Max Norman
Roman-Flood | Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Diabolic Realism
Max Norman
If you made it through the 3,600 pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Min kamp, in the Norwegian), its conclusion could only inspire mixed feelings. Book Six — also known as “the Hitler one” due to its three hundred pages on the life of the dictator whose manifesto gave Knausgaard his title — records the precise moment (7:07 a.m., on September 2, 2011) that Karl Ove brought it to...
Posed Riddles | Seeing Through Empathy with Diane Arbus
Max Norman
“I am not ghoulish, am I?” Diane Arbus wrote to a lover in 1960, describing how she couldn’t help but stop and watch as a woman lay crying in the street. “Is everyone ghoulish? It wouldn’t have been better to turn away, would it?” For half a century, Arbus’s work has kept us asking these same questions. Her unlikely subjects have become almost proverbial: the twin girls, dressed in...
