Kjell Askildsen's Top 3 Books

Si Chekhov He is one of the undisputed masters of the short story, when you discover Askildsen you ask yourself that this Norwegian genius was not far behind either. Because from Askildsen's imaginary we can discover the art of conciseness as its essence. Everything written by Askildsen could be in other hands an extensive novel. But he preferred to tell it in strokes, with restless strokes, from the spatial description to the emotional approach.

More than a resource an intention. More than a form, a will to blend in with characters with hardly any faces, loaded with gestures where each reader transmutes his existence to look at notions about life and death as a theatrical evolution around the world. Without forgetting the halftimes where important things happen, where one falls in love or makes that decision that will mark his destiny.

The result is a different reading, a blank canvas shared between writer and reader. His hand barely guides, the scenery is capable of transmitting that cold or heat of living only to meet the most opportune emotion capable of offering itself as a spring bud from which each one can observe how a very own story is born.

Top 3 Recommended Books by Kjell Askildsen

Thomas F. Last Notes for Mankind

Imagine Ignatius Reilly from “A Confederacy of Dunces”, with his recalcitrant and desperate asocial spirit. A kind of early old age where everything is complaints from the physiological to the political and spiritual. This book is about how you become Ignatius. How Ignatius we will all be when the last days appear between uncertainty and hopelessness...

The reader of Thomas F. Last Notes for Mankind (which won the Critics' Award in Norway) will begin by hating the protagonist and narrator of these stories, an old curmudgeon and misanthrope facing today's world. Later, the reader will remember the dear old people, and will begin to discover under the bad blood of Thomas F. his sparkling good humor, an indication of a high degree of wisdom and lucidity. Finally, the reader will understand, not without emotion, that they are talking about himself, that Thomas F. is a literary representative of the Robinson Crusoe that we are destined to be when we reach what the most recent hypocrisy calls the third age.

Thomas F. Last Notes for Mankind

I'm not like that. Stories. 1983 – 2008

As if it were automatic writing, many of Askildsen's stories appear to us as impulses between the visceral and unfiltered emotion. The result is a composition, a very clear link between all of them around brevity and intensity. There is no very thoughtful decoration or presentation adapted to formal requirements. A kind of narrative vomit where what is expelled is a mixture of soul remains and vital drives.

Askildsen has a literary style characterized by restraint, brevity, and formal conciseness. Storytelling artist who has created an indelible style. He can narrate everything and in the best way with characters without faces or more physical features than the indispensable detail, with names that are immediately forgotten, without tones of voice; rendering dialogues minimalist and very often without paragraph breaks or quotation marks; with emotions transmitted by a word or by an impulse to act, with climates and seasons indicated only by light or by tiny signs of the body or of the natural space; with tragedies summed up by the simple evocation of a visual image and an erotic climax achieved by the slight movement of a hand.

I'm not like that. Stories. 1983 - 2008

the price of friendship

At bargain price for off-season. Big words like friendship led to disuse or abandonment. The vivid sensation transmitted by the characters that go through these stories that it is not so much about judging the shared experiences. But to know that the question of survival can destroy the most noble intentions.

Askildsen's seventh short story collection consists of twelve short stories, most of them written between the years 1998 and 2004. The writer explores his themes and ideas in a variety of new ways, and the stories are characterized by astute insights and great clarity. . Kjell askildsen lends a voice to the inner unrest and unresolved in people-to-people meetings like no other writer.

The characters in these stories often move within fixed patterns, as observers or observed by others, trapped in unbearable or unstable situations, incomplete conversations, and moments of sudden lucidity, silence, or confrontation. Nineteen years after his last novel, the publication of The Price of Friendship was a great event in Norwegian literature.

the price of friendship
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