{"product_id":"in-the-land-of-the-cyclops-isbn-9781939810748","title":"In the Land of the Cyclops","description":"\u003cb\u003eKnausgaard’s struggle is still ongoing with \u003ci\u003eIn the Land of the Cyclops\u003c\/i\u003e as he continues to navigate the fjord of truth between reality and experience\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This, which we perhaps could call inexhaustible precision, is the goal of all art, and its essential legitimacy.”  —Jessica Ferri,\u003ci\u003e The Los Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn his first essay collection to be published in English, the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling author of the \u003ci\u003eMy Struggle \u003c\/i\u003eseries Karl Ove Knausgaard explores art, philosophy, and literature with piercing candor and remarkable erudition. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePaired with full color-images, his essays render the shadowlands of Cindy Sherman’s photography, illuminate the depth of Stephen Gill’s eye, and tussle with the inner mechanics of Ingmar Bergman’s workbooks. In one essay he describes the figure of Francesca Woodman, arms coiled in birch bark and reaching up toward the sky—a tree. In another, he unearths Sally Mann’s photographs of decomposing corpses, so much so that branches and limbs, hair and grass, begin to harmonize.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEach essay bristles with Knausgaard’s searing honesty and longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world.\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\". . . A modern Roland Barthes . . . Knausgaard has a gift for stopping the reader in their tracks with an unexpected, casual profundity.\" — \u003cb\u003eMeghan O'Gieblyn, The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"...As in the fiction, [Knausgaard's] intense focus, formidable command of reference and tendency to see the interconnectedness of things make for highly stimulating, almost overwhelming reading . . . The pantomime of critical dispassion is avoided; the rhetorical effect is one of wisdom gained rather than merely delivered.\" —\u003cb\u003eCharles Arrowsmith, the \u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Knausgaard is less interested in answers than in authentic engagement with the world . . . \u003ci\u003eIn the Land of the Cyclops\u003c\/i\u003e is another worthy addition to Knausgaard’s oeuvre that aims to recapture this intense feeling and to see the world anew.\" \u003cb\u003e—Phillip Garland, \u003ci\u003eWorld Literature Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I appreciate Knausgaard revealing his unflattering first impression, then interrogating it, his willingness to go further, to look again, and to show how his mind moves, then changes . . . I want to see what Knausgaard sees, even when I’m overwhelmed by it or disagree . . . Boring down into any moment, thought, or artwork, offers its own thrilling spectacle. You don’t want to look away.\" — \u003cb\u003eBridget Quinn, \u003ci\u003eHyperallergic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The collection, which also includes essays on Michel Houellebecq, Cindy Sherman and Kierkegaard, reads less like a book of criticism at times than a work of negative theology, circling the mysteries of artistic creation that cannot be directly articulated: What makes a book or a painting feel alive and relevant? Why should art, which occupies the realm of pure fantasy, have any rules at all?\" — \u003cb\u003eStephen Poole, \u003ci\u003eThe Telegraph \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Knausgaard’s passion for interiority and the detail of the individual experience, the most brilliant elements of his fiction, come through . . .  “In the Land of the Cyclops” proves that Knausgaard’s struggle is still ongoing, the search for truth as a balance between reality and our experience of it: “This, which we perhaps could call inexhaustible precision, is the goal of all art, and its essential legitimacy.”\" \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e — \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eJessica Ferri, The Los Angeles Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Knausgaard argues that art is at its most effective when it destabilizes our understanding of the world...The moody, provocative black-and-white photos of Francesca Woodman reveal the “constraints of our culture and what they do to our identity” while Michel Houellebecq’s novel \u003ci\u003eSubmission\u003c\/i\u003e succeeds because it suggests how easily disillusioned people might accept political upheaval, asking “What does it mean to be a human being without faith?”...The throughline is the author’s keen, almost anxious urge to understand the artistic mind.\"\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e — Kirkus Reviews\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In this . . . thought-provoking essay collection, Knausgaard once again displays his knack for raising profound questions about art and what it means to be human . . .  These wending musings will be catnip for Knausgaard’s fans. \"\u003cb\u003e -- Publishers Weekly\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the realm of the aesthetic where it overlaps with the quotidian in fact as he has in fiction . . . Much insight awaits any sifting through these disparate compositions . . . Knausgaard transforms the everyday into a portal of deep insight.\" \u003cb\u003e-- John L. Murphy, \u003ci\u003eSpectrum Culture \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMore Praise for Knausgaard's work:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e   • Intense and vital...Knausgaard is utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties...Superb, lingering, celestial passages...[with] what Walter Benjamin called the \"epic side of truth, wisdom.\"-James Wood, The New Yorker \u003cbr\u003e   • As Jeffrey Eugenides so marvelingly put it, [Knausgaard] broke the sound barrier of the autobiographical novel...There's something primitive and hungry in that experience-and for me, sometimes, something spiritual, close to the exprience of grace. - Charles Finch, \u003ci\u003eSlate\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • What's notable is Karl Ove's ability, rare these days, to be fully present in and mindful of his own existence...as if the writing and the living are happening simultaneously...it immerses you totally. You live his life with him. - Zadie Smith, \u003ci\u003eNew York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • ...so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary - Jesse Barron, \u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • \u003ci\u003eMy Struggle\u003c\/i\u003e is a revolutionary novel that is highly approachable, even thrilling to read. The book feels like a masterpiece-one of those genuinely surprising works that alters the tradition it inherited. - Meghan O'Rourke, \u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • The book kept me up until two almost every morning for a week...Real and singleminded in his storytelling.\" - Lorin Stein, \u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • Questions about precisely what fiction is and how it relates to reality and the extend to which traditional narrative can be a delivery vehicle for saying something true about life...lie at the intellectual and aesthetic heart of Knausgaard's huge undertaking. - Daniel Mendelsohn, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • Knausgaard succeeds in producing prose that is \"alive\"...Such transgressive blurring of the borders between the public and private, sayable and unsayable, can be both life-affirming and riveting. - \u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • For all its complexity, \u003ci\u003eMy Struggle \u003c\/i\u003eachieves something pretty simple,the thing that enduring fiction has always done: it creates a world that absorbs you utterly...[\u003ci\u003eBook Six\u003c\/i\u003e] is alive. - Theo Tait,\u003ci\u003e Sunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • Who'd have thought that the first monumental literary production of the 21st century...would seem, on a line-by-line basis, so modest and so raw? The books in the \u003ci\u003eMy Struggle\u003c\/i\u003e series fly high by flying low, by scanning the intricate topography of everyday life. - Dwight Garner,\u003ci\u003e The New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • This deserves to be called perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our times. - Rachel Cusk, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • How wonderful to read an experimental novel that fires every nerve ending while summoning in the reader the sheer sense of how amazing it is to be alive, on this planet and no other. - Jeffrey Eugenides, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003eKnausgaard   broke the sound barrier of the autobiographical novel.  — Jeffrey   Eugenides\u003cbr\u003e KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD. MY STRUGGLE. It’s unbelievable. I just read 200 pages   of it and I need the next volume like crack. — Zadie SmithKarl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel \u003ci\u003eOut of the World \u003c\/i\u003ewon the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his \u003ci\u003eA Time for Everything\u003c\/i\u003e was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. \u003ci\u003eMy Struggle: Book One\u003c\/i\u003e was a \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e Book of the Year and \u003ci\u003eBook Two\u003c\/i\u003e was listed among the \u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e's 2013 Books of the Year. \u003ci\u003eMy Struggle\u003c\/i\u003e is a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003eBest Seller and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Knausgaard writes regularly for the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cb\u003eTranslator Bio: \u003c\/b\u003eMartin Aitken is the acclaimed translator of numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Hoeg, Jussie Adler-Olsen, and Pia Juul. His translations of short stories and poetry have appeared in many literary journals and magazines. In 2012 he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation's Nadia Christensen Translation Prize. In 2019 he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of \u003ci\u003eLove \u003c\/i\u003eby Hane Orstavik, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award in 2018.ALL THAT IS IN HEAVEN.\u003cbr\u003e A few days ago a picture appeared in a number of newspapers online, it was from a medical\u003cbr\u003e examination, an ultrasound image of a man’s testicles; there was a face in there as clear as\u003cbr\u003e day, with eyes, a nose and mouth, a child gazing disconcertedly out of its darkness in the\u003cbr\u003e depths of the body. The phenomenon is not uncommon and has often been associated\u003cbr\u003e with Christ, perhaps because only his face makes such occurrences noteworthy enough to\u003cbr\u003e report on. The face of Jesus can appear in a marble cake, a slice of burnt toast, a stained\u003cbr\u003e piece of fabric. Last autumn I was stopped by a woman on the street in Gothenburg, she\u003cbr\u003e wanted to give me a photograph of Christ seen in a rock face somewhere in Sweden. These\u003cbr\u003e viral images are not vague schemata filled in by vivid imaginations, but utterly convincing;\u003cbr\u003e the face staring out of the man’s testicles is incontestably that of a child, and the male\u003cbr\u003e figure in the rock face, his hand held up in a gesture of peace, is incontestably an image of\u003cbr\u003e Jesus Christ exactly as he has been iconised. This is so because the forms that occur in the\u003cbr\u003e world are constrained in number, and the human face and body are one such form. They\u003cbr\u003e can just as easily appear in a pile of sand as in a pile of cells.\u003cbr\u003e If you lie on your back and look up at the sky on a summer’s day, hardly a few minutes will\u003cbr\u003e pass before you see a recognisable shape in the clouds. A hare, a bathtub, a mountain, a\u003cbr\u003e tree, a face. These images are not constant; slowly they transform and turn into something\u003cbr\u003e else, as opposed to the person lying there looking at them, whose face and body remain\u003cbr\u003e unchanged, and to the natural surroundings from which they are observed: the ground with\u003cbr\u003e its grass and trees, they too remain unchanged. But the immutable is only seemingly so, for\u003cbr\u003e the face, the body, the grass and the trees change too, and if we return to the same spot,\u003cbr\u003e this clearing in the forest, fifteen years later, it will be completely different and the face and\u003cbr\u003e body will also have changed, albeit not unrecognisably so. However, in the greater\u003cbr\u003e perspective of time they too will change; over a two-hundred-year period the face and body\u003cbr\u003e will have arisen, formed, deformed and dissolved in sequences of change not unlike those\u003cbr\u003e undergone by the clouds, though far more slowly since they take place in the denseness of\u003cbr\u003e the flesh rather than in the vaporous firmament.\u003cbr\u003e That we do not see the world in this way, as matter at the mercy of all-destructive forces, is\u003cbr\u003e only because that perspective is not available to us, our being confined within our own\u003cbr\u003e human time as it were, viewing all change from that vantage point only. We see the changes\u003cbr\u003e in the clouds, but not the changes in the mountains. On this basis we form our\u003cbr\u003e conceptions of the immutable and immutability, of change and changeability. We retain in\u003cbr\u003e our minds the form of the mountain as it appeared to us the day we stood in front of it,\u003cbr\u003e but not the forms of the clouds that were above the mountain at that same moment. Our\u003cbr\u003e body exists somewhere in between these monitors of mutability that measure the speed of\u003cbr\u003e our lives. Our own time, the change we are able to register as we stand here in the midst of\u003cbr\u003e the world, is, apart from the movements of the body, almost always bound up with water\u003cbr\u003e and wind. The raindrops that drip from the gutter, the leaf whirled into the air, the clouds\u003cbr\u003e that slip over the ridge, the water that trickles towards the stream, the river that runs into\u003cbr\u003e the sea, the waves that form and break apart in an ever-changing abundance of unique\u003cbr\u003e forms. We can see this, for the time in which such movement occurs is synchronised with\u003cbr\u003e that of our own existence. We refer to that time as the now. And what happens within us\u003cbr\u003e in the now is not dissimilar to what happens outside us, a continual formation and breaking\u003cbr\u003e apart that never ceases as long as we live: our thoughts. On the sky of the self they come\u003cbr\u003e drifting, each unique, and over the precipice of oblivion they vanish again, never to return\u003cbr\u003e in the same shape.\u003cbr\u003e The idea of a connection between our thoughts and the clouds, between the soul and the\u003cbr\u003e sky, is ancient and has always been opposed, or restrained, by the connection between the\u003cbr\u003e body and the earth. That which is fleeting, ethereal and free has always been eternal; that\u003cbr\u003e which is firm, material and bound has always been transient. With the breakthrough of\u003cbr\u003e modern science in the seventeenth century, which pushed back the limitations of the\u003cbr\u003e human eye with the invention of the microscope and the telescope, an era in the western\u003cbr\u003e world in which the human body began to be systematically dissected, one of the greatest\u003cbr\u003e challenges to arise concerned the nature of thought in this system of cells and nerves.\u003cbr\u003e Where was the soul in this mannequin of muscles and tendons? The French philosopher\u003cbr\u003e Descartes performed dissections in his apartments in Amsterdam, striving to find the seat\u003cbr\u003e of the soul, which he believed to be found in one of the glands, and to trace human\u003cbr\u003e thought, which he believed to be conducted through the tiny tubes of the brain. Science\u003cbr\u003e has come no closer to pinning down these concepts in the three hundred or so years that\u003cbr\u003e have passed since Descartes made his investigations, for the distinction between the I who\u003cbr\u003e says I think, therefore I am, and the brain in which that sentence is conceived and thought,\u003cbr\u003e and from which it is then issued, that biological-mechanical welter of cells, chemistry and\u003cbr\u003e electricity, is immeasurable, as one of Descartes’ contemporaries only a few city blocks\u003cbr\u003e away, the painter Rembrandt, demonstrates in one of his dissection pictures where the\u003cbr\u003e upper part of the skull has been removed, held forth like a cup by an assistant while the\u003cbr\u003e physician himself cautiously cuts into the exposed brain of the corpse. No thought, only\u003cbr\u003e the tubes of thought; no soul, only its empty casing. What were thought and the soul? They\u003cbr\u003e were what stirred inside.\u003cbr\u003e In his essay collection Descartes’ Devil: Three Meditations, a substantial and near-fuming\u003cbr\u003e apologia for Descartes, the German poet Durs Grünbein writes about one of the Baroque\u003cbr\u003e philosopher’s dissections of an ox in whose eye Descartes claimed to have seen an image\u003cbr\u003e of what the ox itself had seen in its final seconds of life. Descartes writes: “We have seen\u003cbr\u003e this picture in the eye of a dead animal, and surely it appears on the inner skin of the eye of\u003cbr\u003e a living man in just the same way.” Of this strange idea, Grünbein writes: “Descartes, who\u003cbr\u003e imagines the retina as a sheet of paper, as thin and transluscent as an eggshell, really\u003cbr\u003e believes that something seen is, as it were, imprinted on it.”","brand":"Archipelago","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300820898021,"sku":"NP9781939810748","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781939810748.jpg?v=1767729970","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/in-the-land-of-the-cyclops-isbn-9781939810748","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}