You’ve heard about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle series. If you’ve been avoiding the annual hype since 2012 but now find yourself KOK curious, welcome to 12K+ words collecting impressions from one reader’s experience:
Book One: A Death in the Family
Translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett
Within a week of each other my mother and a grad school friend recommended this to me, both calling it “up my alley,” maybe because it’s a literary autobiography unafraid of piling on detail and ripping off pages of dense, insightful exposition. I hadn’t seen the James Wood review in The New Yorker (didn’t skim it until after I wrote a draft of this review), but I’ve long been a lover of the look and feel of Archipelago’s books and I’m an Anselm Kiefer fan (there’s a Kiefer on the cover).
Fiction is fact selected, understood, arranged, and charged with purpose, Thomas Wolfe asserted, but Knausgaard’s acknowledged precedent is Proust. Narrator admits to gulping Proust down before writing this novel, memoir, “roman,” something that maintains the circuitous structure but swaps out the velveteen serpentine suffusions for something cleaner, starker, heteronormative, and involuntarily cathartic more than ecstatic — none of which mean it’s better than Proust, just comparing the two because Proust is the archetype, the way some bands derive from The Beatles, The Stones, Led Zep, and others from Kraftwerk.
A pretty clear division between scene and summary (exposition): pages of always welcomed dense/deep exposition (usually about death, although at first about parenthood) followed by pages of scenes (sometimes with quick little refreshing streams of sparsely attributed dialogue). The exposition I loved whereas the scenes, especially in the first part, I only admired — or maybe I overrelated to the first section involving his adolescence? Teenage dudes driving around looking to drink, playing guitar (I loved how my electric guitar case smelled), crappy bands playing outside to no one (my college band once played outside to four of our friends), lusting, making out, varieties of — to my mind — overly common experience that may account for why I’ve never really written about my teen years, have always pushahed them, deemed them necessarily stoned more than beautiful, and therefore unworthy. But Knausgaard seemed to approve those years, those experiences, and shows how to go about it as long as — as in Proust — teen/childhood talk is filtered through a mature narrator’s recollections. That depth, that distance, seems necessary in part to evade accusations of YA-ness from fuckheads like me.
Something else I loved: things are detailed at times to the point of what Frank Conroy called “abject naturalism”: comprehensive minute detailing of minor movements, especially washing dishes or setting a table or other rote physical actions. Here, such naturalism is less abject than the object, its point, a cataloguing of momentary forms, like monumental skyscapes at sunset, momentary, meaningless, lacking secret codes to crack, glanced at, deemed beautiful, that’s it — appreciated but so common they’re taken for granted. “The veranda, the plastic bottles, the light in the neighbor’s windows . . . The gutter and the rainwater still running down it into the grass. I could not grasp that he wouldn’t see any more of this, however hard I tried.” There’s something steely about the narrator no matter how often he, like water from a rock, breaks into tears. Things are clear and rational and yet move unpredictably — nonlinear layering of the story gives it more depth. It feels absolutely real and reading it enhanced perception of life around at least one reader.
Also, when they inevitably round up the post-irony novels that have come since DFW’s prediction in the famous TV essay about Leyner, Knausgaard will be mentioned. He’s sincere without being stupid about it, without feeling like he’s restraining a natural instinct to entertain or humor. Loved the bit, after he talks with his wife on the phone and they both say how much they miss and love each other, how he gets some things at a convenience store and wants to sleep with the chubby Iraqi or Iranian girl who won’t look up at him. It’s very well-done, understated, its significance not overexplicated with exposition, plus it suggests issues that might arise in later volumes. Throughout, its naturalism feels natural, like literature more than contemporary literary fiction that adheres to the rules of its genre and thereby so often for me feels unreal, like a story, like fiction.
It was a bit of a slog midway before the second half when the aftermath of the father’s death started up — but I also had trouble finding time to sit down for consistent stretches (too cold and windy to walk and read at lunch or to/fro work). One thing of note: when I did walk around at lunch and read this, it was fun to think that a few folks might have thought I was reading a fancy new translation of “Mein Kampf.” That suggestion/juxtaposition is pretty audacious/rad since it adds heft to the minor details throughout — reminds me a little of the early Kiefer photos (late ’60s) of the artist giving the Heil Hitler while standing in a bathtub filled with toy boats, in front of the ocean, or alone in a field?
The author’s struggle is artistic, emotional, personal if not solitary (ie, familial), literally and figuratively cleaning the mess others have made in life, dealing with the memory of his father now that the narrator himself is a father of three. Not a depressing book since it’s filled with life, even if it’s mostly about death.
Minimal talk of fjords, too, although the word definitely appears.
Book Two: A Man in Love
Translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett
The original Norwegian editions of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle series, presented in thick ~500-page installments, have purportedly sold more than a half-million copies and won lots of prizes. If rumors of such critical and commercial success are true, even if only in Scandinavia, it’s good news for humanity, since these volumes lack traditional plot, let alone anything approaching bondage, vampires, or wizards. Maybe it helps that Knausgaard, a respected author of two novels before he’d even started My Struggle, has a bold, sensationalist, attention-grabbing title appropriated from Hitler’s polemical autobiography, which forces readers to contrast his representation and impressions of his writing/family life with the Führer’s concerns? Or maybe the series has stormed across Scandinavia because its scope and approach suggest Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, but instead of tracing the past in rapturous, velveteen, serpentine effusions – every passage suffused with chrysanthemum dust – My Struggle presents something comparatively without affectation, a steady, solid, quotidian, flinty (albeit likely to burst into tears, like squeezing water from a rock) representation of and insight into what it’s like for one man to be alive.
In Fall 2012, both my mother and a grad school friend recommended the first volume to me, saying it sounded “up my alley.” It was way up there, in approach, accessibility, unpredictability, unexpected humor, and heft. For a few years I’ve been saying that fiction that feels like fiction is not my favorite sort of fiction. I’ll turn on a novel for an overwrought simile comparing a Gatorade cap to a crown of thorns. Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer fiction that feels unlike contemporary literary fiction. I’m not necessarily a fan of experimental or explicitly unconventional fiction, either. Turns out I just seem to prefer fiction that feels real. Twain said something like the difference between fiction and non-fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable. Thomas Wolfe (the guy who wrote Look Homeward, Angel, not the guy in the white suit who wrote Bonfire of the Vanities) said that fiction is fact, selected, arranged, and charged with purpose. Both of these assertions apply to Knausgaard’s recent work, except I don’t think the author, at least as he presents himself in the My Struggle series, charges his selections and arrangements of fact with an explicit purpose other than trying to get as close as he can to the core of life. No conventional plot therefore, yet nevertheless engaging, consistently insightful, and almost recklessly sincere.
This series is a multivolume masterpiece of sincerity. It’s epic literary autobiography, worthy of the traditional and more recent meanings of the modifier epic. A Norwegian living in Sweden may have written it but it fulfills David Foster Wallace’s prophecy about post-ironic fiction in the United States: “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.” By now, at least as Knausgaard presents Sweden in this volume, the notion of “U.S. life” can be expanded to include Western Civilization’s so-called First World, including Scandinavia. Like DFW, Knausgaard covers significant territory across apparently infinite pages but he doesn’t do it in a look Ma no hands backflipping with a smile sorta way. All the formal elements of traditional fiction are in place, sans gimmickry. No attention-getting footnotes or images or power points or graphs or numbered lists or Danielewskisms. No masturbatory flights of language en route to the celestial sublime. No silly set pieces or big dance numbers at the end. No talking pieces of poo. Nothing included for a joke. No excessive modifiers or anything that feels like it’s not part of the author’s attempt to stay as close as possible to what he perceives as the core of things, the honest truth of life. He also realizes that such a project may seem megalomaniacal, and he addresses this more than once, never mythologizing himself, always his worst critic, always forcing himself to submit to humility.
What happens in this engrossing, readable, plot-less stretch of 543 beautifully formatted pages published by Archipelago? Mostly child care. Instead of the mythologized image of the author of the past, we find a 21st century house husband, considering himself feminized compared to how fathers once raised children, living in a homogenized culture thanks to international influence (as in Murakami, American fast food joints are name-checked, including Burger King and Subway): “Europe . . . was merging more and more into one large, homogeneous country. The same, the same, everything the same.” Karl Ove is a 30-something Norwegian who’s left his first wife and moved to Stockholm, where, despite this sense of sameness, he can’t read clues revealing minute social gradients as he can in Norway. The author’s good friend Geir, another Norwegian writer living in Sweden, rants about the differences between Norway and Sweden the way some in Philadelphia may occasionally rant about the differences between Philly and New York. (Sweden is essentially more orderly. In Norway people bump into each other on the street. Norwegian academics don’t dress so well.)
Book 1 ended with the author cleaning up the mess his recently deceased alcoholic father made, literally and figuratively. As with Book 2, it started in the recent past and presented a surprisingly fresh vision of the author with young children, at playgrounds, struggling with plastic contraptions meant to convey children across town. As in the first volume, these opening sections create a sympathetic image of a manly, cigarette-smoking Scandinavian author overrun by three children, loving them deeply, trying to control them, aware that this image of a father who gets down on the floor and plays with a rattle with his kids is relatively recent and yet by now pervasive.
His own upbringing had been strict, his father distant and scary, and so Karl Ove struggles with his father’s spirit inside him. He has a history with drink, too. In one riveting recollected scene in which he drinks himself into a world that’s narrowed to a dark tunnel, after the woman who will become the mother of his children humanely rejects him, he smashes a glass and uses its largest, sharpest shard to shred his face.
In both books, this opening fatherhood gambit won me over, made me willing to follow him wherever he went. In the first volume, it’s teen years playing in a terrible band and looking for a place to drink on New Year’s Eve. In Book 2, it’s his first days in Stockholm and the story of how he met his wife, Linda, the woman who helped him become who he is today: prize-winning successful novelist pushing around three young children in a stroller.
The central struggle in this volume is achieving a balance between family and art. He wants a family, three children like a little gang, but he also wants to be left alone to write. He has an “all or nothing” mentality, so this conflict drives the story. It’s all pretty deceptively simple:
For me, society is everything, Geir said. Humanity. I’m not interested in anything beyond that. But I am, I said. Oh yes? Geir queried. What then? Trees, I answered. He laughed. Patterns in plants. Patterns in crystals. Patterns in stones. In rock formations. In galaxies. Are you talking about fractals? Yes, for example. But everything that binds the living and dead, all the dominant forms that exist. Clouds! Sand dunes! That interests me. Oh God, how boring, Geir said. No it isn’t, I said. Yes, it is, he said.
David Foster Wallace’s 1990 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” concludes with questions about what will come after postmodern irony: “Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal!’”
To which Knausgaard might reply: “For me it was trees and leaves, grass and clouds and a glowing sun, that was all, I understood everything in the light of this.”
An elaborated elegance makes this series what it is. Its patterns and formations feel organic and humble yet troubled and in no way understated. The form in the first two volumes at least suggests something like quiet majesty. It’s only as complicated as it needs to be, with simply dramatized scenes with plentiful short bursts of dialogue, summarized scenes, stretches of essayistic exposition, all in rotation in a way that I comfortably anticipated over time. Yet, despite what’s essentially a not very experimental form, the project itself as a whole seems unconventional, almost unhinged. Three thousand pages of literary autobiography about a middle-aging Norwegian writer and his wife and kids and friends and family? You kidding me? His kids don’t even suffer from Marcusian language pathologies? No empathic immersion in the presentation of other lives? No specific canonical biggie (despite the title and physical similarity to Proust’s multivolume masterwork) providing explicit formal and thematic support?
Of the young writers I had read there was only Jerker Virdborg I liked; his novel Black Crab had something that raised it above the mist of morals and politics others were cloaked in. Not that it was a fantastic novel, but he was searching for something different. That was the sole obligation literature had, in all other respects it was free, but not in this, and when writers disregarded this they did not deserve to be met with anything but contempt.
By the time of the second volume’s action, Karl Ove has written one well-regarded novel but the money is running out. He hasn’t written much of anything for four or five years. He’s included in an article about writer’s block and authors who’ve only written one novel. But he’s searching for something different, a way out. After seeing Bergman’s production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” with his future wife, he has a model for the sort of work he wants to do in the future. The play offers a bright horizon for the author, and a guide to the book in the reader’s hands.
“A kind of boundlessness arose, something wild and reckless. Into it disappeared plot and space, what was left was emotion, and it was stark, you were looking straight into the essence of human existence, the very nucleus of life, and thus you found yourself in a place where it no longer mattered what was actually happening . . . That was where I had to go, to the essence, to the inner core of human existence.”
This inner core of human existence manifests as conversations with friends, dinners at home, fights with a Russian alcoholic neighbor who blasts music in the middle of the night, irritation with his wife’s inability to pitch in around the house and thereby force him to do all the shopping, cooking, and cleaning, all of which gracefully revolve in the present, interspersed with non-linearly proceeding backstory. This sort of structure after a while feels like associative telescopic stargazing into the past, the present naturally filled with expanses of history. Inclusion of non-linear backstory makes the whole story feel real and alive, its edges open and scalloped instead of straight, orderly, contrived, and fictional, since memories tend not to appear in order:
Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change diapers but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.
A half-million Scandinavians might like Knausgaard in part because this longing for something more meaningful, his attempts to find meaning and beauty in the banalities of life, his struggles at home and with his artistic ambition, are the mark of a conventional protagonist whose obsessive desires are ceaselessly impeded by obstacles. It’s a double-bind in Knausgaard’s case: art impedes family and family impedes art. Like Homer Simpson’s famous revelation about alcohol, art and family are the cause of and cure for all his problems.
In the second volume, there are two exaggeratedly extreme acts: the drunken face-cutting when younger and the manic immersion that produces his second novel, A Time For Everything, risking his family for the sake of his art. So often I sympathized with the author’s situation. I read passages aloud to my wife involving discussions about day care so similar to discussions we’d just had. She began referring to the thick squarish hardback as my new best friend. As a father of a three-month-old daughter, a writer learning to balance family and art, this volume was even more up my alley than the first one about teenage drinking/bands and the death of his father. Yet, despite convergences, I would never go at my face with a shard of glass and I would never leave my family to live in an office for weeks to write a novel. Of course, it’s possible that neither of these extreme actions ever happened. It’s possible that these semi-sensationalist moments are straight-up fiction. But it feels wrong to type that, as though it betrays a trust established between writer and reader over more than 1000 pages at this point.
I don’t want to make it seem like this series was written only for me, since most likely its revelations about self, its honesty with itself and with the reader, bring the project close to more readers than one. But still, it’s a rare expanse of recently published prose that opines about Thomas Bernhard in the context of the narrator’s search for what he would do after his second novel:
“No space was opened up for me in Bernhard, everything was closed off in small chambers of reflection, and even though he had written one of the most frightening and shocking novels I had read, Extinction, I didn’t want to look down that road, I didn’t want to go down that road. Hell no, I wanted to be as far from that which was closed and mandatory as it was possible to be. Come on! Into the open, my friend, as Hölderlin had written somewhere. But how, how?”
The clear answer to the preceding question is the book itself, a non-annoying narrative loop-de-loop. By the time the above quotation appears on page 409 we have a pretty good idea of how he’ll write his way out. I don’t in any way want to suggest that the book runs cutesy metafictional macros on the reader. It’s more like the second volume begins to catch up to the point in recent history when he began the project. Whereupon I foresaw an ending in which Knausgaard makes it to the absolute present, completely caught up with himself, writing about writing the sentence he’s writing . . .
Early on in the second novel he states that the work is its own reward. Sitting in a room alone working on what he’s writing is all he really wants. There’s something inexplicitly East Asian about his project, his interest in naturally occurring patterns, as though writing is not about creating another form of narrative entertainment or gaining an audience of readers but a meditation that produces text as traces of where his mind traveled whenever it achieved the solitude he longed for. As such, the primary enlightenment Knausgaard offers involves humility and endurance, presented in uniquely formatted short bursts followed by hard returns, amounting to the volume’s thematic climax on page 501:
“If I have learned one thing over these years, which seems to me immensely important, particularly in an era such as ours, overflowing with such mediocrity, it is the following:
Don’t believe you are anybody.
Do not believe you are somebody.
Because you are not. You’re just a smug, mediocre little shit.
Do not believe that you’re anything special. Do not believe that you’re worth anything, because you aren’t. You’re just a little shit.
So keep your head down and work, you little shit. Then, at least, you’ll get something out of it. Shut your mouth, keep your head down, work and know that you’re not worth a shit.
This, more or less, was what I had learned.
This was the sum of all my experience.
This was the only worthwhile thought I’d ever had.”
Again, part of the struggle for the author is to triage eventual criticism that he’s a self-serving megalomaniacal freak. He’s successful in this. He wins the reader over thanks to what seems like sincere introspection throughout. But also through well-phrased contempt for unnamed examples of the sort of self-serving mediocrities he’s afraid he might be or become.
Knausgaard succeeds in presenting the particularities of his conflict with such steadiness and clarity that it appeals on a deep level to a large readership. There are very few sensationalist details or betrayals of confidence that trigger voyeuristic impulses in readers. There’s very little sex, for example, and when it occurs it’s procreative, on a couch after watching a crappy movie. Ultimately, the sense you get from reading this series, the mental and emotional state achieved when silently immersed in its pages, is of connection with another human being, a man from a distant yet familiar place, like yourself in some ways but not in all ways, a man concerned with achieving existential fulfillment, stability, peace. In the end, the project itself seems like proof that he’s achieved a productive balance. There’s a sense that he’s able to write this My Struggle series while maintaining his family. Wikipedia says he’s still married to Linda and they live with their three children, and he’s clearly lived up to manifesto-like spiels about fiction in My Struggle.
I suppose just because a purported half-million Scandinavians have read Knausgaard’s series doesn’t mean I should lump them together. But a great novel seems to bring its readers together, those who’ve shared an experience, each similar yet unique. There’s no question that this volume continues a remarkable series that I expect will have long-lasting influence, at least on me as I gulp down the remaining 2000-plus pages as they appear in English over the next few years. If Knausgaard’s project influences a generation of literary autobiographers, in theory, for now, it’s fine with me. I’d love to see more fiction that feels unlike fiction because it consists of fact selected, arranged, and charged with the purpose of presenting itself as real. Not hyper-real reality or semblances seen through the scrim of tasteful artifice, but as real as it gets, raw, unadorned, and awesome.
Book Three: Boyhood Island
Translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett
Move over robins, tulips, pastels, and jelly beans, the appearance of a fresh volume of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard now marks the coming of spring and will continue do so in 2015, 2016, and 2017 2018 as the final three books in the series appear in English in the United States, translated from the Norwegian by Donald Bartlett, published by Archipelago Books in signature squarish hard covers. Quick recap: My Struggle is a six-volume literary autobiography. Comparisons to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—thanks to size and spirit—are inexact and inevitable. On a sentence level, My Struggle is easier reading than the Search. Scene-wise, the former includes no interminable stretches (i.e., hundreds of consecutive pages) in which haute bourgeois folks, gently derided by the narrator, chat about the Dreyfus Affair. There are similarities, sure: Marcel is a tad fey and Karl Ove is called out for being a bit of a nancy boy (a “jessie” in Norwegian slang); both narrators tend to wax ecstatically about unexpected encounters with the sublime (the “little phrase” in Vinteuil’s violin sonata in Swann’s Way; Roxy Music’s “More Than This” in Book Three); and there’s the commonality of fulfilled ambition on the part of both writers to produce elevated literary art by tracing in text their wandering paths en route to life’s core. Proust’s highest highs (for me, in Sodom and Gomorrah, the central pages describing Marcel’s Grandmother’s death and Marcel’s first sight of an airplane) may be higher than those in My Struggle, but overall, as a child of the 1970s and 1980s, I find myself relating more to Karl Ove than to Marcel.
My Struggle: Book One began with the narrator/author’s current state as a father of a few kids, backtracked to his own childhood, spent much time dramatizing a postadolescent search for alcohol on New Year’s Eve, focused a bit on the author’s terrible teenage rock band, before committing to a heartbreaking, detailed description of cleaning up the literal and figurative mess after his alcoholic father’s death. Book Two: A Man in Love (see above) is more about the quotidian details of raising a family while trying to write (specifically, it covers the time the author wrote A Time for Everything, an extraordinary retelling of the Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah stories and others, but set in Norway, focused on the interaction between humans and angels on Earth, a novel that wonderfully complements Book Two since both books share details and scenes heavily fictionalized in one yet not at all in the other). Book Two offers some shocking scenes and plentiful straightforward insight into living, writing, and art. More than Book One, which seemed to wobble a bit through its first half until it detailed the father’s dissolution and death, Book Two seems to me an absolute masterpiece. The current Book Three, “Boyhood,” is the prequel to Book One, and it too is masterly, albeit in a quieter way than Book Two.
The first two volumes begin with description of life as a parent of young children before diving into the waters of the past, which in Knausgaard’s hands are clear and refreshingly chilly. Despite often moving associatively instead of linearly, things never get murky. The point of view is always solid. We’re situated in a scene or an image that’s explored and developed and then we move on, often crossing dozens of years in a centimeter-sized space break. Book Three maintains this steady episodic associative structure. It’s all over the place at the pace of youth. But not once does the narrator discuss his wife or three children or his writing career. This is 99% immersion in the activities of daily living of a sensitive kid growing up in the ‘70s, a mama’s boy who lives under the shadow of a father who’s always grabbing young Karl Ove by the ear or the arm and punishing him for the slightest thing. We know this father from the first book. We’ve seen his sons clean up his mess. But now the father is a lean handsome bearded teacher at the high school; he’s about thirty years old and drives fast; he’s involved in local politics, and he’s a footie fan who forces his youngest son to watch with him and his older brother Yngve — and punishes Karl Ove for refusing to consume the ritual soccer-watching treats. The alcoholism that will do the father in is still on the horizon, but mostly he’s a dreadful presence in Book Three who never fails to trigger Karl Ove’s tears.
If I had a digital copy of Book Three I’d search for and count the appearance of the words “cry” or “tears” since it seems that every few pages he’s crying again. That’s the number one lingering image of Book Three: at times it felt like an erotic novel in which climaxes are replaced by tears. They come at the least insult to his fragile yet estimable conception of self. Previous volumes I’ve described as flinty, but youth is fluid, conceptions of self, friendships, the emerging ego, physicality, and desire are fluid, and more often than not, this fluidity emerges from our narrator’s eyes.
The kids call him a “Jessie.” A femme boy. He must be a cute kid since the preadolescent lasses he describes as objectively beautiful are attracted to him, and he takes an interest in clothes because he realizes doing so can help him talk to girls. But his primary interests are dreaming about girls, playing soccer, listening to music, riding bikes, setting fires, swimming, skiing, reading as much as he can (I loved the dense lists of what he read as a child)—the unremarkable activities and attractions of a young boy. Like a magic trick that astounds thanks to a lack of gimmicks and props, sincere detailed divulgence makes these mundanities compelling. Embarrassment lurks around every corner. Arrogance and humility are in constant conflict. The waterworks are always ready to flow. And all the while there’s the slightest awareness that the adult author is gathering early evidence of his mature conceptions of self, family, society, and art.
One of the few times in the novel the narrator comes up out of the past and emerges into the present, he says:
I was so frightened of [my father] that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close.
His footsteps on the stairs – was he coming to see me?
The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth. The lips that parted involuntarily. And then his voice.
Sitting here now, hearing it in my inner ear, I almost start crying.
His fury struck like a wave, it washed through the rooms, lashed at me, lashed and lashed and lashed at me, and then it retreated. Then it could be quiet for several weeks. However, it wasn’t quiet, for it could just as easily come in two minutes as two days. There was no warning. Suddenly, there he was, furious.
It would be unfair to characterize this as the memoir of a man in his 40s looking back at his traumatized youth. Paternal terror is part of it, sure, but more so it’s a dramatized compendium of small memories, the sensations of youth, that can’t help but resonate with most readers, since—regardless of sex, nationality, or age—all readers were once children who at one point, for example, heard their parents piss. Knausgaard compares his mother’s hissing urination with his father’s strong stream. He describes having to wipe the floor after he pees. He talks about shitting in the woods, standing up and letting one go and then analyzing it. He has some money to buy some candy, is super-psyched for his Lox and Nox, but on the way home two older girls take his candy and he cries forever. He needs a cap for swimming class and the one his mother hands him is adorned with a little plastic flower. He and friends throw large stones off overpasses at passing cars. He votes for himself during a classroom election. A little older, essentially serving as the climax in terms of its placement about two-thirds of the way through Book Three, he works his penis into a bottle found in the woods and feels like something is slicing into him. Turns out it’s a black beetle with huge pincers!
I don’t remember voting for myself in a classroom election, I certainly never forced my penis into a bottle, and I didn’t have a domineering father, but for the most part I found myself thinking about relatability as I read. I don’t love the word all that much—finding a novel “relatable” seems like the critical hallmark of weak students in undergrad English Lit classes. But Knausgaard’s extremely relatable material evoked my memories to the point of it seeming like pulling the proverbial rabbit from the hat on my head. Karl Ove and a friend start a band they call Blood Clot—and a rush of memories returns about a “band” I started in third grade called Blue Blood in which I played “drums” (Chock Full of Nuts coffee cans, their openings covered in crayon-scrawled construction paper secured by rubber bands, against which I’d improvise idiosyncratic polyrhythms with Magic Markers). Most scenes and details of Book Three serve as Proustian madeleines for the reader. By so effectively immersing himself and the reader in a nearly plotless progression of text that’s nevertheless compelling, he evokes his childhood in a way that evokes that of readers’ too. It’s like Knausgaard gets out of the way of retelling his childhood story, allowing readers room to remember their own stories. That’s a generous and difficult thing to do.
Who I am to them I have no idea, probably a vague memory of someone they once knew in their childhood years, for they have done so much to one another in their lives since then, so much has happened and with such impact that the small incidents that took place in their childhoods have no more gravity than the dust stirred up by a passing car, or the seeds of a withering dandelion dispersed by the breath of a small mouth. And, oh, wasn’t the latter a fine image, of how event after event is dispersed in the air above the little meadow of one’s own history, only to fall between the blades of grass and vanish?
Knausgaard remembers this period of his life because his family moved as he entered the Norwegian equivalent of high school. The kids he grew up with continued to affect each other through all the incidents of their teenage years and beyond. But Karl Ove’s boyhood ends there. It’s contained in time. And it’s contained in Book Three, event after event dispersed in the clean, crisp air of these pages.
The official publication date isn’t until late May, a few weeks from summer. By then, after what’s been one of the coldest, snowiest winters on record in Philadelphia, let’s hope the preadolescent days of the year bring atmospheric refreshment on par with the sweetness and storms of Knausgaard’s childhood.
Book Four: Dancing in the Dark
Translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett
One day in the distant future, whenever we think about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle series, memories of an era between 2012 through 2018 will come rushing back.
Book One (2012) involved a teenage search for alcohol on New Year’s Eve followed by the alcoholic death of the author’s father some ten years later. Book Two (2013)—the best one by far for me; the volume responsible for the author’s reputation—covered falling in love, fatherhood, the conflict of having a family and trying to write. Book Three (2014), set entirely during his childhood under the shadow of an unpredictable, menacing father, presented regularly occurring instances of tears. Book Four, published in the U.S. in April 2015, replaces tears with nocturnal emission and premature ejaculation.
A six-volume memoir of a chronic masturbator would be problematic. Fortunately, KOK avoids critiques regarding autobiographical autoeroticism:
The fact was I had never masturbated. Had never beat off. Had never played with myself. I was eighteen years old now and it had never happened. Not once. I hadn’t even tried. My lack of experience of this meant that I both knew and didn’t know how to do it. And once I hadn’t done it as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, time passed and it slowly became unthinkable, not in the sense of unheard of, more in the sense of beyond my horizons. The direct result of this was that I had heavy nocturnal emissions. I dreamed about women, and in my sleep not even touching was required, it was enough just to lay my eye on them, standing there, with their beautiful bodies, and I came. If I was close to them in my dreams, again I came. My whole body jerked and convulsed through the night, and my underpants were soaked with semen in the morning. (350)
If all goes well for the remainder of the year, 2015 will be forever linked in our minds with an 18-year-old’s underpants filling up with semen. This one’s narrative arc tracks an academic year as he teaches in a small fishing village in northern Norway, an isolated spot lorded over by fjords and permanent winter darkness. But progression can also be charted in terms of sticky underpants at first, followed by premature ejaculation during failed attempts at coitus, ending with a triumphant scene that made this reader literally LOL as he closed the book.
KOK at this age is sex obsessed, especially since he’s still a virgin. In a civilization lacking significant rights of passage, intercourse is the new bar/bat mitzvah, even in northern Norway in 1987. But there’s more to it than the will to copulate. It’s about exchanging the chrysalis of innocence for the wings of experience, attaining knowledge reserved for adults.
I looked upon [girls] as completely unapproachable creatures, indeed, as angels of a sort, I loved everything about them, from the veins in the skin over their wrists to the curves of their ears, and if I saw a breast under a T-shirt or a naked thigh under a summer dress, it was as though everything in my insides was let loose, as though everything began to swirl around and the immense desire that then arose was as light as light itself, as light as air, and in it there was a notion that everything was possible, not only here but everywhere and not only now but forever. At the same time as all this arose inside me, a consciousness shot up from below, like a waterspout, it was heavy and dark, there was abandon, resignation, impotence, the world closing in on me. There was the awkwardness, the silence, the scared eyes. There were the flushed cheeks and the great unease.
But there were other reasons too. There was something I couldn’t do and something I didn’t understand. There were secrets and there was darkness, there were shady dealings and there was laughter that jeered at everything. Oh, I sensed it, but I knew nothing about it. Nothing. (82)
It’s about love, too: erotic, spiritual, artistic. Young KOK loves women, books, music. But he doesn’t quite love himself. He believes girls detect his lack of confidence the way dogs smell fear. Nearly all members of the opposite sex are attracted to him, nevertheless, including many of his thirteen-year-old students.
My heart beat faster as I stopped beside her. Oh, it was ridiculous, but the awareness that she might be in love with me made it suddenly impossible to behave normally.
I leaned over and she seemed to shrink back. Her breathing changed. Her eyes were locked on to the book. I could smell the fragrance of her shampoo, I studiously avoided any form of contact, placed my finger on the first number she had written. She stroked her hair to the side, rested one elbow on the table. It was as if everything we did had become conscious: every detail became visible, it was no longer unthinking and natural but considered and artificial. (397)
Interactions with students awkwardly and tenderly approach transgression. He admires the form of a student and feels an abyss open inside him. He may be a little in love with Andrea, a thirteen year old, but he knows no one knows. At an all-ages alcohol-soaked party in another town, he kisses a thirteen-year-old girl, regrets it in the morning, and fears repercussions that never come.
But Book Four seems mostly about emerging from childhood into the freedom (and, to a degree, responsibility) of adulthood. It’s about an 18-year-old boy with artistic tendencies as undefined as they are ambitious, in a black beret, white shirt, and black pants held up by a studded belt, emerging from the shadow of youth. The first 100+ pages relay KOK’s arrival in the north to teach, the start of classes, his acclimation to the isolation in which he writes his first stories. One early weekend night, he goes out with new friends and blacks out after drinking too much. An audaciously long stretch of backstory follows (200+ pages), set during the preceding year. KOK’s childhood was lorded over by his increasingly alcoholic father, but he lives with his mother in southern Norway as he finishes high school. He hosts a graduation-type party (cases of beer stacked in the kitchen) that wrecks his mother’s house. That summer he sells cassettes to tourists, drinks, and tries as hard as he can to have sex. He causally mentions being drunk in a car that goes off the road and flips over at 100 kph (62 mph). By the time we return to the bathroom in which the young teacher has just vomited bile, we feel that in no way should he be educating children. He’s an overgrown child himself, fresh off a summer of indulgence in drunkenness and the quest to shed his virginity.
I wanted to steal, drink, smoke hash, and experiment with other drugs – cocaine, amphetamines, mescaline – to get high and live the great rock-and-roll lifestyle, to feel to the last drop of my blood that I couldn’t give a flying fuck about anything. Oh, what appeal there was in that! But then there was all the rest of me inside that wanted to be a serious student, a decent son, a good person. If only I could blow that to smithereens! (320)
Imagine Kurt Cobain in the classroom in 1987. (KOK was born in December 1968; Cobain in February 1967).
KOK knows the order of the planets and has written reviews about bands like Tuxedomoon for hometown newspapers, but there’s not that much difference between students and teacher, we realize, and there’s an expectation therefore that something indecent will happen while the teacher is blacked out one night.
Young Karl Ove is a fan of author Jens Bjørneboe and his History of Bestiality trilogy, the first volume of which describes an alpine wind that drives residents mad, sometimes causing murders, and difficulties with hard cider that often result in fathers killing their entire families. All three volumes consistently emphasize that we live on a thin crust of land between raging magma below and idiotically ordered outerspace above, that it’s no wonder we behave like homicidal lunatics, but there’s also great natural beauty and pleasures galore on Earth. Somewhat like KOK’s father, Bjørneboe was an alcoholic who ultimately hanged himself instead of drinking himself to death. The father’s shadow gives all these volumes their heft, so when young Karl Ove enthuses about his early experience with drink, end-stage alcoholism always lurks off-stage.
Why didn’t they drink? Why didn’t everyone drink? Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person become attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful. (426)
As with the first section of Book One (the teenage quest for alcohol on New Year’s Eve), Book Three (entirely embedded in early childhood), Book Four complicates for me the concept of relatability. Finding a novel “relatable” often seems like a weak critique but part of KOK’s allure is exactly this connection with readers. It’s not so simplistic as “I get what he’s saying, I once constantly thought about losing my virginity, too.” At its best, it’s more about evoking memories in a reader.
Proust is the patron saint of associative memory, the famous phenomenon in which a cookie dipped in tea revives a forgotten world. KOK and his My Struggle series will become associated with something similar: instead of some innocent trigger evoking memories, Knausgaard’s dramatization of his past evokes memories for readers. My Struggle is the madeleine.
His detailed quest for sex opens a world of memory, particularly embarrassing bits not so often aired these days. It takes considerable restraint not to list instances from my life that more or less match those in the novel. And I’m sure many women share memories of these mostly forgotten, awkwardly executed initial attempts at getting it on.
But there’s more to this than that: there’s the image of KOK listening to Led Zep, pacing his apartment with clenched fists, psyching himself up to write. There’s the excitement of his initial immersion in the act of writing. There’s the clueless/confident sense of the importance of what’s been written, a surge at first that hooks the nascent writer for life. And there’s the first experience with criticism, especially the negative sort from his older brother, which fuels his ambition to one day write something like My Struggle:
You don’t think anyone’s going to publish it do you? In all seriousness?
I’ll damn well show him. I’ll damn well show the whole fucking world who I am and what I am made of. I’ll crush every single one of them. I’ll render every single one of them speechless. I will. I will. I damn well will. I’ll be so big no one is even close. No one. No. One. Never. Not a chance. I will be the greatest ever. The fucking idiots. I’ll damn well crush every single one of them.
I had to be big. I had to be.
If not, I might as well end it all. (413)
As KOK once again receives big attention we can expect to see increasingly intense dissent online. This installment supplies more than enough fodder for those who prefer hot-take ridicule and rage over the time-consuming busy work of reading. I generally look forward to superficial, dismissive, reductive critiques based on the author’s gender and race, tweets along the lines of “do we really need more narratives like this?” (White male tales of heterosexual adventures.)
Scott Esposito (editor of the Quarterly Conversation and point person for lit in translation) off-handedly tweeted a few weeks before I started reading that “Book Four is pretty much all about Karl Ove’s penis.” This was followed by the online equivalent of eye rolls and sighs: “please tell me you are joking.” Esposito responded that it’s all about “semen and alcohol,” and the response was “no please make it stop.” Esposito then said it makes sense since KOK is like 18 years old in Book Four, to which the response was “I don’t care just make it stop.”
As attention ramps up with this volume’s release followed by events in NYC and San Francisco in May, we can expect to see more of this sort of thing. Or maybe since KOK’s attempts are so consistently thwarted most will find him (sym)pathetic.
Book Five: Some Rain Must Fall
Translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett
Book Five begins soon after Book Four ends, with a nineteen-year-old Karl Ove triumphantly copulating in a tent. He’s returning from travels, preparing to attend a writing academy in Bergen. He’s been in touch with an angelic girl (Ingvild) he met for a moment, flipped for, and expects to see once school starts. Other than writing and reading, he’s still deeply into music (“pop and indie”). He’s with his brother Yngve a good deal, acclimating to city life in an apartment alone, masturbating for the first time, ignorant of everything other than the distance between his abilities and his ambitions.
The rise and fall of his affections for Ingvild, the all-encompassing, spirit-emboldening, perception-enhancing fizz of it (“inner joy finds an outer counterpart”) and resultant fumbling, drive the first part of Book Five. He’s cray cray for Ingvild but they can hardly talk, they’re too attracted, it’s terrible, it’s fantastic, he drinks too much, screws everything up, he dreams of Yngve kissing her, a dream that proves prophetic and sparks sibling misery until things end between Yngve and Ingvild, whereupon the brothers watch footie and make up for a while before a super-drunk Karl Ove beams a glass at his brother’s face.
Other love stories follow. His experience of love varies with each woman: the first is idealized, lust-filled, impossible to realize; the second is comfortable, caring, normal, sane, stable, yet difficult to maintain; the third combines the others: it’s comfortable, caring, committed, but bonded by passion, idealization, and a sense of right-ness from the start. The opening rounds of this third big love elicit a signature Knausgaard statement, a hard-won declaration that may seem too simple or even unsophisticated out of context: “Life can be so fantastic. Living can be so fantastic.”
Other interests make living fantastic: books, music, writing, drinking. So many titles are listed. (A review limited to lists of authors/books and bands/records mentioned might be ideal.) He’s filling himself with experience and culture, seeing what seeps out when he plays drums poorly in a band called Kafkatrakterne with his brother, when he writes poorly received stories and poems as the youngest member of the Writing Academy, when he opens himself to darkness via drink. At times, Karl Ove stands at the gates of hell, its mouth agape and ready to devour him. There’s a darkness in this volume that threatens to overtake Karl Ove’s life, the way we know from the end of Book One it enveloped his father. He characterizes it while out drinking with Yngve as “dancing in the realm of death.”
The scenes in which he tightropes across the abyss, on the verge of blacked-out drunk, counterbalance ecstatic moments momentarily experienced via love and art. This conflict extends Book Five’s range in a way that makes it weightier than installments since Book Two. Of course, even when most endangered, passed out on someone’s roof in the rain in Iceland, or trying to climb up to a woman’s window only to fall on his back into a huge muddy puddle, he’s protected in part by the bright-shining horizon of his eventual achievements. We know he will write two well-received novels, have a family (he has four kids now), and write six volumes of autobiographical fiction that will rock Scandinavia before storming the UK and US. There’s a sense that everything in Book Five is gathering itself in preparation for literature, the knowledge and experience gained, the low points serving a higher, or at least a later, purpose. But he can’t achieve maturity without first suffering from immorality (stealing bikes, attempting to maim his brother) and self-inflicted harm (drinking to excess, slicing-up his face).
The cover of the Archipelago Books edition makes sense since he’s spiraling, although it’s not necessarily a downward sort of spiral. It’s more of an involution that’s ultimately productive. All the love interests, the random drunken sexual exploits, the reading and early attempts at writing, the early failures at everything important to him, all the spiraling in general — five or six years after school ends and he’s worked in mental institutions and a radio station — expresses itself as a jetty, a bulwark against the metaphorical tides, when he focuses completely on writing his first proper novel:
“It was a fantastic feeling. I had spent ten years writing without achieving anything, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it was just flowing. And what I wrote was of such quality, compared with what I had produced earlier, that I was surprised every evening when I read through what I had written the night before. It was like having a head rush, or walking in your sleep, a state in which you are out of yourself, and what was curious about this particular experience was that it continued unabated.” (579)
He has connections through his interests in books and music that help him get published. Once published, rave reviews appear on the cover of the newspaper, followed by interviews and a bit of celebrity. But the success comes at great personal cost. We know that the woman with whom he has three kids in Book Two is Linda, not Tonje, but the revelation of the devolution and end of his first marriage, particularly the time he spends in solitude on a small desolate island, is surprising and affecting.
Book Five is surely not the first extended stretch of prose to describe the development of a young male writer who plays music, drinks to excess, and experiences what seems like every calibration along the spectrum of love. But this iteration will be read and taken seriously. Why? Because it’s not just about Karl Ove’s books and music and writing and drumming and drinking and carousing with alluring girls. It’s also about his family, his grandparents, his parents, his brother, his cousin, and his surroundings. Bergen is forever wet in this, drenched by what seems like constant pouring rain. Such liquidity syncs with Karl Ove’s malleable identity and position. There’s discussion of the porous borders between Dublin and its characters in Ulysses (“this arrogant brilliant young man [Stephen Dedalus] was perhaps first and foremost a place where things happened . . . the world flowed though him and the story, Augustin, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, everything moved through him and the same was true of Bloom . . .”).
Intertextuality may be this installment’s most interesting aspect, how its curatorial content—the way Knausgaard names and discusses writers and novels, bands and albums—bonds with readers.
“. . . I noticed a young guy with a shaved head and Adorno glasses, not least because he had a copy of Ole Robert Sunde’s Of Course She Had to Ring on the desk in front of him. This was a statement and a signal, a code for the initiated, of whom there were not many, and therefore particularly significant. He read Sunde, he had to be a writer himself.” (462)
Intertextuality, for the most part, functions in Book Five as a sort of secret handshake. When he talks about two of my favorite novels—Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers—in a span of fifteen pages, or when he mentions listening to Tortoise, a band that sound-tracked the second half of the ‘90s for me, it strengthened the bond between writer and this reader. This can cut both ways, however, like when he talks about Smashing Pumpkins, who I never really came around on beyond one song (“1979”). But in general inclusion of this sort of thing unites more than it repels. Fans of Bjork, for example, will feel especially bonded with Karl Ove when he describes attending a party at her home in Iceland and vomiting in her toilet.
The spiral jetty on the cover also works because Book Five concludes a long and winding journey through childhood and adolescence back to the territory of the first and second volumes. This volume returns to the death of the father, covered in detail in the second half of volume one, yet really only touched on here. Karl Ove (horrifically) slices his face in the first instance of a pathological and disturbing courtship ritual, but it’s not the same episode described in Book Two early on with Linda. And, by the end of Book Five, he’s once again being interviewed for articles about writers who have only written one book. He has the idea for A Time for Everything but only approaches it, writing preliminary notes and false-start drafts, not yet ready to abandon his second wife Linda and their child to write for weeks in his office until he’s finished.
Something else about this reading experience I’ll mention although its significance is limited only to this reader: I received the advanced reading copy on the second day of January 2016, whereas previous volumes had arrived in March or April. A new volume of My Struggle had taken its place among robins and jelly beans as a rite of spring the past four years (2012 to 2015), but I couldn’t have been happier than to have started 2016 with 629 fresh pages of Knausgaard. (Read it in 50-page sittings, immersed, now planning a trip to Bergen one day.) Ending this volume means the arrival of Book Six, the final installment apparently featuring a 200-page essay on Hitler, may be less than a year away. I know from interviews that one aspect of this project, only signaled by the semi-ironic title at this point, is that Karl Ove as a boy, teen, and a young man shared tendencies with the young, artistically ambitious Adolf Hitler. In a different time and place, Karl Ove suggests he could have become a Hitler, or better yet, Hitler could’ve have written a completely compelling six-series autobiographical novel. That’s a pretty enormous stone to drop into the pool of five-volumes of prose. I look forward to seeing how this ripples back through the previous volumes and reevaluating — if not completely re-reading — the complete project as soon as possible next year.
Book Six: The End
Translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken
It’s hard to talk about a 1148-page book that’s only one of six. Book Six, the final installment 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. As you’ve already probably definitely ascertained from my impressions of Books One through Five above, 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.
*
To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). 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).