Darwin8u's Reviews > Inadvertent

"Thoughts are the enemy of the inadvertent, for if one thinks about how something will seem to others, if one thinks about if something is important or good enough, if one begins to calculate or pretend, then it is no longer inadvertent and accessable as itself, but only as what we have made it into."
- Karl Ove Knausgaard, Inadvertent



The second book published in the Windam-Campbell and Yale Press series 'Why I Write'. This short book is the lecture Knausgaard gave at the 2017 Windam-Campbell Prize ceremony at Yale. Knausgaard reflects on why he writes and his approach to writing. He travels a lot of the same ground he has traveled in his fiction, auto-biographical fiction, and his writing about art. He describes his motivations, inspiriations, frustrations, and theories of literature, art, life, form, and writing.

Some of my favorite gems from this book:

"Literature is not primarily a place for truths, it is the space where truths play out." (pg 2).

"That is what writing is: creating a space in which something can be said." (pg 3).

"All language casts a shadow, and that shadow can be more or less apprehended, but never quite controlled" (pg 13).

"Writing is about making something accessable, allowing something to reveal itself." (pg 27).

"This is because I have hit upon it inadvertently, or it has to hit upon me. It is one thing to know somehthing, another to write about it and often knowing stands in the way of writing." (pg 40).

"Yes, I write because I want to open the world." (pg 46).

"What we seek in art is meaning. The meaningful carries an obligation. With obligation comes consequences." (pg 65).

"This was what I had been longing for. This was writing. To lose sight of yourself, and yet to use yourself, or that part of yourself that was beyond the control of your ego. And then to see something foreign appear on the page in front of you." (pg 81).