...reading this book i found at the library by this norwegian writer karl ove knausgaard...called "my struggle 2"...on the back it says "this book is about leaving your wife and everything you know, it is about fresh starts, about love, about friendship, it is also about the earth shattering experience of becoming a father, the mundane struggles of family life, ridiculously unsuccessful holidays, fights with quarrelsome neighbours, the emotional strains of childrens birthday parties and pushing a stroller around stockholm when all you really want to do is write"...obviously being a husband, father and writer, i felt drawn to read more...i guess it outsold the bible for a bit...and his books were banned from being talked about at the "office" because people would get too heated in their discussions and wouldn't get any work done...anyway...i have more to say on it but i found this passage relatable..."nonetheless, i couldn't help thinking about dad, who had left my mother just a few weeks before he turned forty. the age coincidence, which in this case was down to a week, was neither a family nor a genetic matter and the midlife crisis was not a myth: it had begun to hit people around me, and it hit them hard. some went almost crazy in their despair. for what? for more life. at the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. when you were forty you realised it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. unless you took one last gamble..."
...i took that "gamble" 2 years ago...tried to blow up my life...fucked up and blew myself up...been putting myself back together since then...humpty dumpty...
Anyway, to be honest the book was kind of boring...thought i was gonna get some Dostoyevsky 2.0 shit...there's no drama and nothing that makes it a page turner...there's alot of bullshit intellectual writer's talk conversations...not sure what people are excited about with this book...he disses Stockholm quite a bit and maybe people got their underwear in a knot over that...and i felt like the writer was showboating a bit with how well he could write...there's even a line in the book where his friend tells him how he's envious because he can write 50 pages about somebody going to the washroom and make it seem interesting...i don't know, the book was like telling a friend to come over everyday for a couple of hours for a couple of weeks and have them tell you about a period of their lives from age 25-40...how they got into their current relationship...the ups and downs of the relationship...how they feel about having 3 kids...talking about some of their friends and what they mean to them...their family...fuck man, you'd need some serious alcoholic aperitifs to get through those sessions right...especially when nothing really dramatic happens in their life...and fuck all happens in this guys life...fact of the matter i'd rather hear a friends life then this dude's...i guess there's 6 books in the My Struggle series...think i'll cut my losses here...wash my hands of this intellectual hand wringing shit and get into some serious porn magazines for awhile.