Ostensibly “So Much Longing in So Little Space” is a book of art criticism, but it is as much about its author as it is about its subject. (Art criticism obviously can’t use the language of the thing it’s critiquing in a way literary criticism can, which is a problem Knausgaard recognizes in the book itself.) And yet, though the book fails in the ways it must, it succeeds where others have failed, in its ability to imbue its failure with its own blend of artifice and truth, cliche and possibility, openness and closedness, creating something that may prove to be classic. But it should not be expected to be a translator. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s treatise on the art of Edvard Munch, “So Much Longing in So Little Space,” fails - as art criticism is prone to do - to adequately “read” or “translate” Munch’s paintings for us. “Nevertheless Munch painted an oak.” This seems about as profound a thing as one can say about painting, which is wordless and beyond words. “Many had painted oaks before,” wrote poet Olav H.
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