More thoughts on Proust v Knausgaard

Continuing w/ further thoughts on Knausgaard v Proust - One difference should be immediately clear to any reader: the difference in literary style, in particular sentence structure. Proust has about the most complex sentence structure of any prose writer in the world, extremely long sentences with many qualifying clauses and phrases and unusual layering of tenses, some of which have no obvious parallel in English. Many of his sentences go on for a page or more and require constant attention and sometimes re-reading. His sentences and paragraphs often end w/ a summative flourish. KOK's style is much more natural, flat, and accessible, not rife with allusions, obscure references, or sefl-reflexive twists and turns - much easier to read and, I suspect, to translate. Neither style is "better"; each serves the needs of the author and establishes the author's voice - which brings us to another key difference: MP's Search for Lost Time, while it is an many ways an autobiographical novel that encompasses a coming of age and a painful retrospective on the life and times of Marcel, is very much a novel seen from the outside. In almost all of the society scenes - the soirees, salons, and dinner parties - Marcel is an acute and trenchant observer who barely participates. He reflects, analyzes, skewers, but largely we feel he is giving us access to a world we could not have otherwise known. KOK's My Struggle differs greatly: Karl Ove is the key figure in every scene, every moment; it is entirely the story of his life. While of course we could not access the many scenes of his life, from childhood through the time of the actual composition of his volumes, we don't feel so much that KOK is providing us privileged access to a cultish and near-extinct society but that he is providing us access to his own consciousness and experience, and the world he lives through does not feel alien but rather exceptionally familiar - not just that he is a contemporary and MP wrote a century ago but it's the very nature of his style and ambition: as one reviewer said (I have quoted this before): It's like reading someone else's diary and (gradually) recognizing that it's your own. Nobody, I think, would ever or could ever has said that of Proust - although his observations and apercus are sometimes so astonishing - its as if he expresses a thought you have always had but had never put into language and you had assumed it was yours alone: loneliness and isolation v community, each with its own shame, pain, and struggle.