Death in the Family - Karl Ove Knausgaard -Reviews

So there is no absolute agreement on the great authors - you only have to hear Nabokov's opinions of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Hemingway to realise that opinions are violently divided!
No surprise then to find that Karl Ove Knausgaard's Death in the Family, the first volume in his - and I have to stoop to cliche here - "provocatively titled " sextet of books My Struggle has the following break down of ratings on amazon.co.uk. as of 6th October 2018:

So half loved it (I am in that group, let's make that clear), but nearly a fifth of readers gave it either one or two stars. So why is that?

Perhaps we need some comparisons -lets' take, just because I mentioned two of them above Dostoevsky's and Nabakov.  Again amazon.co.uk only. We'll come to amazon.com later -to see if there are any interesting differences or whether the spread of like / dislike is eerily the same both sides of the Atlantic ( OK very roughly speaking both sides of the Atlantic)

Here's Lolita - winning on 59% loved it, only 12 two & three star ratings:

And here's The Brother's Karamazov:

Outdoing Nabakov, his detractor. Nabakov said of Dostoevsky 

"as in all Dostoyevsky's novels, a rush and tumble of words with endless repetitions, mutterings aside, a verbal overflow which shocks the reader after, say, Lermontov's transparent and beautifully poised prose. Dostoyevsky as we know is a great seeker after truth, a genius of spiritual morbidity, but as we also know he is not a great writer in the sense Tolstoy, Pushkin and Chekhov are. "  Nabakov  on Dostoevsky , New York Times

So what would Nabakov have made of Karl Ove? We'll never know - but what we do have, to begin with,is those 164 reviews on Amazon, 82 of which are positive rave reviews, approx 45 are mixed and 32 of which relayed that they did not like his book at all!

Well how did you not like his book I ask - as well as how did you like his book? A good review should give some evidence for the reader's opinions surely? By and large the 5* reviews pick out things that readers particularly enjoyed or admired.

Concentrating on the 1* reviews though there are a number of short sparse expressions of annoyance and despair, with the emphasis on short. These are not people who are going to spend a lot of time giving you their extensive assessment of Karl Ove's oeuvre - they're bored and pissed off and just want to send let you know with a short sharp blast of negativity.

There are a number of two or three line 1* reviews that by and large have three main critical points, if you can call them that. They say the book is

• boring
• self-indulgent
• rubbish

I put the list so it read like that as some of the reviewers included more than one of the three criticisms. What links them all of course is resentment, resentment that he's become famous on the back of this to them unreadable prose. Like that Dire Straits song Money for Nothing, they are full of anger at his to them unwarranted success.

Some struggle to include wit in their answer for example: he talks about his struggle, well I struggled to read it - or some kind of literary reference - the Emperor's New Clothes are referenced of course! Others are less nuanced - "Drivel." says one.

For the most though they are upset and personally affronted that someone who is a "writer" is describing ordinary things in detail. They can't see beyond this, they can't see the form and shape, they can't see the story that does build up from this concatenation of feeling and detail. A number of them value their time so much that they are very upset indeed that Knausgaard is causing them to waste it. In fact this kind of time is of so much value  that they are prepared to write a review to warn others not to make the same mistake - or is it that they just want to get it off their chest, have a good public moan and stick it to his literary propensities. Who knows?

I think it is a common complaint among a certain kind of reader that doesn't "get" certain kinds of reading. They feel the need to expose it and themselves in the minute unread print of a 1* star review. But all one really asks for is a bit of intelligence and engagement, a bit of real criticism.

It's an odd coincidence that just as I was writing this the literary Hub came up with a rather lazy daily post - they just cut and pasted  the "50 best" one star reviews of James Joyce's Ulysses and let them speak for themselves - here.

Iain M Banks and Iain Banks, The Culture novels and The Bridge - a reflection on the worship of fiction and fandom

Someone said Iain (M) Banks was* two of the best novelists we ever had and I would go with that. I've been listening to some of the Culture novels beautifully read by Peter Kenny and loving being immersed in the Culture again. I've now moved on to listening to The Bridge (again wonderfully read by Peter Kenny) which is, well, maybe a bridging novel between the two genres that Banks wrote in, certainly a bit of a homage to Lanark (Alastair Gray) but entirely, robustly, on its own two literary feet.

So far I've listened to the Player of Games and The Use of Weapons (read by Peter Kenny) and one of the great joys is hearing the names pronounced correctly out loud, and then, of course, and this is down to the skill of the reader, a series of wonderful character voices for the ships and drones. That is one of the great joys of hearing something read aloud especially with humour is that it makes you *hear* properly and pay attention to the story and the humour. (There should be a mention here of Matter read by a different reader, but just as good as kenny - in fact I think I was so impressed I reviewed it here: Matter - Amazon review

I've also just joined the Iain [M] Banks fan forum, just to read and speak and interact with people, who love these novels, just so that I can get more out of my re-readings and listenings


*Iain Banks died on the 9th June 2013 - an inconceivably bitter blow - I still feel distraught even now.

Understanding Differentiation - Leonard Susskind & George Hrabovsky - Classical Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum

I've up to a point dimly understood differentiation - the idea that the slope of a graph is its rate of change, and that you can differentiate an equation like x³ + 5x² +12x -7 quite simply by following the rules - the x³ goes to 3x², the 5x² goes to 10x, the x goes to 12 and the 7 disappears. You can check this very easily by just cut and pasting my first formula into this brilliant derivative-calculator site   Wonderful though this site is it doesn't actually explain why this is happening - it explains the individual rules, but not why the rule works.

It wasn't until I started reading Classical Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum (Theoretical Minimum 1) by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky, and then checked my answers to the differentiation question that I actually understood the marvelous mathematical sleight of hand that differentiation is.

 I had to do it in my own hard way by looking at each line of the explanation, then matching up bits of equation with the next line to see what was different or missing. It was then that I really understood what that delta t, that little bit of infinitesimal time actually does. So that I never forget it I'm going to lay it out all in glorious colour here.

What we're actually doing with differentiation is taking a function like this one: f(x) = x³ + 5x² +12x -7 and then writing out the equation again as f(x+𝛥t) - basically adding 𝛥t on every x as so:

 f(x+𝛥t) = (x+𝛥t)³ + 5(x+𝛥t)² +12(x+𝛥t) -7

which we then multiply out to make things easier to combine. (𝛥t or delta t as it is pronounced is just a very small bit of... time.)  Of course I began to get into real grief here just sorting this out and had to visit another fantastic cheat site -Symbolab  that did the expansion for me - and showed me how it got there. I had forgotten that there were formulae for multiplying out things like (x+𝛥t)³

 f(x+𝛥t) = x³ +3x²𝛥t+3x𝛥t²+𝛥t³+ 5x²+10x𝛥t+5𝛥t²+12x+12𝛥t-7

So there we go with the expanded f(x+𝛥t). Then we write out f(x) - f(x+𝛥t) using these expanded formulae and take one away from the other.

 f(x+𝛥t)- f(x)  = x³ +3x²𝛥t+3x𝛥t²+𝛥t³+ 5x²+10x𝛥t+5𝛥t²-12x+12𝛥t+7- x³ - 5x² +12x -7

The coloured pairs like x³ from both f(x) and f(x+𝛥t) nullify each other so you're left with:

f(x+𝛥t)- f(x)  =3x²𝛥t+3x𝛥t²+𝛥t³+10x𝛥t+5𝛥t²+12𝛥t

Now the really clever bit - divide both sides by 𝛥t and you get 3x²+10x+12.  All the multiples of delta t vanish as you go to zero - what you are doing is "taking the limit" as delta t heads for zero. I should write it out properly really but I need a better mathematical editor to do that but here it is bodged up with the space bar to line it up on two lines.
                                              lim      f(x+-𝛥t) -f(t)   = 3x²+10x+12
                                          𝛥t->0          𝛥t


Looking at the writing out of  f(x) - f(x+𝛥t) using these expanded formulae above I realised I had got all the plus and minus signs in the wrong place, but the gist of it is if you take  f(x) = x³ + 5x² +12x -7 away from  f(x+𝛥t) = (x+𝛥t)³ + 5(x+𝛥t)² +12(x+𝛥t) -7 all you get left with is the bits that have 𝛥t in them.  Well it makes sense to me now - but it's been days, days.