“My Struggle” is six volumes and more than a million words. “Actually, I talked to my brother later, and he once had a job where he had to walk down so many stairs to get to the bathroom that he did pee in bottles. The part where the brother pees in bottles so that he doesn’t have to leave his room? I made that up.” She paused. (Karl Ove’s “My Struggle” series described his life-including his marriage to Boström Knausgård, who has bipolar disorder-in long-winded, unsparing detail.) “But my book is different,” she said. “After the thing with Karl Ove, she was just exhausted with being written about,” the author said. Ingrid-also an actress-had mixed feelings about the book. The semi-autobiographical book follows a young girl, Ellen, who stops speaking. “Welcome to America” commemorates Ingrid, but it’s complicated. This past August, her mother, Ingrid, died, and, the week of the funeral, she moved again, this time into a three-bedroom apartment in a Stockholm suburb. Three years ago, after Boström Knausgård separated from the novelist Karl Ove Knausgård, she moved to Ystad, in the south of Sweden.
Her voice-low, melodious-was at odds with her body language: skittish, almost ill at ease. That is Swedish.”īoström Knausgård, who is forty-seven, was wearing a black blouse tucked into a long black skirt, with black tights and bright-white sneakers. She reached down to touch a coffee table. “Maybe too modern,” she said, sizing up a stainless-steel kitchen. And in the Marketplace area downstairs, where you find everything yourself-that’s where the real fighting is.” She joined a line of shoppers wending their way through the maze of settees and shower cubbies and office chairs. “Every couple that comes in here starts to fight!” she said, shaking her head. While in town, she visited the Red Hook IKEA-a notional Sweden from whose windows one could see, rising sedately in the rain, the Statue of Liberty. The book, despite its title, is set not in the United States but, rather, within the confines of a Stockholm apartment, similar to the one in which Boström Knausgård grew up. We are in Hell and we will never leave.” Boström Knausgård was in New York on a book tour her second novel, “Welcome to America,” was recently translated into English. The Swedish poet and novelist Linda Boström Knausgård held up a finger. Linda Boström Knausgård Illustration by João Fazenda
0 kommentar(er)
