But there is also a long tradition of crime writing being viewed as these novelists' guilty pleasure.
"We're both very strong believers in writing being cathartic so after a horrible event it's something that feels very natural to do to make sense of it".
The marvel is that such lyricism, such wonder, such luminous recollections could be sustained in a barred dungeon, subscribing, I suppose, to Borges's claim of writing being "a vague, unreasonable, but ancient quest".
Zadie Smith, in the New York Review of Books: Knausgaard's boredom has many elaborations: the boredom of children's parties, of buying beers, of being married, writing, being oneself, dealing with one's family.
As to what made me write... Somebody talked once about writing being a creaming off of the excess, in the sense of your responses to your life or whatever's happening - I like that idea.
"I have resolved nothing," he writes in "L'Arrière-pays," "which can also explain why I have remained a writer, writing being the wood that piles up as the fire starts to catch".
