Tim Upperton
Books I’ve been reading
read and write poems, but I also read a lot of novels. As a child, I loved books about islands. I devoured , , , and Kiwi misanthrope Tom Neale’s . These feature in the first poem of my new collection, “My in which a new star in the heavens presides over multiple lives and stories down here on Earth. It was panned in the and I almost passed on it, although I’ve read all of Knausgård’s previous books, apart from one he wrote about football. The novel reminds me a bit of Lars von Trier’s with its apocalyptic atmosphere. All of Knausgård’s tics are there – the minutiae of daily life, philosophical digressions, family tensions and marital discord – and the book harks back to the theological concerns of his second novel, . Knausgård tries your patience and he’s difficult, in the sense that any genuinely new art is difficult. But he’s also great.
