So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl One Knausgaard is an interesting work of criticism by one great Norwegian artist about another. Knausgaard, the biggest literary celebrity in his country, wrote this extended essay as a companion to an instillation that he curated at the Munch Museum in Oslo. As Edvard Munch is best known for The Scream and Knausgaard is best known for My Struggle, there's a nice existential companionship they seem to share. The book can be dense, and it feels incomplete. Still, the strongest moments, when a great novelist compares his medium to another, and the general observations about art and form, are worth the read overall.
The text is pretty academic. I can mostly keep up with art criticism; I understood about 85% of So Much Longing in So Little Space. (That said, if I hadn't read What Are You Looking At? by Will Gompertz, or taken an excellent art history class at Oregon State by the late John Maul, I would have drowned in this text. My gratitude, then, to Gompertz and Maul.) Knausgaard assumes a lot from his readers. This can be daunting, but there's a point, two-thirds of the way through, where he interviews others artists and reveals his own ignorance about Munch. This fills him with shame, and also makes me love him. It's nice to stay with a writer that is ambitious enough to take on any subject, but honest enough to reveal his own limitations.
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