Karl Ove Knausgaard cannot stop fucking writing. And if you’re like me and not, say, a Barnes & Noble employee stuck with the Sisyphean task of finding shelf space for all of his everexpanding works, that’s a good thing. Because I cannot stop fucking reading him. I almost wouldn’t call it reading, it’s devouring in the truest Saturnian sense of the word. I pillage the books he writes. They’re nourishment for me. He could write a phone book and I would scan every dotted line, read every ad, Google image every obliquely referenced painting that I’m sure he would find a way to fit in. He makes me feel legitimate existential woe just about once a page when I realize that I likely won’t remember a given sentence that he’s used to beautifully convey something about the human spirit. So when I saw that the first thing he published after his exegetic magnum opus, My Struggle, was a collection of essays I dutifully and willfully picked up In the Land of the Cyclops the second I saw it on a bookstore shelf.

What does one write about after writing about…everything? And My Struggle, as much as any truly great book after oh I don’t know 1917 give or take, is about everything. He pours himself into print for us to see every nook, crease, and fold of his brain. So then there should be nothing left for him to write about. He’s kind of covered it all, the whole human experience is contained within My Struggle. But obviously a man who wrote a 5,000 page modernist autobiography can’t just not write about anything. So he tries instead to see if he can write about nothing.

In the Land of the Cyclops is bookended by two essays that are about trying to capture the world without us in our art. You could call this the anti-Expressionist experiment. Where Monet and Van Gogh and Manet and maybe Munch tried to use images of the world to show us what it feels like to experience the world, more modern attempts to trap reality into our world of images have attempted to fully remove the human from the depiction of the world. To see if indeed it’s even possible to do so.

August Strindberg pointed a camera in a field toward the sky in the nineteenth century. Stephen Gill stuck a trail cam on a fence post in Österlen in the late 2010’s. Two apparatuses in the same century-spanning experiment: can we capture the world without being captured or even being there to do the capturing? But then, don’t we fail to not be there the second we view the art? Is it possible to observe art and not become the art? We’ve always been the stick figures chasing down the late Pleistocene megafauna, scrawled in ochre dust and sealed off from the world. And now after 300,000 years when we unseal the cave we become them all over again in new and strange pixelated depictions.

So there, says Karl Ove. Not only can he not stop creating art about himself but the second he or anyone else would start to create art with the goal of ignoring himself and by extension the rest of us, he would inevitably end up sketching a silhouette of himself. Just like everyone else has before him. It turns out that every piece of art is a narcissistic one so Knausgaard figures he might as well juxtapose essays about art and Flaubert and photography and the publishing world with anecdotes about depression and his personal interactions with Dante’s fiction and the way that it feels to be a kid watching a disappointed parent walk out of the room while hearing the birds sing outside on the driveway. Because when we are there to hear them, the magpies sing a song of awareness.

In the Land of the Cyclops

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