Knausgaard, Wallace, Dostoevsky

For a few days on the week it was published I was so distracted by the gooners essay, and then the various reactions to the gooners essay on social media (which have now become an expected part of the experience of cultural consumption, like the postgame shows for sporting events), that I failed to notice Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “second read” column in the New Yorker, on The Brothers Karamazov. Normally I would have rushed to read such a thing as soon as it appeared, then texted it to several friends and fellow Knausgaard obsessives. I read almost anything Knausgaard writes, but this signaled a special significance to me for a couple reasons. It is rare to read the great writers of our own time on the great writers of all time, and usually it is revealing. In addition, the article interested me in relation to the set of ideas that inspired the (largely notional so far, I know) project on sincerity which I promised to undertake on this platform back in January.