It’s hard to talk about a 1148-page book that’s only one of six (my reviews of each installment, also including what’s below, are here). The final volume, published in the US by Archipelago Books, is unlike the others, unlike anything I’ve ever read, and as I read it there was nothing else I really wanted to do. Those reviews linked in the first sentence make it clear that I find this project entirely engrossing, engaging, sticky/retentive, easy, enjoyable, serious, effortless, thoughtful, perceptive, and an enhancer of perception. But this one raises the thematic stakes, errs wholly and exaggeratedly on the side of HEFT, and does so in a way that drops a boulder from on high into your memory and understanding of the ~2500 pages you’ve read so far.
Major themes include the interpenetration of external and internal worlds (KOK’s recent Seasons Quartet seems mostly about this too) including the social and the personal, which extends to memory and reality (what we remember and what really happened), which extends to the nature of representation in memoir, literature, art, which evolves into elaboration on the processes of dehumanization (the Nazi dehumanization of Jews — “we” transforms into “they” transforms into “it” — and, more interestingly, the post-WWII dehumanization of Nazis in general and Hitler in particular), ultimately ending with dramatization of his wife’s manic and depressive episodes, her hospitalization and recovery, all while reflecting on the dynamics of domestic life, child-rearing, writing, friendship, emergent fame, and love.
Very broadly, the structure is something like this: first part is about family reaction to the manuscript of Book 1, particularly his uncle Gunnar’s extremely negative take that makes KOK question his memory and representation of reality in the second half of Book 1 (his father’s death, cleaning his grandmother’s house). A visit from Geir and his young son follows, mostly talk about how to react to reactions to what he’s written, but also somewhat about Geir’s 1000-page book about living in Baghdad as a human shield during the American invasion. In this part, KOK interrupts the usual dialogue-replete easy dramatization and drops a 10-page essay on influence and the I into the proceedings, an essay that feels absolutely cut and pasted into the text, with a different texture/feel, but it’s just an introduction/taste of what’s to come: a dense 50-page close-reading of a Paul Celan poem about the Holocaust, the most difficult reading by far in the whole project, a vast chunk of interpretative reading unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a novel, a wall at which many eyes will probably either close and cease progress or simply leap over, although this part is thematically essential in that it introduces the “we, they, it” theme, which refracts the light of everything the project/series has been about so far and in turn acts as a thematic launchpad for the following 400 pages of essay about Hitler, primarily a linear analysis starting with his youth, family, upbringing (his father beat him senseless), teen years, early artistic endeavors in part as a reaction to his father’s dreary civil servanthood, living in parks and painting on the street for money, concocting an opera without knowing how to write music, re-designing cities in his head, ultimately finding himself in WWI, after which he discovers his gift for public speaking, as well as anti-Semitism, wondering what so many of his fellow soldiers died for, a Germany reduced in defeat, totally devalued, and so begins his quest to elevate Germany again, in part so all those millions of young men won’t have died for nothing, all of which (the WWI influence on Hitler’s thinking and spirit) I found particularly interesting, especially since in the past few years I’ve read and loved Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, Enrich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Ernst Junger’s Storms of Steel, and so felt “prepared” for this in a way, like we’d done a lot of the same reading — all this with really interesting interspersed excerpts from various biographies that describe similar times in Hitler’s life in different ways, for example presenting the teenage Hitler as a latent monster, inherently inhuman from the start (a method KOK rejects — he says it’s important to humanize Hitler so he’s not an “it” but part of the “we,” emphasizing what we’re capable of), intermittently interspersed with examples of the artistic upbringing of canonical European writers of around the same generation or a little older (Hamsun, Kafka, Zweig, Mann, Junger), followed by excerpts and analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which I’ve never read and have never really considered reading, which therefore feels transgressive in what otherwise had been a novel about doing dishes and pushing three kids around in a stroller while trying to write.
And then it returns to the project’s traditional mode of dramatization with sometimes lengthy expository interjections about his wife’s mental health, including their purchase of a cabin they can’t upkeep, totally evocative description and dramatization of a trip to the Canary Islands when Linda was still pregnant with their third child John and they almost bought a timeshare they couldn’t possibly afford, a trip during which KOK reads Gombrowicz’s Diary and pretty much conceives of the project of writing about his life (they also consider moving to Argentina — KOK’s favorite soccer nation as a child, a distant, seemingly impossible land, and the original title for the project [actually, per Summer, it was The Dog before it was Argentina] before Geir suggested the somewhat more evocative My Struggle), ending with the sale of the cabin and purchase of a summer home near the southeastern coast of Sweden that becomes their full-time home.
I don’t think any of this really counts as “spoilers” since it’s not so much about what happens as the ideas, the experience, the extreme solidity and weight of the book in your hands (at one point while walking and reading it at lunch, it actually made my left arm sore and I wondered if I was maybe having a heart attack or I’d just been holding the book in my left hand too long).
Amazingly, this all not only “works,” it succeeds, I think, in that it does what KOK loves to do, which is lay out a long stretch during which you’re questioning why you’re reading yet propelled by the quickness and easy charisma of the text until he eventually interrupts the proceedings in a way that makes you consider everything so far. I first noticed this while reading A Time for Everything when the story of the flood and Noah’s ark comes after maybe 70 pages of domestic life that made me feel like the novel was slipping in quality but then was revealed eventually as their last moments alive before drowning and therefore entirely significant, all their little domestic movements were not meaningless at all, which KOK then elaborates in My Struggle to all the little domestic movements of the day with the children, trying to write etc, ultimately shifted in significance by the flood of text about Hitler’s autobiography/biography as a reflection on his own — all of which also in comparison belittles the transgression of representing his life as it is, his father’s demise, all the personal private things that in Scandinavian society one does not reveal to the world. In A Time for Everything KOK also complexifies the story of Cain and Abel, humanizing Cain, the first human considered evil — in this, he complexifies the story of Hitler, the Michael Jordan/GOAT of evil.
In my review of A Time for Everything, I wrote:
“Dramatizing the complexity of black/white archetypes is something really great lit does best — I don’t like to think about lit/art as something that “serves society,” that’s functional or necessary or useful per se, but Complexity Emphasis is one of the arguments in lit’s defense.”
And that really applies here. Not only does KOK complexify the typical understanding of Hitler to emphasize that he is not a monster, a dehumanized “it,” but a human being like us, part of the “we,” but he uses Hitler’s story to complexify his own story, to show that in different circumstances Hitler could’ve been like him, and vice versa, and also that the sin of what he’s done with “My Struggle” is really not all that bad at all compared for example TO WHAT HITLER DID!!! Ultimately the project attempts to present everything unspoken that’s relayed in an instant simply by looking someone else in the eye for an extended moment.
But there’s also the last section after the Hitler essay about Linda’s depressive and then manic episodes — hanging out the dirty laundry of the relationship in such a way that news last year that they divorced seems more inevitable than surprising. At one point he writes that he writes this as he does since he has nothing to lose, he doesn’t care anymore, he’s essentially reached the point of saying “fuck it” all the time and doesn’t worry about the consequences — but then he softens and professes his love and remembers when they first met and knowing that they’d have three children together (now four). Yet at the end of Book Six it seems like they’ll be OK, they’ve found a new home, a proper home to raise the three kids in, not a messy urban apartment, so knowing that they’ve divorced post-publication of the original Book Six makes the dedication at the end even more poignant.
About twenty years ago (1997/8) I wrote a book of autobiographical essays (Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World) that was published in 2004 — it was propelled in part by a quotation from Thomas Wolfe: “Fiction is fact selected, arranged, and charged with purpose.” But also a response to my first real depressive stretch, an attempt to write my way out of it in a way. It also was an expression of a native impulse that fiction is best when it doesn’t read like fiction at all (the archetype for a lot of this who’s often unspoken or unacknowledged due to lack of literary prestige is Kerouac, not so much On the Road but the later ones like The Subterraneans and Big Sur — also KOK says he wrote the 500+-page Book Five in five weeks, which suggests Kerouac’s weekends of “athletic” writing fueled by coffee and speed). Later I read Moody’s Demonology story about his sister’s death and Lorrie Moore’s famous story about blood in her daughter’s diaper, both of which were touchstones for me of fiction that’s not fiction, that goes against fiction in a way by emphasizing its reality but then by doing so elevates itself as a sort of supreme fiction. Since then the genre of “autofiction” has emerged, with primary recipients of attention being Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station; 10:04); Tao Lin (Shoplifting from American Apparel; Taipei), Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?; Motherhood), and more recently Rachel Cusk (Outline; Transit; Kudos). All of these have their merits and I’ve been attracted to them and felt like they were up my alley but when it comes to what I look for in writing as a reader (audacity, authority, execution, heft, oomph), the My Struggle series completely fulfills its exaggerated ambition, and by doing so fulfills the need I felt in 1997 or so when I felt like it felt right to write about my life. It’s hard to explain. It’s like there was a sense that conventional fiction wasn’t sufficient and that by writing about life like in DFW’s essays or a less “hip”/annoying explicitly Buddhist way like Keroauc there was an under-occupied space and way forward. Now, it’s clear that My Struggle has not only occupied that space but will be a sort of black hole warping the light of all further autofictional energy. At the end, in the last line, he says he’s no longer a writer, something he’s since disproven. But there’s something about this that’s like he’s put it all out, eviscerated himself and stretched the entrails out like Keroauc’s unfurled scroll along a shuffleboard table. He’s exhausted his capacities. And I’m sure that’s something that many writers have wanted to do at one point but never come close to achieving.
Stray thoughts:
Very few similes. At one point I noted “no similes” and then a few pages later three appeared on one page. But generally very few similes. Eschews those little metaphorical flourishes that so often signal that the writer is intent on achieving Proper Literary Tone, which KOK purposefully tries to avoid.
Very little social media — not until the end of Book Six is Linda posting updates on Facebook. Otherwise, I can’t imagine what this project would be like if the author posted all the time on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. In many ways, it’s the anti-thesis of social media updates by writers. Definitely not character restricted, not going for the laugh, no group think, not concerned with pop culture or self-promotion. Reading this book actually felt like the antidote to social media — I was off it other than Goodreads as I read this. It felt good never to reach for my phone to scroll through updates when I needed to take a break from it.
The translators will win all the awards for this I’m sure — it seems like one of them handled the dramatized parts and the other handled the essayistic parts. The tone is similar but not exact, although that of course could have more to do with KOK than the translator.
I liked that the cover is the same color as my 2014 novel The Shimmering Go-Between, a novel very much unlike My Struggle but that also is about the interplay of fact and fiction.
Will I re-read Book 1 now? Like with In Search of Lost Time, I would love to read a volume each year, over and over forever, but lord knows if I will.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).