When the newly revamped New York Times Magazine asked the famously prolix (but personally reticent) Karl Ove Knausgaard, the author of a 3,500-page confessional six-book series called My Struggle, to undertake a road trip through Canada and the U.S., it enlisted him in a noble tradition: the foreign writer grappling with America via that most American of journeys, the road trip. How does his long and divisive report, part one of which will appear in this Sunday’s print issue, compare to those of his predecessors? Below, we compare and contrast.Game Plan Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835: The great French intellectual is commissioned by the king of France to visit and report on the American penitentiary system—which he does. But then he uses it as a platform to go a little off-message—meditating for two volumes on the evolution of democracy. American Vertigo, by Bernard-Henri Lévy,...
- 2/27/2015
- by Boris Kachka
- Vulture
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