No, we are not a pack of rubes who pay no mind to contemporary literature and would thus misprint the name of Karl Ove Knausgaard‘s sensation-causing My Struggle. If anything, we might get the wise observations and be spared the intensely solipsistic: Alexander Payne has signed to adapt the author’s My Saga, a two-part journey through the North American territories supposedly explored by Vikings and a survey of whatever cultural footprint might’ve been left in their wake. [Thompson on Hollywood]
As Knausgaard wrote early into his work, which can be read here and here:
When The New York Times Magazine contacted me in December to ask whether I would travel across the United States and write about my trip for them, at first I didn’t think of my missing license. The editor proposed that I travel to Newfoundland and visit the place where the Vikings had settled, then rent a car and drive south, into the U.S. and westward to Minnesota, where a large majority of Norwegian-American immigrants had settled, and then write about it. ‘A tongue-in-cheek Tocqueville,’ as he put it. He also suggested that I should see the disputed Kensington Runestone while I was in Minnesota. It was on display in a little town called Alexandria, near where a farmer had claimed to discover it in 1898, and it could be proof — if authentic — that the Vikings had not only settled Newfoundland but made it all the way to the center of the continent. It probably was a hoax, he said, but seeing it would be a nice way to round out the story.
This may not sound readily adaptable for the big screen, but the lucidity of Knausgaard’s prose –and, if Nebraska and Sideways signal anything to me, the fact that Payne knows the road picture rather well — could establish fertile ground for a drama. (And, while we’re on the subject of contemporary comparisons, the fact that this set-up could make for an End of the Tour-esque two-hander, being that he was joined on this strange quest by photographer Peter van Agtmael.) Whatever comes next for the director (who’s still preparing Downsizing), the to-be-hired scribe — a Scandinavian one, according to first reports — Bona Fide, and Zentropa Sweden, our attention’s been earned.