Karl Ove Knausgaard Enters Adulthood
In the fifth volume of “My Struggle,” contemporary Norway comes into view at last.
In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel A Time for Everything, the narrator says that if we are to understand his character, a sixteenth-century Italian named Antinous, it won’t come from charting the inner landscape of his life. “Antinous was, first and foremost, of his time, and to understand who he was, that is what must be mapped.” Our tendency to interpret all external events by the way they shape the dark crevasses of the psyche is a modern one, he asserts, a paradigm ushered in by Freud, and it would be a fatal mistake to presume that people back then were anything like us, that their thoughts and feelings were shaded by a common consciousness, since “our world is only one of many possible worlds.”
