In The Land Of The Cyclops

Karl Ove Knausgård Harvill Secker £20 ★★★

The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård (inset) is best known in this country ountry as the author of f the monumental series of six autobiographical ‘novels’, My Struggle. Depending on your point of view, they amount to more than 3,500 pages of self-indulgent oversharing of the intimate details of one man’s fictionalised self, relayed in fastidious detail, or an epic exploration of that same e man’s response to the vicissitudes of life, written tt with ith a raw and rare honesty. Is it even a novel? Is he the king of confessional writing? Or the emperor without any clothes? Depends which side of his family you ask; the debate rumbles on.

This collection of 16 essays on literature, photography, painting and philosophy is a motley bag and displays both the acuity and the defects of his undoubted talent: intelligent and provocative but also uneven, prolix and narcissistic. At the centre of it all, of course, is Knausgård himself with his overarching vision for art as a disruptive force, rarely passing up the opportunity to put the personal centre stage, whatever the subject, refracting his reflections through the solipsistic lens of his own self-importance.

He is best when short, focused and absent from the drama. His essay on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (originally the preface to Adam Thorpe’s excellent recent translation) is perceptive and inspiring; likewise his thoughts on painter Anselm Kiefer and his review of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission.

In the pieces on p photographers F Francesca Woodman, Ci Cindy Sherman and Step Stephen Gill and in his re reflections on

Ingmar Bergman’s notebooks notebooks, he comes closest to expressing i t the essence of his own creative endeavour.

Elsewhere – on Kierkegaard, fate, the Icelandic sagas – he is too wordy and too convoluted. His long paean to the modernist aesthetics of fellow countryman Knut Hamsun, though full of insight, largely overlooks that Nobel laureate’s fascist inclinations. The title piece is merely a rant of literary self-justification. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.