“How Long Have You Been Waiting and How Much Have You Read?: In Line for Knausgaard in New York”
By James Yeh, originally published on Electric Literature (2014)
Photo by the author
I had expected a crowd — there had recently been, among many other articles and reviews, a profile in Time magazine under the headline “Norway’s Proust” and a series of New York Times articles, one referencing the surprising popularity of Knausgaard’s six-volume, 3,600-page autobiographical novel My Struggle, describing it as a “movement” — but I hadn’t expected something to this extent, mostly because this kind of thing never happened at literary events, and even less so for an international author in translation making a bookstore appearance. The event, billed as a “book three launch party with Karl Ove Knausgaard and Zadie Smith,” was scheduled to start at 7 PM with, according to the bookstore’s website, “doors open at 6 PM,” as though it were a rock concert.
“We’ve been waiting since 4:30,” said Kelsey Ford, the permissions editor at New Directions, who stood maybe fifty people from the front of the line, far enough away as to be invisible from where we were standing, like some promised land to which we could only be admitted after proving ourselves worthy, a thing that could — or, depending on your place in line, could very possibly not — happen.
Toward the end of the line, I saw Anelise Chen, a writer I know, who said she’d been waiting since six or so.
“How much have you read?” I asked, and she answered, “Just the first and second books” — just meaning, roughly, one thousand pages.
Continue reading on Electric Literature.