magiadoreal

On Page 92 of the slate-gray third volume of the six-part Norwegian novel “My Struggle,” by Karl Ove Knausgaard — an autobiographical work that offers detailed accounts of events like the teenage Karl Ove trying to sneak alcohol to a New Year ’s party (Book 1), the paternal Karl Ove attending a children’s birthday party (Book 2) and the child Karl Ove eating, on two different occasions, cornflakes (Book 3) — we learn that the headmaster of Karl Ove’s grade school was a diver who discovered a slave ship sunk off Norway’s coast in 1768. “To me, someone who held diving in greater esteem than anything else,” Knausgaard writes, “he was the greatest man I could imagine.” But one day this headmaster comes to speak with the students about the ship, and young Karl Ove finds himself “a tiny bit disappointed when it turned out the wreck lay in waters that were only a few meters deep. . . . I had expected a depth of say a hundred meters, . . . extreme pressure, . . . an over...