Karl Ove Knausgaard - Boyhood Island (My Struggle: 3), New Statesman magazine(pitiful again)

A while ago I picked a copy of the New Statesman in London (thinking about it, it's over a year ago), and except for a brilliant piece by Will Self on Costa coffee it was nauseatingly familiar in its snipey I know better than you tone. I really didn't like it. So when half way though Boyhood Island I stop and look up some of the reviews, and read the New Statesman review it was truly sick making in its superior tone as it said how bored the reviewer was reading the book:

  "To a loud anglophone minority, he constitutes a thrillingly boring alternative to boringly diverting invention"

- what a condescending piece of shit that sentence is.  Of course he has to say that the book is good (which it is, oh yes it is, a searing portrait of child hood I'd say, both because I mean it and because I can't be bothered to think up a less cliched phrase). He does say

 "he also displays a tremendous and irreducible zeal for penetrating what Karl Ove, ...  calls 'the inner core of human existence' ".

But he says it begrudgingly. It's a really bad review (you can read it here if you want to: NS Review) , because it's pretentious, over- intellectual ( being intellectual isn't bad, being a clever little show off is) and really hasn't opened up to the experience of the book (if I can loosely call it that). Because  Boyhood Island is intense raw "ordinary" childhood, written so clearly, so fiercely and so boldly, in simple everyday language that makes it punch you hard, in the head, in the gut, in the soul. Above all he captures the distress and panic of being a child where small things in themselves figure as cataclysmic tragedies , and the highs and joys as well, which arise out of similarly small things. And there is true horror in his terror of his probably alcoholic angry father. It makes you rethink you own childhood, and if you are a parent, your own parenting.