Karl Ove Knausgaard on Out of the World

Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria.

Today, Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses his 1998 debut novel, Ute av verden (Out of the World): “I got up at six in the evening, I woke up, and then I sat and wrote all night, till eight or nine in the morning … I was so egocentric, it was really the only thing I cared about for sixteen months. When you write a book you don’t know why you’re doing it.” Knausgaard wrote the book for his father, who died just before it was published. “I realized the book was meaningless,” he says. “I wanted to say to him, Look, this is me, you don’t know me, you never knew me.”

Be sure to watch the previous interviews in the series:

Akhil Sharma on An Obedient Father, his first novel
Vivian Gornick on In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt, her first book
Helen DeWitt on The Last Samurai, her first novel
Jeffrey Eugenides on The Virgin Suicides, his first novel
Ben Lerner on The Lichtenberg Figures, his first collection
Katori Hall on Hoodoo Love, her first play
Donald Antrim on Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, his first novel
Sheila Heti on The Middle Stories, her first collection
Tao Lin on Bed, his first collection
Christine Schutt on Nightwork, her first collection
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on his play Neighbors
Gabrielle Bell on The Book of ... series, her early cartoons
J. Robert Lennon on his debut novel, The Light of Falling Stars

The post Karl Ove Knausgaard on Out of the World appeared first on The Paris Review.

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