Cityscape

Famed Author Karl Ove Knausgaard Writes About Detroit

February 28, 2015, 7:53 AM

Travel pieces about Detroit are increasingly common, even in some of the nation's biggest publications.

Here's the latest: Well-known Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, who has gained international fame for his six-volume autobiographical novel "My Struggle," was asked by the New York Times magazine to travel around North America with Times photographer Peter van Agtmael.

One stop was Detroit.  He visited the Garden Bowl and stayed at The Inn on Ferry Street, not your typical tourist hotel. He doesn't provide new insights, nonetheless, it is worth a read. (We were first tipped off to this story in Metro Times.)

Driving with the photographer, he writes in the magazine:

Suddenly, a chasm opened to our left. An enormous industrial site lay beneath huge, black clouds of smoke, our whole field of vision was filled with steel pipes, metal walls, tanks and towers, and it seemed to be on fire, there were flames leaping up in several places, patches of glowing and flickering orange beneath the darkening sky, against the backdrop of bulging, black clouds.

“Look at that!” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Man is an awful and disgusting species.”

“But it’s so beautiful!”

I had never seen anything like it. I twisted my neck to keep it in sight as long as possible. The car climbed the gentle slope of a concrete bridge, and when we came down on the other side and stopped at a crossing, there were brick buildings on every side. We were in Detroit.

“I suggest we just drive around town for a while. It’ll be dark soon, so if we check in, we won’t see anything.” . . .

The wind drove the falling snow into eddies as we drove through town. The snow formed strange patterns on the slippery roadway, got torn to shreds, hung like veils in the air. We drove beneath some skyscrapers, which were too spread out to give any sense of downtown, or maybe that impression was caused by all the empty lots, or the big office buildings, heavily tagged with graffiti and full of broken windows. It looked more like a periphery than a center, I thought. We kept driving down the empty, windswept main street, then turned right and entered a residential area. There wasn’t a person in sight or any lights.


"I’d never seen anything like this. . . . It must be a new kind poverty."

His reaction to Detroit is typical of a first-time visitor

I’d seen poverty before, of course, even incomprehensible poverty, as in the slums outside Maputo, in Mozambique. But I’d never seen anything like this. If what I had seen tonight — house after house after house abandoned, deserted, decaying as if there had been disaster — if this was poverty, then it must be a new kind poverty, maybe in the same way that the wealth that had amassed here in the 20th century had been a new kind of wealth. I had never really understood how a nation that so celebrated the individual could obliterate all differences the way this country did. In a system of mass production, the individual workers are replaceable and the products are identical.

They went to the Garden Bowl on Woodward to hear music.

Three bands were playing, and what better place was there to experience American music than Detroit, the birthplace of Motown and home of Iggy Pop and the Stooges?

When the first band came on stage, I realized that it wasn’t going to happen. They played some kind of blues rock, with reference to the sound of early 1970s, Grateful Dead-ish, but in a high-school-graduation-party kind of way. The band knew how to play, but they knew how to play the way 14- and 15-year-olds know how to play.

Was this for real?

Weren’t we in Detroit?

As a side note, Slate magazine isn't impressed with his travel writing. Katy Waldman writes a piece: "Karl Ove Knausgaard Is the World’s Worst Travel Writer."

But the broader reason that no one should be tapping Knausgaard for illuminating travel writing is that he appears flummoxed by everything that happens outside of his own brain. Other people, unfamiliar spaces, complicated airports—he faces them all with equal bafflement. The flat, uncomprehending tone Knausgaard uses to describe elements in the Cleveland landscape is the same that he employs for Pierce, the hotel worker, or Peter, the photographer. “So your idea is to drive across America and write about it without talking to a single American?” asks Peter at one point. “Yes,” Knausgaard replies. Earlier, he sums up American diners in terms that he himself acknowledges are tatted cliché: “Everyone in the place, except the waiter, was fat, some of them so fat that I kept having to look at them.” Knausgaard neither knows how nor wants to close the distance. This makes him almost constitutionally averse to establishing a real sense of place.


Read more:  The New York Times


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