movies influenced Knausgaard. Later in yesterday’s reading he plucks Tarkovsky’s Stalker off the shelf and inserts it into the DVD player. Stalker is kind of a story about angelic visitation too, but Knausgaard claims never to have gotten past the first scene. Maybe he’d make the same claim about Wenders: got it, haven’t watched it. But what the hell, I can say the same about Paradise Lost: got it, haven’t made it past Book One.
interesting, haven’t read him but in interviews about the books and reviews i didn’t have a sense of there being anything but a kind of strident realism to the work. wouldn’t be surprised if one of these movies slipped into his process.
A few pages later…
“But you must write, Karl Ove!”
And when push came to shove, when a knife was at my throat, this was what mattered most.
But why?
Children were life, and who would turn their back on life?
And writing, what else was it but death? Letters, what else were they but bones in a cemetery?
Knausgaard tells us that his second novel, the one about the angels that he finished after his first child was born, devotes significant attention to the prophet Ezekiel, known to this day for his visions of the wheel within a wheel and dem bones (the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, etc.). So here he associates his writing, all writing, with Ezekiel’s dry bones. But of course in Ezekiel’s vision the dead dry bones come back to life…
I’m surprised by how engaging and affecting I find Knausgaard’s memoir-fiction, but tonight we’ll be watching the second Wenders angel movie, which we’ve not seen and to which you’ve so graciously linked.
thanks for the quote and the review, hope the utube gatekeepers don’t catch up with the film before you get to enjoy it, with any luck it’s old enough and foreign/fringe enough to avoid their interests
Watched it via the utube and enjoyed it. Foreign and fringe: these are features not bugs, as I’m sure you’d agree.
Here’s a strange synchronicity — When Cassiel becomes human he takes the name Karl Engel. Engel = angel, so that makes sense, but why Karl? The story unfolds in East Berlin not long after the Wall came down, so the name could be a communist mashup of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It turns out that one of my fictions has a character named Fred Marx — the complementary mashup. Once I become famous some interviewer might ask/accuse me: didn’t you get the character’s name from the Wenders movie? It’s from the Manifesto, I’ll say with a sneer.
ha well now you can share with them the connection to the film, good company to be in I think, glad you liked the film and yeah foreign and fringe is kind of my thing, first an alien and than an alienist…
if you would ever like to share some of yer work here (the pay sucks as we are on a profit-sharing model but the readership is top-shelf) let me know.
Money is no object, as we process-oriented ontologists like to say. I’ll have my people get in touch with your people…
very good, I’ll let them know to make the necessary preparations.
synthetic zerØ 
Reblogged this on Kafka's Ruminations and commented:
“In some places time seems to want to linger…”
I’ve been reading Knausgaard’s My Struggle, which is about as embodied a written work of fiction as one is liable to find. In yesterday’s installment his wife has just given birth to their first child; in the aftermath, he spends most of his time at his office obsessively laboring over — giving birth to? — his second novel. I’ve not read it, but it turns out that this second novel deals extensively with embodied angels manifesting themselves in Norway. I wonder if Wenders’s movies influenced Knausgaard. Later in yesterday’s reading he plucks Tarkovsky’s Stalker off the shelf and inserts it into the DVD player. Stalker is kind of a story about angelic visitation too, but Knausgaard claims never to have gotten past the first scene. Maybe he’d make the same claim about Wenders: got it, haven’t watched it. But what the hell, I can say the same about Paradise Lost: got it, haven’t made it past Book One.
interesting, haven’t read him but in interviews about the books and reviews i didn’t have a sense of there being anything but a kind of strident realism to the work. wouldn’t be surprised if one of these movies slipped into his process.
A few pages later…
“But you must write, Karl Ove!”
And when push came to shove, when a knife was at my throat, this was what mattered most.
But why?
Children were life, and who would turn their back on life?
And writing, what else was it but death? Letters, what else were they but bones in a cemetery?
Knausgaard tells us that his second novel, the one about the angels that he finished after his first child was born, devotes significant attention to the prophet Ezekiel, known to this day for his visions of the wheel within a wheel and dem bones (the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, etc.). So here he associates his writing, all writing, with Ezekiel’s dry bones. But of course in Ezekiel’s vision the dead dry bones come back to life…
I’m surprised by how engaging and affecting I find Knausgaard’s memoir-fiction, but tonight we’ll be watching the second Wenders angel movie, which we’ve not seen and to which you’ve so graciously linked.
thanks for the quote and the review, hope the utube gatekeepers don’t catch up with the film before you get to enjoy it, with any luck it’s old enough and foreign/fringe enough to avoid their interests
Watched it via the utube and enjoyed it. Foreign and fringe: these are features not bugs, as I’m sure you’d agree.
Here’s a strange synchronicity — When Cassiel becomes human he takes the name Karl Engel. Engel = angel, so that makes sense, but why Karl? The story unfolds in East Berlin not long after the Wall came down, so the name could be a communist mashup of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It turns out that one of my fictions has a character named Fred Marx — the complementary mashup. Once I become famous some interviewer might ask/accuse me: didn’t you get the character’s name from the Wenders movie? It’s from the Manifesto, I’ll say with a sneer.
ha well now you can share with them the connection to the film, good company to be in I think, glad you liked the film and yeah foreign and fringe is kind of my thing, first an alien and than an alienist…
if you would ever like to share some of yer work here (the pay sucks as we are on a profit-sharing model but the readership is top-shelf) let me know.
Money is no object, as we process-oriented ontologists like to say. I’ll have my people get in touch with your people…
very good, I’ll let them know to make the necessary preparations.