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Min kamp #1
A Death in the Family
Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his life with painful honesty. He writes about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and unpredictable father, and his bewilderment and grief on his father鈥檚 death.
When Karl Ove becomes a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature. Knausgaard has created a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives. A profound and mesmerizing work, written as if the author鈥檚 very life were at stake.
Shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Award.
When Karl Ove becomes a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature. Knausgaard has created a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives. A profound and mesmerizing work, written as if the author鈥檚 very life were at stake.
Shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Award.
490 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
4436 people are currently reading
50517 people want to read
About the author
Karl Ove Knausg氓rd
77听books7,015听followersNominated to the 2004 Nordic Council鈥檚 Literature Prize & awarded the 2004 Norwegian Critics鈥� Prize.
Karl Ove Knausg氓rd (b. 1968) made his literary debut in 1998 with the widely acclaimed novel Out of the World, which was a great critical and commercial success and won him, as the first debut novel ever, The Norwegian Critics' Prize. He then went on to write six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle (Min Kamp), which have become a publication phenomenon in his native Norway as well as the world over.
Karl Ove Knausg氓rd (b. 1968) made his literary debut in 1998 with the widely acclaimed novel Out of the World, which was a great critical and commercial success and won him, as the first debut novel ever, The Norwegian Critics' Prize. He then went on to write six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle (Min Kamp), which have become a publication phenomenon in his native Norway as well as the world over.
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August 11, 2015
I sat, leaning slightly forward, and continued to stare at the screen, but I could think of nothing to say. I shifted my weight, trying to find a more comfortable position, and scratched my head, using my left hand; my right shoulder had still not completely recovered from the skiing accident I had suffered earlier that year, when for a few days I had felt near death. Now, it was hard to remember how I had experienced that time. A small shower of dandruff landed on the keyboard, and I wondered if I ought to change to a different brand of shampoo, but I had recently bought five bottles of Garnier Extra Mild, which were still sitting on the right-hand side of the cupboard under the bathroom sink, just behind a blue and white packet of paper tissues. It seemed ridiculous to waste the shampoo. I visualized the curved font on the label; now it occurred to me that exactly the same font had appeared on the tins of golden syrup I had eagerly spooned over my porridge as an eight-year-old. Not only that, the color of the shampoo was almost the same as that of the syrup. I felt a sudden connection to the person I had been then, and saw my father, now dead, looking at me as I dragged my spoon through the viscous syrup, stirring it into small waves and curlicues as it gradually diffused into the cooling porridge. I knew I was wasting precious time: I had been sitting there all afternoon, and so far I had not written a word. A wave of angst washed over me. My eyes filled with tears. I moaned involuntarily.
脜氓氓氓氓氓氓氓氓, I said. 脜氓氓氓氓氓氓氓氓.
Not, my girlfriend, appeared in the doorway.
Are you alright? she said anxiously. What is it?
It's okay, I said. I'm just reviewing Min kamp.
[to Min kamp 2]
脜氓氓氓氓氓氓氓氓, I said. 脜氓氓氓氓氓氓氓氓.
Not, my girlfriend, appeared in the doorway.
Are you alright? she said anxiously. What is it?
It's okay, I said. I'm just reviewing Min kamp.
[to Min kamp 2]
March 10, 2023
I lay on the beige textile corner sofa thinking that I should start writing my review for A Death In The Family, My Struggle Part 1. I sit up, unplug the laptop from the white charger and sit back down. I open the lid, punch in the password and click on the Notes application icon. A new blank page is revealed to me. I then start to look at the empty screen and realize I am hungry. I sit up again and take an orange form the fruit basket which also containes pears, apples, bananas and kiwis. I reach for the fruit knife from the counter and start to cut the orange peel in equal sized parts. The smell of fresh orange juice fills my nostrils with expectation. I start to unwrap each juicy orange bit and put them in a bowl to take with me. I lay in the sofa again with the laptop on my lap. I start to type a few words while eating the orange. Bored already? I am. However, Knausgaard writes in the same excruciating detail about all sorts of mundane stuff and I was never bored (almost) while reading this almost 500 pages memoir.
Here is an example of his detail at its worse: 鈥淚 joined Yngve, who was standing in front of the house hold detergents section. We took Jif for the bathroom, Jif for the kitchen, Ajax all-purpose cleaner, Ajax window cleaner, Mr. Muscle for extra-difficult stains鈥�- and he goes on and on with the things he bought. Yes, he wrote almost half a page about his shopping choices in a local supermarket.
The first few times I heard of this book and the omnipresent comparison with Proust, I thought that it is the kind of book literature 鈥渟nobs鈥� would read because of its originality and to prove their endurance with an unreadable novel. In short, I ran away from it with all my might. Gradually, after reading more and more positive reviews from friends, my attitude became a bit more accepting and I even became interested. While on holiday to beautiful Norway, I bought a couple of novels, this one included. I was surprised by the fact that I was drawn into the Karl Ove Knausgaard鈥檚 memoir right from the first sentence.
鈥淔or the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action will cease of its own accord, and the bloody will begin to run towards the body鈥檚 lowest point, where it will collect in a small pool, visible from the outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whiter skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain.鈥� Creepy but fascinating at the same time.
It took me two months to finish the first of this massive six volume fictionalized autobiography. I felt that I could not be rushed. Even though the book is filled with unnecessary mundane details about the author鈥檚 life and it does not have an obvious plot, I found it strangely readable and fascinating as a literary Big Brother can be.
The volume is structured in two parts, the first one deals with the author as a boy growing up, with bits and pieces from different periods. The 2nd part discusses the death of his alcoholic father and the burial preparations which triggers more memories from childhood. There is also a part about him as a struggling writer trying to be affectionate to a pregnant wife and to also find the much needed solitude to write. The narration shifts between painfully detailed memories of everyday activities, including banal dialogues between family and friends, to deep philosophical insights.
鈥淲riting is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing鈥檚 location and aim? But how to get there?鈥�
Knausgaard is an amazing writer, a wizard who manages to keep one interested and willing to absorb all his written words. His sincerity is shocking and disarming. We get to see him as a self-absorbed man who is sometimes a jerk with the ones around him, who loathes his father and wants him dead but is destroyed by his death. A man who likes to be alone and is afraid to talk to people but writes a 7 volume memoir about himself. It was fascinated to enter Knausgaard mind with all its contradictions and flaws.
Here is an example of his detail at its worse: 鈥淚 joined Yngve, who was standing in front of the house hold detergents section. We took Jif for the bathroom, Jif for the kitchen, Ajax all-purpose cleaner, Ajax window cleaner, Mr. Muscle for extra-difficult stains鈥�- and he goes on and on with the things he bought. Yes, he wrote almost half a page about his shopping choices in a local supermarket.
The first few times I heard of this book and the omnipresent comparison with Proust, I thought that it is the kind of book literature 鈥渟nobs鈥� would read because of its originality and to prove their endurance with an unreadable novel. In short, I ran away from it with all my might. Gradually, after reading more and more positive reviews from friends, my attitude became a bit more accepting and I even became interested. While on holiday to beautiful Norway, I bought a couple of novels, this one included. I was surprised by the fact that I was drawn into the Karl Ove Knausgaard鈥檚 memoir right from the first sentence.
鈥淔or the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action will cease of its own accord, and the bloody will begin to run towards the body鈥檚 lowest point, where it will collect in a small pool, visible from the outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whiter skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain.鈥� Creepy but fascinating at the same time.
It took me two months to finish the first of this massive six volume fictionalized autobiography. I felt that I could not be rushed. Even though the book is filled with unnecessary mundane details about the author鈥檚 life and it does not have an obvious plot, I found it strangely readable and fascinating as a literary Big Brother can be.
The volume is structured in two parts, the first one deals with the author as a boy growing up, with bits and pieces from different periods. The 2nd part discusses the death of his alcoholic father and the burial preparations which triggers more memories from childhood. There is also a part about him as a struggling writer trying to be affectionate to a pregnant wife and to also find the much needed solitude to write. The narration shifts between painfully detailed memories of everyday activities, including banal dialogues between family and friends, to deep philosophical insights.
鈥淲riting is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing鈥檚 location and aim? But how to get there?鈥�
Knausgaard is an amazing writer, a wizard who manages to keep one interested and willing to absorb all his written words. His sincerity is shocking and disarming. We get to see him as a self-absorbed man who is sometimes a jerk with the ones around him, who loathes his father and wants him dead but is destroyed by his death. A man who likes to be alone and is afraid to talk to people but writes a 7 volume memoir about himself. It was fascinated to enter Knausgaard mind with all its contradictions and flaws.
March 10, 2020
鈥滲ut Dad was no longer breathing. That was what had happened to him, the connection with the air had been broken, now it pushed against him like any other object, a log, a gasoline can, a sofa. He no longer poached air, because that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world.鈥�
I first met Karl Ove Knausgaard while watching an interview he gave to BBC. He has all this barely tamed hair surrounding a face that conveys peaceful reflection. He has dramatic, bold features. Hollywood casting need look no further for what a novelist should look like or an artist or maybe even a poet. I can easily see him walking around in a toga in Ancient Greece, with a flock of students following him around, waiting to tongue any words he wished to speak.
Karl Ove is obsessed with his father, and therefore by extension, he is obsessed with himself. To understand how he feels about his father, he has to also understand himself. He can鈥檛 just loath his father without loathing himself. He can鈥檛 like himself until he figures out what it was that made his father so indifferent.
Did his father abuse him? Karl Ove doesn鈥檛 share any physical confrontations, but the way he keeps track of his father would indicate that there was a real fear of his father鈥檚 presence. 鈥漌hen I could see him I felt safer with him, and in a way that was what mattered most. I knew his moods and had learned how to predict them long ago, by means of a king of subconscious categorization system, I have later come to realize, whereby the relationship between a few constants was enough to determine what was in store for me, allowing me to make my own preparations. 鈥� The brooding silence of his father and the difficulty that he, his older brother Yngve, and their mother had having a conversation with him can also be a form of unintended abuse.
His father was unhappy.
I found it interesting that no one seemed to explore the idea of what was making his father unhappy. Was it a natural chemical imbalance? A dissatisfaction with life? A melancholy over feelings of failure? There are five more volumes, so more may be revealed. As children, we don鈥檛 really care why our parents are upset; we just hope they aren鈥檛 upset with us. Analysis of our parents comes much later when we first start to navigate the perils of creating our own life on our own raft.
His father didn鈥檛 drink much alcohol, and then if the Glomma River had turned to booze, he would have gladly drowned in it. The boys were long gone, living their own lives. He moved in with his mother and drank himself to death rather efficiently and quickly. When they came for the funeral, they found their grandmother in a state they never expected to see.
鈥漈he dress she was wearing was discolored with stains and hung off her scrawny body. The top part of her bosom the dress was supposed to cover revealed ribs shining through the skin. Her shoulder blades and hips stuck out. Her arms were no more than skin and bone. Blood vessels ran across the backs of her hands like thin, dark blue cables.
She stank of urine.鈥�
A few years ago, I bought a house to use as a rental. An old woman had lived there by herself. The carpets had not been swept in a long time. Knobs were broken on the appliances. Everything was dusty and dirty. Smudge fingerprints were on the walls. The living room carpet had a huge brown blood stain that had never been cleaned up properly. The ceilings of every room was black with cigarette smoke. The house had been neglected for years, which also had me thinking that the woman had been neglected as well. Family becomes busy, and they don鈥檛 realize that their older relatives have become incapable or indifferent to caring for their home, but also for their person. It was certainly a lesson for me and reading about Karl Ove鈥檚 grandmother reinforced my own need to be attentive to my older relatives.
The book jumps around from time period to time period. We get a glimpse of Karl Ove when he is working as a writer, struggling to be an attentive husband to a pregnant wife when all he wants to do is disappear into the world he is creating with his words. 鈥滻 have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive. And when what has kept me going for my whole adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape.鈥�
I always love pictures like this because it is like looking into the soul of reader. I can look at the books on their shelves.
Karl Ove has an addictive personality, and drinking and smoking is not spoken in terms of having one or two, but in having multitudes until he is somewhere beyond drunk and his throat is raw with smoke. He finds that, if he drinks, he can reach the happy zone where others at a party seem to reach so effortlessly. Smoking calms his jittery nerves down. He is self-medicating to appear as normal as possible, as many of us do.
The book is oddly hypnotic. His writing style, even in translation was smooth and easy to read. I asked myself a couple of times why I was reading this? It isn鈥檛 really my kind of thing, but every time I set it down to read something else, it wasn鈥檛 long before I reached for it again. I almost felt like a priest hearing Karl Ove鈥檚 confession, a whisper out of the dark Norwegian night.
鈥滱nd death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.鈥�
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:
I first met Karl Ove Knausgaard while watching an interview he gave to BBC. He has all this barely tamed hair surrounding a face that conveys peaceful reflection. He has dramatic, bold features. Hollywood casting need look no further for what a novelist should look like or an artist or maybe even a poet. I can easily see him walking around in a toga in Ancient Greece, with a flock of students following him around, waiting to tongue any words he wished to speak.
Karl Ove is obsessed with his father, and therefore by extension, he is obsessed with himself. To understand how he feels about his father, he has to also understand himself. He can鈥檛 just loath his father without loathing himself. He can鈥檛 like himself until he figures out what it was that made his father so indifferent.
Did his father abuse him? Karl Ove doesn鈥檛 share any physical confrontations, but the way he keeps track of his father would indicate that there was a real fear of his father鈥檚 presence. 鈥漌hen I could see him I felt safer with him, and in a way that was what mattered most. I knew his moods and had learned how to predict them long ago, by means of a king of subconscious categorization system, I have later come to realize, whereby the relationship between a few constants was enough to determine what was in store for me, allowing me to make my own preparations. 鈥� The brooding silence of his father and the difficulty that he, his older brother Yngve, and their mother had having a conversation with him can also be a form of unintended abuse.
His father was unhappy.
I found it interesting that no one seemed to explore the idea of what was making his father unhappy. Was it a natural chemical imbalance? A dissatisfaction with life? A melancholy over feelings of failure? There are five more volumes, so more may be revealed. As children, we don鈥檛 really care why our parents are upset; we just hope they aren鈥檛 upset with us. Analysis of our parents comes much later when we first start to navigate the perils of creating our own life on our own raft.
His father didn鈥檛 drink much alcohol, and then if the Glomma River had turned to booze, he would have gladly drowned in it. The boys were long gone, living their own lives. He moved in with his mother and drank himself to death rather efficiently and quickly. When they came for the funeral, they found their grandmother in a state they never expected to see.
鈥漈he dress she was wearing was discolored with stains and hung off her scrawny body. The top part of her bosom the dress was supposed to cover revealed ribs shining through the skin. Her shoulder blades and hips stuck out. Her arms were no more than skin and bone. Blood vessels ran across the backs of her hands like thin, dark blue cables.
She stank of urine.鈥�
A few years ago, I bought a house to use as a rental. An old woman had lived there by herself. The carpets had not been swept in a long time. Knobs were broken on the appliances. Everything was dusty and dirty. Smudge fingerprints were on the walls. The living room carpet had a huge brown blood stain that had never been cleaned up properly. The ceilings of every room was black with cigarette smoke. The house had been neglected for years, which also had me thinking that the woman had been neglected as well. Family becomes busy, and they don鈥檛 realize that their older relatives have become incapable or indifferent to caring for their home, but also for their person. It was certainly a lesson for me and reading about Karl Ove鈥檚 grandmother reinforced my own need to be attentive to my older relatives.
The book jumps around from time period to time period. We get a glimpse of Karl Ove when he is working as a writer, struggling to be an attentive husband to a pregnant wife when all he wants to do is disappear into the world he is creating with his words. 鈥滻 have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive. And when what has kept me going for my whole adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape.鈥�
I always love pictures like this because it is like looking into the soul of reader. I can look at the books on their shelves.
Karl Ove has an addictive personality, and drinking and smoking is not spoken in terms of having one or two, but in having multitudes until he is somewhere beyond drunk and his throat is raw with smoke. He finds that, if he drinks, he can reach the happy zone where others at a party seem to reach so effortlessly. Smoking calms his jittery nerves down. He is self-medicating to appear as normal as possible, as many of us do.
The book is oddly hypnotic. His writing style, even in translation was smooth and easy to read. I asked myself a couple of times why I was reading this? It isn鈥檛 really my kind of thing, but every time I set it down to read something else, it wasn鈥檛 long before I reached for it again. I almost felt like a priest hearing Karl Ove鈥檚 confession, a whisper out of the dark Norwegian night.
鈥滱nd death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.鈥�
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:
November 29, 2022
Karl Ove Knausgaard - Norwegian novelist born in 1968
This first volume of the author's novel captures episodes in his life, usually as a boy growing up but sometimes events in his twenties and thirties and also reflections as he writes in his forties, through a particular lens: the poignant emotions and heart-break of a teenager. While this would probably be a formula for literary disaster if attempted by most writers, in the skillful hands of Mr. Knausgaard it is a formidable achievement.
How does he do it? Darn if I know but, like a Cirque du Soleil juggler juggling eleven balls at once, Karl Ove makes it look easy. You might ask: `Why can't I write like that?' Well, go ahead and try! You will find out very quickly just how extremely difficult such a feat is to pull off. For example, he mixes this hypersensitivity with both light and dark humor as he sits at his writing desk and projects how the public will ponder his death, and captures the flavor in a number of wonderfully whimsical poems. Here are a few snatches:
Here lies a man who never complained
A happy life he never gained
His last words before he died
And went to cross the great divide
Were: Oh, Lord, there's such a chill
Can someone send a happy pill?
**
Here lies a man of letters
A noble man of Nordic birth
Alas, his hands were bound in fetters
Barring him from knowing mirth
Once he wrote with dash and wit
Now he's buried in a pit
Come on, worms, take your fill,
Taste some flesh, if you will
Try an eye
Or a thigh
He's croaked his last, have a thrill.
**
Book not accepted, the man blew his top
He guzzled and belched and couldn't stop
His belly it grew, his belt got tight,
His eyes glared, his tongue alight
"I only wanted to write what was right!"
And why have many reviewers, both men and women, described Karl Ove Knausgaard's writing as riveting and gripping? In large measure, I think the answer lies in the fact that the author's words reawaken the reader's own forgotten teenager years with all their intensity, insecurity and emotional, hormonal topsy-turvy. Matter of fact, the connection is so direct, many people have had the strong sense they were reading their own autobiography instead of his. In a way, this was my experience, as well.
One last example - here is a bit of the narrator's passionate swirl, age sixteen, when he is with Hanne, the first love of his life: "What does laconic mean? she asked, her green eyes looking at me. Every time she did that I almost fell apart. I could smash all the windows around us, knock all the pedestrians to the ground and jump up and down on them until all signs of life were extinguished, so much energy did her eyes fill me with. I could also grab her around the waist and waltz down the street, throw flowers at everyone we met and sing at the top of my voice." Ah, to be sixteen and in love. This is only Book One. Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote six thick volumes of My Struggle. What an exhilarating read; what a narrative voice; what an author. Thanks Karl.
Coda: Volume One contains powerful, almost overwhelming emotionally charged scenes revolving around Karl Ove's father. Be prepared for some tough going as you turn the pages, especially toward the end of the book.
December 10, 2022
This is the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, a magnus opus which as wonderfully put by the New York Times is essentially a "six volume, 3,600 page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six volume, 3,600 page Norwegian novel." There's been a death in Karl's family and semi-stream of conscious-like in episodic fashion he looks back in detail at the highs and lows of his childhood and teens as well as the present... oh yeah, and it is all real personal history, taking autobiographical writing to a new place.
This book is highly lauded around the world, but what did I think of it? In the first 50-odd pages I thought this was a dead-cert Five Star read, until the tedium set-in, this feels like one of those books that you have to immerse yourself in it 'to get it', so my reading this book whilst mostly using public transport has probably done it a disservice. But that asides, should I rate a biography highly just because of the brutally honest retelling of his life, especially about the slow disintegration of family by a thousand little almost painless cuts, painless to the parents to a degree; but painful for Karl and to a lesser extent his brother. If I could get the other five books free or from a library, I would certainly want to read them though. A Three Star, 6.5 out of 12
Karl Ove in the flesh :)
2022 read
This book is highly lauded around the world, but what did I think of it? In the first 50-odd pages I thought this was a dead-cert Five Star read, until the tedium set-in, this feels like one of those books that you have to immerse yourself in it 'to get it', so my reading this book whilst mostly using public transport has probably done it a disservice. But that asides, should I rate a biography highly just because of the brutally honest retelling of his life, especially about the slow disintegration of family by a thousand little almost painless cuts, painless to the parents to a degree; but painful for Karl and to a lesser extent his brother. If I could get the other five books free or from a library, I would certainly want to read them though. A Three Star, 6.5 out of 12
Karl Ove in the flesh :)
2022 read
reviews-of-books-i-didnt-read
June 7, 2021I just came across a quote from Celeste Ng which pretty much sums this thing up for me. She admitted she couldn't finish it and added :
What really frustrates me about it is that, for centuries, extremely average straight white men get volumes to tell every detail of their lives, while stories by anyone else have to fight to be published at all.
What really frustrates me about it is that, for centuries, extremely average straight white men get volumes to tell every detail of their lives, while stories by anyone else have to fight to be published at all.
March 5, 2022
ECCE HOMO
Avevo molti pregiudizi su il Mein Kempf di Karl Ove Knausg氓rd, che in norvegese suona un filo meno raccapricciante: Min Kamp.
Migliaia di pagine (pi霉 o meno quattromila, dipende dalle edizioni) scritte nell鈥檃rco di due anni. Diffidenza totale! Autofiction portata all鈥檈stremo. La sensazione che il suo ego facesse impallidire perfino quello di Emm脿nuel Carr猫re (scrittore che ho abbandonato dopo quattro letture proprio perch茅 ho un limite con l鈥檃utoreferenzialit脿). I paragoni, ripetuti da pi霉 parti, con la Recherche: ma siamo matti, Proust non si tocca, nessuno pu貌 neppure sfiorarlo! Addirittura la sua foto in primo piano sulla copertina, non sulla quarta o sulla bandella, proprio davanti manco fosse Miss Universo.
Poi ho deciso di dargli una chance.
O di darla a me.
Per giunta parte male: i discorsi iniziali su morti e defunti mi sono sembrati di profondit脿 solo apparente, in realt脿 li ho trovati insipidi e pretenziosi. Per esempio quando si stupisce - fino al punto di trovare la cosa manifestazione di cinismo 鈥� che nelle agenzie di pompe funebri siano sparse scatole di kleenex. Al suo posto avrei evitato.
La prima entrata in scena del padre 猫 raggelante. Anafettivo 猫 eufemismo. Eppure scorrono le pagine e il figlio narratore, intendo Karl Ove, non lo dice esplicitamente, si limita a raccontarne i comportamenti, ma non esprime opinioni n茅 giudizi. Viene da pensare che avrebbe avuto bisogno di un sano percorso psicanalitico.
Il pessimo comportamento dello stesso Karl Ove con i suoi stessi figli (che so, scossi e sbatacchiati a ripetizione), come se ripetesse con entusiasmo e dedizione il modello appreso da suo padre, probabilmente meno violento ma molto pi霉 gelido. E di nuovo, viene da pensare che avrebbe avuto bisogno di un sano percorso psicanalitico
Uno dei quadri preferiti di Karl Ove Knausg氓rd: l鈥檃utoritratto a 63 anni di Rembrandt (1669, London Nationa Gallery).
E allora com鈥櫭� che appena preso in mano 鈥榮to tomo ne ho letto centoventi pagine in un fiato? Cos鈥櫭� che mi ha catturato e trascinato avanti?
Magari un filo di voyeurismo.
Forse una scrittura chiara, non particolarmente elaborata, ma mai tirata via: efficace, sempre sul pezzo, che non permette distrazioni.
Possibile che siano stati quei momenti in cui descrive particolari, dettagli, minuzie, temperature, luci, e tu ti chiedi, ma come fa a ricordarsi 鈥榮te cose con tanta chiarezza, che memoria ha鈥� Poi, ti viene da pensare che siano parti letterari e che quindi l鈥檃utobiografia e la finzione siano intrecciate a meraviglia.
E magari sono stato conquistato dalla sua sincerit脿, dal suo cuore messo a nudo in modo cos矛 imbarazzante che gli avrei quasi suggerito di coprirsi, vestiti, non lo vedi che sei nudo, non puoi esporti cos矛.
Sulla copertina del suo romanzo d鈥檈sordio (Fuori dal mondo, 1998, mai tradotto in italiano) uno scatto di Jock Sturges.
Tre aspetti ricorrenti mi hanno particolarmente colpito: la quantit脿 di volte che Knausg氓rd scrive e descrive le sue lacrime, i suoi pianti, che sgorgano numerosi anche in momenti che non sembrano giustificarli, fino al punto che qualche volta viene da dubitarne; l鈥檌nsistenza ossessiva su dettagli inezia, quasi stesse cercando di trovare il suo karma attraverso l鈥檈lenco e descrizione di marginalit脿 e quisquilie 鈥� che so, per esempio, con l鈥檈lenco delle marche dei detersivi, addirittura la storia degli stessi, il racconto delle pulizie nella casa dove muore il padre, mattonella per mattonella, listello per listello; il racconto di episodi che sembrerebbe automatico dovrebbero generare senso di colpa e pentimento, ma dei quali invece Knausg氓rd si assolve senza incertezza e traccia d鈥檕nta, senza neppure porsi il problema: e qui, per esempio, mi riferisco a quelli di bullismo e sfott貌 esasperato che praticava negli anni di liceo, o al trattamento dei suoi piccoli figli in certi momenti.
La scrittrice e poetessa Linda Bostrom, seconda moglie di Karl Ove, madre dei suoi quattro figli, in un ritratto giovanile. Karl Ove e Linda erano sposati all鈥檈poca di questo libro, e i figli erano ancora tre, due femmine e un maschio.
Knausg氓rd non ne fa mistero: 猫 presto chiaro che la titanica lotta, lunga tremilaseicento pagine divise in sei volumi, 猫 con se stesso, con il suo febbrile sogno, e bisogno, di scrivere ed essere scrittore.
Lontanissimo da qualsiasi tentazione d鈥檈nfasi, con approccio che mi verrebbe da definire documentaristico, quasi si trattasse di altro soggetto e altra storia da s茅 鈥� il che probabilmente giustifica l鈥檃tteggiamento di totale auto-assoluzione - senza censure, e con quella che forse si pu貌 chiamare sincerit脿, o onest脿, Karl Ove si fa Holden e Huck Finn, si fa Zeno e Dante, Mersault e doctor Watson, diventa la madre di tutti i narratori omodiegetici, e giunto nel mezzo del cammin di questa via, finalmente, uccide il padre, simbolicamente compie giustizia filiare. Uccide suo padre che non ha mai imparato a essere padre, quell鈥檜omo 猫 moto senza aver capito cosa vuol dire avere figli.
Poi, anche se tutto sommato si tratta dei suoi primi quarant鈥檃nni, credo che a un certo punto ho sentito che Knausg氓rd pi霉 che parlare di me, stesse parlando a me. Direttamente, a me.
Ma forse, questo 猫 pi霉 facile se si scrive la verit脿?
Bergen al tramonto (foto di Daniele Rielli).
Avevo molti pregiudizi su il Mein Kempf di Karl Ove Knausg氓rd, che in norvegese suona un filo meno raccapricciante: Min Kamp.
Migliaia di pagine (pi霉 o meno quattromila, dipende dalle edizioni) scritte nell鈥檃rco di due anni. Diffidenza totale! Autofiction portata all鈥檈stremo. La sensazione che il suo ego facesse impallidire perfino quello di Emm脿nuel Carr猫re (scrittore che ho abbandonato dopo quattro letture proprio perch茅 ho un limite con l鈥檃utoreferenzialit脿). I paragoni, ripetuti da pi霉 parti, con la Recherche: ma siamo matti, Proust non si tocca, nessuno pu貌 neppure sfiorarlo! Addirittura la sua foto in primo piano sulla copertina, non sulla quarta o sulla bandella, proprio davanti manco fosse Miss Universo.
Poi ho deciso di dargli una chance.
O di darla a me.
Per giunta parte male: i discorsi iniziali su morti e defunti mi sono sembrati di profondit脿 solo apparente, in realt脿 li ho trovati insipidi e pretenziosi. Per esempio quando si stupisce - fino al punto di trovare la cosa manifestazione di cinismo 鈥� che nelle agenzie di pompe funebri siano sparse scatole di kleenex. Al suo posto avrei evitato.
La prima entrata in scena del padre 猫 raggelante. Anafettivo 猫 eufemismo. Eppure scorrono le pagine e il figlio narratore, intendo Karl Ove, non lo dice esplicitamente, si limita a raccontarne i comportamenti, ma non esprime opinioni n茅 giudizi. Viene da pensare che avrebbe avuto bisogno di un sano percorso psicanalitico.
Il pessimo comportamento dello stesso Karl Ove con i suoi stessi figli (che so, scossi e sbatacchiati a ripetizione), come se ripetesse con entusiasmo e dedizione il modello appreso da suo padre, probabilmente meno violento ma molto pi霉 gelido. E di nuovo, viene da pensare che avrebbe avuto bisogno di un sano percorso psicanalitico
Uno dei quadri preferiti di Karl Ove Knausg氓rd: l鈥檃utoritratto a 63 anni di Rembrandt (1669, London Nationa Gallery).
E allora com鈥櫭� che appena preso in mano 鈥榮to tomo ne ho letto centoventi pagine in un fiato? Cos鈥櫭� che mi ha catturato e trascinato avanti?
Magari un filo di voyeurismo.
Forse una scrittura chiara, non particolarmente elaborata, ma mai tirata via: efficace, sempre sul pezzo, che non permette distrazioni.
Possibile che siano stati quei momenti in cui descrive particolari, dettagli, minuzie, temperature, luci, e tu ti chiedi, ma come fa a ricordarsi 鈥榮te cose con tanta chiarezza, che memoria ha鈥� Poi, ti viene da pensare che siano parti letterari e che quindi l鈥檃utobiografia e la finzione siano intrecciate a meraviglia.
E magari sono stato conquistato dalla sua sincerit脿, dal suo cuore messo a nudo in modo cos矛 imbarazzante che gli avrei quasi suggerito di coprirsi, vestiti, non lo vedi che sei nudo, non puoi esporti cos矛.
Sulla copertina del suo romanzo d鈥檈sordio (Fuori dal mondo, 1998, mai tradotto in italiano) uno scatto di Jock Sturges.
Tre aspetti ricorrenti mi hanno particolarmente colpito: la quantit脿 di volte che Knausg氓rd scrive e descrive le sue lacrime, i suoi pianti, che sgorgano numerosi anche in momenti che non sembrano giustificarli, fino al punto che qualche volta viene da dubitarne; l鈥檌nsistenza ossessiva su dettagli inezia, quasi stesse cercando di trovare il suo karma attraverso l鈥檈lenco e descrizione di marginalit脿 e quisquilie 鈥� che so, per esempio, con l鈥檈lenco delle marche dei detersivi, addirittura la storia degli stessi, il racconto delle pulizie nella casa dove muore il padre, mattonella per mattonella, listello per listello; il racconto di episodi che sembrerebbe automatico dovrebbero generare senso di colpa e pentimento, ma dei quali invece Knausg氓rd si assolve senza incertezza e traccia d鈥檕nta, senza neppure porsi il problema: e qui, per esempio, mi riferisco a quelli di bullismo e sfott貌 esasperato che praticava negli anni di liceo, o al trattamento dei suoi piccoli figli in certi momenti.
La scrittrice e poetessa Linda Bostrom, seconda moglie di Karl Ove, madre dei suoi quattro figli, in un ritratto giovanile. Karl Ove e Linda erano sposati all鈥檈poca di questo libro, e i figli erano ancora tre, due femmine e un maschio.
Knausg氓rd non ne fa mistero: 猫 presto chiaro che la titanica lotta, lunga tremilaseicento pagine divise in sei volumi, 猫 con se stesso, con il suo febbrile sogno, e bisogno, di scrivere ed essere scrittore.
Lontanissimo da qualsiasi tentazione d鈥檈nfasi, con approccio che mi verrebbe da definire documentaristico, quasi si trattasse di altro soggetto e altra storia da s茅 鈥� il che probabilmente giustifica l鈥檃tteggiamento di totale auto-assoluzione - senza censure, e con quella che forse si pu貌 chiamare sincerit脿, o onest脿, Karl Ove si fa Holden e Huck Finn, si fa Zeno e Dante, Mersault e doctor Watson, diventa la madre di tutti i narratori omodiegetici, e giunto nel mezzo del cammin di questa via, finalmente, uccide il padre, simbolicamente compie giustizia filiare. Uccide suo padre che non ha mai imparato a essere padre, quell鈥檜omo 猫 moto senza aver capito cosa vuol dire avere figli.
Poi, anche se tutto sommato si tratta dei suoi primi quarant鈥檃nni, credo che a un certo punto ho sentito che Knausg氓rd pi霉 che parlare di me, stesse parlando a me. Direttamente, a me.
Ma forse, questo 猫 pi霉 facile se si scrive la verit脿?
Bergen al tramonto (foto di Daniele Rielli).
July 12, 2014
鈥淟ife's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her b鈥檚.鈥�
I鈥檓 not sure I can say much of anything about this work that hasn鈥檛 already been said. I still have several volumes to finish. The next one is nearly 600 pages, so in a way, I鈥檓 just getting started on this enterprise.
Perhaps the best I can do is to offer a few of my observations. All I keep thinking is that this is the best boring book I鈥檝e ever read. I can鈥檛 believe how utterly boring it is and that I cared. Every detail seemed mundane and lead to nowhere. I can鈥檛 believe that Knausgaard actually made me care about his first beer run or the detailed cleaning strategy he used to prepare his deceased father鈥檚 home for a wake.
In the London Book of Reviews, the novelist Ben Lerner writes, 鈥淚t鈥檚 easy to marshal examples of what makes My Struggle mediocre. The problem is: it鈥檚 amazing.鈥�
And that鈥檚 exactly right. This boring book is amazing. Ask me why, and I doubt I could adequately answer.
The only fleck of amazement I can even begin to articulate is the genius it took to actually remember or create an allusion to memory that had to occur for this book to be written.
How in the world could anyone remember such detail from a decade ago? I can barely remember five minutes ago. I found it almost unbelievable that Knausgaard remembered how deep he dipped his teabag into the cup at his Grandmother鈥檚 house back in the early 90s鈥�.
The only way I could continue reading and find it believable was to devise some theories as to how he remembered these details. I know this is a novel and categorized as fiction, so there鈥檚 always liberties. But, I also know that it鈥檚 been marketed as autobiographical and that many of his own family members were so mortified by this book that they have refused to speak to him again.
Here are my theories about how Knausgaard constructed the details in this book:
鈥� He knew he was going to write this novel from a very early age and therefore set about remembering and notating every single detail of his life, mundane or not. Genius.
鈥� His memory failed him and he couldn鈥檛 remember anything, except for the major incidences, and therefore was forced to make up all the details, and every single minor observation is fiction. Genius.
鈥� It鈥檚 a combination of both. He remembered some things, and what he didn鈥檛, he had to relive or re-observe. He literally went back to his grandmother鈥檚 home and cleaned the railings with a rag and detergent and then recorded his observations as they would鈥檝e occurred had he remembered every detail. Genius!
He does write that at one point he burned all of his journals from when he was younger, so my first theory may not be correct. He also states that his memory is weak, which supports the theory that the details were made up. Again, just a theory. There may be proof otherwise.
I don鈥檛 know how he did it. Perhaps I鈥檒l gain some insights in the next volume.
Either way, I can鈥檛 undo what鈥檚 been done. I have a feeling this book will forever change the way that I read and observe life.
I wish I could say more or review more eloquently, but this is one of those you just have to see for yourself.
I鈥檓 not sure I can say much of anything about this work that hasn鈥檛 already been said. I still have several volumes to finish. The next one is nearly 600 pages, so in a way, I鈥檓 just getting started on this enterprise.
Perhaps the best I can do is to offer a few of my observations. All I keep thinking is that this is the best boring book I鈥檝e ever read. I can鈥檛 believe how utterly boring it is and that I cared. Every detail seemed mundane and lead to nowhere. I can鈥檛 believe that Knausgaard actually made me care about his first beer run or the detailed cleaning strategy he used to prepare his deceased father鈥檚 home for a wake.
In the London Book of Reviews, the novelist Ben Lerner writes, 鈥淚t鈥檚 easy to marshal examples of what makes My Struggle mediocre. The problem is: it鈥檚 amazing.鈥�
And that鈥檚 exactly right. This boring book is amazing. Ask me why, and I doubt I could adequately answer.
The only fleck of amazement I can even begin to articulate is the genius it took to actually remember or create an allusion to memory that had to occur for this book to be written.
How in the world could anyone remember such detail from a decade ago? I can barely remember five minutes ago. I found it almost unbelievable that Knausgaard remembered how deep he dipped his teabag into the cup at his Grandmother鈥檚 house back in the early 90s鈥�.
The only way I could continue reading and find it believable was to devise some theories as to how he remembered these details. I know this is a novel and categorized as fiction, so there鈥檚 always liberties. But, I also know that it鈥檚 been marketed as autobiographical and that many of his own family members were so mortified by this book that they have refused to speak to him again.
Here are my theories about how Knausgaard constructed the details in this book:
鈥� He knew he was going to write this novel from a very early age and therefore set about remembering and notating every single detail of his life, mundane or not. Genius.
鈥� His memory failed him and he couldn鈥檛 remember anything, except for the major incidences, and therefore was forced to make up all the details, and every single minor observation is fiction. Genius.
鈥� It鈥檚 a combination of both. He remembered some things, and what he didn鈥檛, he had to relive or re-observe. He literally went back to his grandmother鈥檚 home and cleaned the railings with a rag and detergent and then recorded his observations as they would鈥檝e occurred had he remembered every detail. Genius!
He does write that at one point he burned all of his journals from when he was younger, so my first theory may not be correct. He also states that his memory is weak, which supports the theory that the details were made up. Again, just a theory. There may be proof otherwise.
I don鈥檛 know how he did it. Perhaps I鈥檒l gain some insights in the next volume.
Either way, I can鈥檛 undo what鈥檚 been done. I have a feeling this book will forever change the way that I read and observe life.
I wish I could say more or review more eloquently, but this is one of those you just have to see for yourself.
September 18, 2016
My first impression of Karl Ove Knausgaard came from a black and white photograph published with a review of his book "A Time For Everything" in The New York Review of Books.
He is seen smoking against the rugged Norwegian landscape, hair disheveled, wearing an old, battered tee-shirt, lost in thought. Completely and unabashedly himself, yet ill at ease. Entirely present, feet deeply rooted in the present moment, yet his mind is clearly in flight, flickering at the surface of his gaze.
The striking portrait somehow encompasses all of the qualities of his writing: intense, raw, physical, elusive, inquisitive and elemental.
...
What Knausgaard achieves in "My Struggle", his mad yet mesmerizing 6-volume autobiographical enterprise, is simply the most "real" depiction of the movements of the mind that I have ever read. A life told in its most boring minutiae and its most elemental highs and lows, as it moves from the most mundane to the most transcendent.
Knausgaard plays alongside Proust or Virginia Woolf in his desire to encapsulate all of his experience as a human being, a teenager, a son, a friend, a lover, a father but most of all: a writer. But he does it with even more urgency, more radicality, more anger and more modernity. An Everyman of the 21st century with a 17th century temperament.
The second volume of this autobiography, which tackles the fire and vagaries of love as well as the deep ambivalences that lie at the heart of domestic life and parenthood, is utterly engrossing.
Read him, and listen to him below speak about Book 1, which deals with his youth and the death of his father, and he might very well change the way you look at the world around you and your own reaction to events.
He is seen smoking against the rugged Norwegian landscape, hair disheveled, wearing an old, battered tee-shirt, lost in thought. Completely and unabashedly himself, yet ill at ease. Entirely present, feet deeply rooted in the present moment, yet his mind is clearly in flight, flickering at the surface of his gaze.
The striking portrait somehow encompasses all of the qualities of his writing: intense, raw, physical, elusive, inquisitive and elemental.
...
What Knausgaard achieves in "My Struggle", his mad yet mesmerizing 6-volume autobiographical enterprise, is simply the most "real" depiction of the movements of the mind that I have ever read. A life told in its most boring minutiae and its most elemental highs and lows, as it moves from the most mundane to the most transcendent.
Knausgaard plays alongside Proust or Virginia Woolf in his desire to encapsulate all of his experience as a human being, a teenager, a son, a friend, a lover, a father but most of all: a writer. But he does it with even more urgency, more radicality, more anger and more modernity. An Everyman of the 21st century with a 17th century temperament.
The second volume of this autobiography, which tackles the fire and vagaries of love as well as the deep ambivalences that lie at the heart of domestic life and parenthood, is utterly engrossing.
Read him, and listen to him below speak about Book 1, which deals with his youth and the death of his father, and he might very well change the way you look at the world around you and your own reaction to events.
April 4, 2021
鈥淭he only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing.鈥�
I could easily rate My Struggle both 3 and 5 stars, it is hard to put my thoughts into words for this one. I have complete Knausgaard on my shelves, as I've received them as a gift, and My struggle is a favorite book of someone I love dearly. Having a complicated relationship with popular contemporary writers, I was afraid to read it, as I was almost certain I will find it to be overrated, and end up disliking it.
But Knausgaard won me over with his honesty and rawness, as I connected a lot of his life experiences to my own. In a way, the book is and isn't outstanding. In my opinion, Knausgaard's writing here is uneven, as he has strikes of brilliancy intertwined with bits of sloppy writing. Blending the genre of autobiography and literary fiction, I've seen the same thing done better (one example I've recently read, much less known is 鈥淯n jour, je m'en irai sans en avoir tout dit鈥�). Speaking of Proust, the only similarity they have is the same niche in which the In Search for Lost Time and My Struggle are.
Based on similar books I've adored that can be read both as a novel and memoir, I've expected to get to know little more about author's philosophy and world view, I've expected a marriage between contemplation, reflection, and the mundane. I find Knausgaard at times a bit shallow in his approach, but looking at quotes I've gathered from this book and reading his profound interviews I think he has a massive potential to go deeper than he did. I feel like there were moments where his true voice would shine through, but the need to speak from his hurt part about traumatic times in detail was greater. In the future, I would want more inner world blended with outer, even though Knausgaard makes a clear point that he is writing only what he wants to say, not what other people what him to write. He does not have the pretension to create beautiful art with luscious prose and dense writing as Proust. But even when the writing was simple and concentrated thoroughly on the mundane I was still engaged in what Knausgaard had to say, and I found even 鈥渂oring鈥� parts of everydayness interesting.
I also love how honest he is in his expression of emotion. He is unapologetic about the fact he is sensitive and feels deeply, and I find this quality very appealing, healthy example to all the men that are perhaps still ashamed of their emotions.
The theme of a complex father-son relationship and complicated mourning of the death of a parent with which the child didn't have a healthy relationship is important for a lot of people. In my opinion, that is the strongest point in the book and an immense contribution for speaking the truth of the aftermath of a pathological parent-child dynamics.
Knausgaard's grief process reminded me of a sentence I've read in one book about psychotherapy:
"There are indeed no dead parents, they can be alive or half dead. If they have died, they live in the world of the child's inner world, in the form of an introject. A parent dies with the death of his children. "
Writer relationship with his father is a perfect example of how emotionally abusive parent can damage the child. Even though the physical violence isn't absent (he talks about being beaten from time to time and, for instance, being put in the cold water as punishment for crying), the relationship is soaked with tension, terror, and angst for Karl Ove predominantly because of psychological misconduct, from humiliation to abadonment.
The emotional/psychological abuse is so much harder to pinpoint and unmask, as most people can't even recognize it in its true form, even though they live every day with the aftermath of it. Most people come into psychotherapy in that state, they know that something wasn't quite right in the relationship with their parent but don't know what that is, and the objective observer is needed to unpack the scope of damage from a harmful relationship. The impact of a parent relationship is present as long as we live, and tragically, the influence of an unhealthy relationship is much greater than the healthy one. Ironically, the person will cope much easier with the death of a loving parent, than with the death of an unloving one. The figure of a parent can not vanish, it exists in our inner world till the day we die, and the parent's pathology will be played out in our life one way or another if we don't untangle and address it.
As Cliff Sargent beautifully said, a lot of this book deals with the massive importance our father's voice has on our life. Father's voice defies reason and logic and sometimes is even stronger than God's. And the voice of the infamous father will perpetuate the unholy trinity of anger, shame and guilt.
The presence of his father, dead or alive, is the dark shadow glooming over Karl's life.
In addition, I will put here quotes that describe the harmful nature of Karl Ove's relationship with his father, as I hope that if someone recognizes the familiar patterns in these, the comprehension that that wasn't right will come. It is not normal for a child to struggle with a constant feeling of humiliation and suffering, to be afraid of father's fury reactions all the time, gripped with feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing. It is not ok, it is abusive.
鈥淐an鈥檛 we put on the heating?鈥� son asks dad. 鈥淚t鈥檚 freezing in here.鈥� 鈥淔weezing?鈥� dad mimics, 鈥淲e鈥檙e not putting on any heating, however fweezing it is.鈥� 鈥淚 couldn鈥檛 roll my 鈥榬鈥檚,鈥� son says in his text. 鈥楴ever had been able to say 鈥渞鈥�, it was one of the traumas of my late childhood. My father used to mimic me, sometimes to make me aware that I couldn鈥檛 pronounce it. But I just turned and went back upstairs. I did not want to give him the pleasure of seeing my moist eyes.鈥�
鈥淎n eight-year-old boy runs across the grass because he鈥檇 seen death in the sea, on the TV news, bounding over to tell dad. Don鈥檛 run across the grass, Dad scowls, sledgehammer in hand. 鈥業 stared at him. How could he know I had run?鈥� His back was turned. 鈥淎nd shut your gob,鈥� dad says to son. 鈥淵ou look like an idiot.鈥� 鈥淵ou鈥檙e a waste of space.鈥�
鈥淭he slightest critical remark and his fury washed over me. The same with parents鈥� evenings. The tiniest comment about my talking too much or a lack of care was followed by a venting of anger. Not to mention the few times I had been given a note to take home. That was Judgment Day. All hell broke loose.鈥�
I hope the impact of this book is and will be to help the wounded inner child's experiences to be validated. As Knausgaard did not demonize his father, rather characterized him as a broken person, the validation of that experience does not mean that one can't love and understand his parent and feel empathy for him. The anger and hate towards the parent are always deeply entangled with love, admiration, and desire to be held and appreciated by that parent, and that is something that never fades.
鈥淚 had also wanted to show him that I was better than he was. That I was bigger than he was. Or was it just that I wanted him to be proud of me? To acknowledge me?鈥�
Interestingly, writing wasn't and still isn't cathartic for Knausgaard, he insists on it, but I'm more hopeful about it. Contrary to his belief, I think unraveling deep scopes of internal pain, as Knausgaard did in his book can have immense cathartic potential.
I would highly recommend this book to EVERY person EVER struggling with a difficult parent-child dynamic or parent's death.
鈥淎nd to me, what had Dad been to me?
Someone I wished dead.
So why all these tears?鈥�
I could easily rate My Struggle both 3 and 5 stars, it is hard to put my thoughts into words for this one. I have complete Knausgaard on my shelves, as I've received them as a gift, and My struggle is a favorite book of someone I love dearly. Having a complicated relationship with popular contemporary writers, I was afraid to read it, as I was almost certain I will find it to be overrated, and end up disliking it.
But Knausgaard won me over with his honesty and rawness, as I connected a lot of his life experiences to my own. In a way, the book is and isn't outstanding. In my opinion, Knausgaard's writing here is uneven, as he has strikes of brilliancy intertwined with bits of sloppy writing. Blending the genre of autobiography and literary fiction, I've seen the same thing done better (one example I've recently read, much less known is 鈥淯n jour, je m'en irai sans en avoir tout dit鈥�). Speaking of Proust, the only similarity they have is the same niche in which the In Search for Lost Time and My Struggle are.
Based on similar books I've adored that can be read both as a novel and memoir, I've expected to get to know little more about author's philosophy and world view, I've expected a marriage between contemplation, reflection, and the mundane. I find Knausgaard at times a bit shallow in his approach, but looking at quotes I've gathered from this book and reading his profound interviews I think he has a massive potential to go deeper than he did. I feel like there were moments where his true voice would shine through, but the need to speak from his hurt part about traumatic times in detail was greater. In the future, I would want more inner world blended with outer, even though Knausgaard makes a clear point that he is writing only what he wants to say, not what other people what him to write. He does not have the pretension to create beautiful art with luscious prose and dense writing as Proust. But even when the writing was simple and concentrated thoroughly on the mundane I was still engaged in what Knausgaard had to say, and I found even 鈥渂oring鈥� parts of everydayness interesting.
I also love how honest he is in his expression of emotion. He is unapologetic about the fact he is sensitive and feels deeply, and I find this quality very appealing, healthy example to all the men that are perhaps still ashamed of their emotions.
The theme of a complex father-son relationship and complicated mourning of the death of a parent with which the child didn't have a healthy relationship is important for a lot of people. In my opinion, that is the strongest point in the book and an immense contribution for speaking the truth of the aftermath of a pathological parent-child dynamics.
Knausgaard's grief process reminded me of a sentence I've read in one book about psychotherapy:
"There are indeed no dead parents, they can be alive or half dead. If they have died, they live in the world of the child's inner world, in the form of an introject. A parent dies with the death of his children. "
Writer relationship with his father is a perfect example of how emotionally abusive parent can damage the child. Even though the physical violence isn't absent (he talks about being beaten from time to time and, for instance, being put in the cold water as punishment for crying), the relationship is soaked with tension, terror, and angst for Karl Ove predominantly because of psychological misconduct, from humiliation to abadonment.
The emotional/psychological abuse is so much harder to pinpoint and unmask, as most people can't even recognize it in its true form, even though they live every day with the aftermath of it. Most people come into psychotherapy in that state, they know that something wasn't quite right in the relationship with their parent but don't know what that is, and the objective observer is needed to unpack the scope of damage from a harmful relationship. The impact of a parent relationship is present as long as we live, and tragically, the influence of an unhealthy relationship is much greater than the healthy one. Ironically, the person will cope much easier with the death of a loving parent, than with the death of an unloving one. The figure of a parent can not vanish, it exists in our inner world till the day we die, and the parent's pathology will be played out in our life one way or another if we don't untangle and address it.
As Cliff Sargent beautifully said, a lot of this book deals with the massive importance our father's voice has on our life. Father's voice defies reason and logic and sometimes is even stronger than God's. And the voice of the infamous father will perpetuate the unholy trinity of anger, shame and guilt.
The presence of his father, dead or alive, is the dark shadow glooming over Karl's life.
In addition, I will put here quotes that describe the harmful nature of Karl Ove's relationship with his father, as I hope that if someone recognizes the familiar patterns in these, the comprehension that that wasn't right will come. It is not normal for a child to struggle with a constant feeling of humiliation and suffering, to be afraid of father's fury reactions all the time, gripped with feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing. It is not ok, it is abusive.
鈥淐an鈥檛 we put on the heating?鈥� son asks dad. 鈥淚t鈥檚 freezing in here.鈥� 鈥淔weezing?鈥� dad mimics, 鈥淲e鈥檙e not putting on any heating, however fweezing it is.鈥� 鈥淚 couldn鈥檛 roll my 鈥榬鈥檚,鈥� son says in his text. 鈥楴ever had been able to say 鈥渞鈥�, it was one of the traumas of my late childhood. My father used to mimic me, sometimes to make me aware that I couldn鈥檛 pronounce it. But I just turned and went back upstairs. I did not want to give him the pleasure of seeing my moist eyes.鈥�
鈥淎n eight-year-old boy runs across the grass because he鈥檇 seen death in the sea, on the TV news, bounding over to tell dad. Don鈥檛 run across the grass, Dad scowls, sledgehammer in hand. 鈥業 stared at him. How could he know I had run?鈥� His back was turned. 鈥淎nd shut your gob,鈥� dad says to son. 鈥淵ou look like an idiot.鈥� 鈥淵ou鈥檙e a waste of space.鈥�
鈥淭he slightest critical remark and his fury washed over me. The same with parents鈥� evenings. The tiniest comment about my talking too much or a lack of care was followed by a venting of anger. Not to mention the few times I had been given a note to take home. That was Judgment Day. All hell broke loose.鈥�
I hope the impact of this book is and will be to help the wounded inner child's experiences to be validated. As Knausgaard did not demonize his father, rather characterized him as a broken person, the validation of that experience does not mean that one can't love and understand his parent and feel empathy for him. The anger and hate towards the parent are always deeply entangled with love, admiration, and desire to be held and appreciated by that parent, and that is something that never fades.
鈥淚 had also wanted to show him that I was better than he was. That I was bigger than he was. Or was it just that I wanted him to be proud of me? To acknowledge me?鈥�
Interestingly, writing wasn't and still isn't cathartic for Knausgaard, he insists on it, but I'm more hopeful about it. Contrary to his belief, I think unraveling deep scopes of internal pain, as Knausgaard did in his book can have immense cathartic potential.
I would highly recommend this book to EVERY person EVER struggling with a difficult parent-child dynamic or parent's death.
鈥淎nd to me, what had Dad been to me?
Someone I wished dead.
So why all these tears?鈥�
March 12, 2016
Book 1: A Death in the Family
"And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor."
First, let me say something about this novel (and I'm assuming the next five novels) that is both simple and genius. This is a weird book. It captures the reader because it falls into a funky zone between memoir and fiction. He is telling secrets. Opening the dirty closets. Cleaning the shit out of an old house. It is exhibitionism of sex, shit, death, life, etc., but it is also a clear reflection. So much of the power of this novel for me is a direct response to how clear I see myself in his exposure. I read about his relationship with his brother, his father, his girlfriends, his mother and I see myself. I see his thoughts on music and art and I think, hell, that is me too. I know it isn't, but that is the trick. Knausgaard uses these forms, or creates this form, in his novel that he fills with his own memories and history and soon you are seeing yourself in these same locks.
Structure/Forms/Locks
In his novel he mentions that great literature is structure or form first. He talks about this about half way through the book:
"For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had gotten nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature's other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called "writing". Writing is more about destroying than creating. - p195
Add this to Knausgaard's view of time and I think we get a hint at how he writes, and perhaps, what makes this novel so great:
For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never bring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. At the same time I see that precisely this repetitiveness, this enclosedness, this unchangingness is necessary, it protects me. - p 33
So, I see his novels as a combination of these ideas, something like below:
Eugenides captures this construction perfectly in his review in the New York Times:
"Knausgaard鈥檚 life is a grab bag of events and recollections, and he uses whatever is handy. He doesn鈥檛 lie or make things up (so far as I know). But the 颅selection process he subjects his memories to in order to fulfill the narrative demands of his writing rises to a level of considerable artifice. Other writers invent; Knausgaard remembers. His raw materials are more authentic (maybe), but the products they create no less artful."
Knausgaard's life/history/experience is the water he fills his locks with; the paint he paints his story with. It isn't history. It isn't autobiography. It isn't even good memory. It is art imitating life.
"And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor."
First, let me say something about this novel (and I'm assuming the next five novels) that is both simple and genius. This is a weird book. It captures the reader because it falls into a funky zone between memoir and fiction. He is telling secrets. Opening the dirty closets. Cleaning the shit out of an old house. It is exhibitionism of sex, shit, death, life, etc., but it is also a clear reflection. So much of the power of this novel for me is a direct response to how clear I see myself in his exposure. I read about his relationship with his brother, his father, his girlfriends, his mother and I see myself. I see his thoughts on music and art and I think, hell, that is me too. I know it isn't, but that is the trick. Knausgaard uses these forms, or creates this form, in his novel that he fills with his own memories and history and soon you are seeing yourself in these same locks.
Structure/Forms/Locks
In his novel he mentions that great literature is structure or form first. He talks about this about half way through the book:
"For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had gotten nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature's other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called "writing". Writing is more about destroying than creating. - p195
Add this to Knausgaard's view of time and I think we get a hint at how he writes, and perhaps, what makes this novel so great:
For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never bring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. At the same time I see that precisely this repetitiveness, this enclosedness, this unchangingness is necessary, it protects me. - p 33
So, I see his novels as a combination of these ideas, something like below:
Eugenides captures this construction perfectly in his review in the New York Times:
"Knausgaard鈥檚 life is a grab bag of events and recollections, and he uses whatever is handy. He doesn鈥檛 lie or make things up (so far as I know). But the 颅selection process he subjects his memories to in order to fulfill the narrative demands of his writing rises to a level of considerable artifice. Other writers invent; Knausgaard remembers. His raw materials are more authentic (maybe), but the products they create no less artful."
Knausgaard's life/history/experience is the water he fills his locks with; the paint he paints his story with. It isn't history. It isn't autobiography. It isn't even good memory. It is art imitating life.
June 2, 2019
Jawdroppingly good. Somehow both a memoir and a page-turner. As smart as it gets, beautiful, and unusually simple for something this deep. A couple of knockout sequences (New Year's Eve party and especially cleaning his Grandma's house). I read it in a day, lagging only when he approached art history.
I am continually amazed, years later, after re-reading, by how many people have ideas about what this is, without having even tried it. I still remember, 6 years ago, the sun in Long Island as I read the sequence about his father's alcoholism. I was drinking a Miller Lite, and felt such nausea, such revulsion, that I had to go to the kitchen and pour it out.
I am continually amazed, years later, after re-reading, by how many people have ideas about what this is, without having even tried it. I still remember, 6 years ago, the sun in Long Island as I read the sequence about his father's alcoholism. I was drinking a Miller Lite, and felt such nausea, such revulsion, that I had to go to the kitchen and pour it out.
June 8, 2015
It was a sense of bewilderment at the utter banality that is the immediate surface of this project of Knausgaard鈥檚 that at first had me thinking 鈥淚鈥檓 not going to be able to see this book through鈥� and questioning not only whether it was worth my time but actually was it worth his, all this writing? It was a genuine bewilderment because I was taken aback, flustered, and not a little annoyed that he seemed so casual in his approach, so utterly unconcerned with any kind of decoration, any kind of Style, that thing that lets one know one is reading a personality that has encountered a world in some kind of authentic way. Nabokov is an overture of interlocking etyms fluttering in accord of each other in a flower garden like the lepidoptera he obsesses over and Gaddis is turmoiled density a kind of cacophony that emerges as tonal bliss and Joyce is the music of the spheres, a radiant cosmos, and Woolf is a kind of chamber orchestra in a shadowy room, but what was this? Just a man talking? Knausgaard is not a stylist, he is not a musician, he might be something like when the rain streaks the pavement different tones of bone-color and you are startled to become aware that this static plain is actually capable of unconcealing multiple appearances, that even a square of pavement can reveal a variety of essences - or when old bricks are made fox red by the right angle of light, fleetingly the animal can be seen in the baked clay. Or the gray cloud bank that arrives and only announces itself, gray cloud bank, but you understand that a gray cloud bank is a touching phenomenon all on its own. He is not Proust. Someone writing at length about their childhood does not make that someone a Proust. Proust is the sound of the different branes of our personal temporal multiverses gently touching one another creating big bangs that detonate and spread subaqueously, subcutaneously, muted and unnoticed but sending us forward in our lives, like we are the disturbed air waves on which the viola sings searching out the ears that might hear. But Knausgaard? He is not these writers; don鈥檛 go looking for them here.
But if you do decide to read this book, don鈥檛 give up on it until you have proceeded deeply into Part Two, because Knausgaard, unconcerned with winning you right away, really comes to life in Part Two, when he is in closest proximity to Death. This is a death-haunted book from page one to the end, and what becomes compelling in Knausgaard鈥檚 exhaustive realism, his absolute dedication to identifying every minutiae of movement, object, sense-item in a scene, is that through his spare prose meditations (almost stone quarries of the everyday) one is forced to reckon with the thought that, because we are involuntarily immersed, from birth, in our miserable, troubled, absurd, sometimes blissful, mostly futile and selfish strivings - since this is a fate we all share, that is only consecrated by Death - then the banality of each life is sacred, and worth the telling. I believe Knausgaard is sincerely approaching his project with the idea that each life is an epic, his not excepted. I see no evidence, in this first book, to qualify the accusation of narcissism, of navel-gazing, unless we are all guilty of this when looking back over our unhappiness, our growth, our attempts at becoming human. This is not narcissism so much as it is a reckoning of self-loathing, (and there is a vital difference between the neuroses of the self that are narcissism and self-loathing) - of coming to terms with our ugly humanity on this rock on which we were washed up at birth, when we plopped out covered in blood, cold, and screaming.
I am intrigued. I am at the very beginning of his project, and I鈥檓 not sold that this is literary greatness. But it is something worthy of your consideration. It might be something necessary...
But if you do decide to read this book, don鈥檛 give up on it until you have proceeded deeply into Part Two, because Knausgaard, unconcerned with winning you right away, really comes to life in Part Two, when he is in closest proximity to Death. This is a death-haunted book from page one to the end, and what becomes compelling in Knausgaard鈥檚 exhaustive realism, his absolute dedication to identifying every minutiae of movement, object, sense-item in a scene, is that through his spare prose meditations (almost stone quarries of the everyday) one is forced to reckon with the thought that, because we are involuntarily immersed, from birth, in our miserable, troubled, absurd, sometimes blissful, mostly futile and selfish strivings - since this is a fate we all share, that is only consecrated by Death - then the banality of each life is sacred, and worth the telling. I believe Knausgaard is sincerely approaching his project with the idea that each life is an epic, his not excepted. I see no evidence, in this first book, to qualify the accusation of narcissism, of navel-gazing, unless we are all guilty of this when looking back over our unhappiness, our growth, our attempts at becoming human. This is not narcissism so much as it is a reckoning of self-loathing, (and there is a vital difference between the neuroses of the self that are narcissism and self-loathing) - of coming to terms with our ugly humanity on this rock on which we were washed up at birth, when we plopped out covered in blood, cold, and screaming.
I am intrigued. I am at the very beginning of his project, and I鈥檓 not sold that this is literary greatness. But it is something worthy of your consideration. It might be something necessary...
December 25, 2012
that statistic about how often the average man thinks of sex? well, double it, change 'sex' to 'death' and you have a hint as to what's going on in my head. the thought that (spoiler) you, me, and everyone we know, ever will know, and/or ever will know of, will end up an inanimate object seems preposterously unfair and, conversely, is what drives me to live-it-the-hell-up in my pitifully brief time on this less-than-a-speck-of-dust in our expanding universe.
obsessed with death, a collector of death (no bodies in my basement, i'm talkin' the artistic and historical representation of), karl ove knausg氓rd jumps to the top of my personal canon (thanon?), edging in there right under ol' philip 'nothing more terrible, nothing more true' larkin.
as with life (KOK's secondary subject), there're pages and pages of dullsville until a flash of the morbidly sublime, ineffable, & mysterious rears its head and all that banality - as with boring memories seen through the lens of time passed - takes on the hazy glow of significance.
an imperfect book: my favorite of the year because of its imperfections. and five more volumes to come. yee-fuckin'-haw!
on seeing his father's corpse:
Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.
on memory:
You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings and Koflach boots. The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child鈥檚 reality and an adult鈥檚, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn鈥檛, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.
obsessed with death, a collector of death (no bodies in my basement, i'm talkin' the artistic and historical representation of), karl ove knausg氓rd jumps to the top of my personal canon (thanon?), edging in there right under ol' philip 'nothing more terrible, nothing more true' larkin.
as with life (KOK's secondary subject), there're pages and pages of dullsville until a flash of the morbidly sublime, ineffable, & mysterious rears its head and all that banality - as with boring memories seen through the lens of time passed - takes on the hazy glow of significance.
an imperfect book: my favorite of the year because of its imperfections. and five more volumes to come. yee-fuckin'-haw!
on seeing his father's corpse:
Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.
on memory:
You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings and Koflach boots. The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child鈥檚 reality and an adult鈥檚, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn鈥檛, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.
February 15, 2020
I was initially sceptical about this Proustian roman fleuve, but I actually really enjoyed it! I find his writing is closer to that of Elena Ferrante than Marcel Proust.
I think there are two Proustian aspects to KOK: the autobiographical angle (the distance from Marcel of the book to Marcel the author is not very great even if often genders are transposed for societal reasons and situations shaked and baked to his narrative) is rather obvious. The other aspect is the roman fleuve and free association of thoughts and ideas which also reminds me of Faulkner. As much as I idolize Proust (I read it in the original French and it was like running a deca-marathon and was one of the greatest, most rewarding experiences of my reading life), I would hesitate to issue a value judgement of Proust being more satisfying. His descriptions are painstakingly accurate and his use of language is absolutely superb, but it is also archaic and often very hard to identify with since even in the Paris of 2019, no one speaks like that anymore. As for KOK, his language (in both English and French translation since I cannot, unfortunately, read the original in Norwegian) is the language of today and so easier to grasp. It also means that the reading time is more compressed: for one Proust book, I needed between one and three months because of the density of the text and the erudite quality of the language whereas I need a few days to a few weeks for a KOK book. This means that the beginnings of the books are still relatively fresh in my mind when I finish KOK whereas with Proust, sometimes I had to go back to refresh my memory. One warning though: I found that the English translation was far better and more "authentic" than the French one (again, big qualifier there because I have no clue what it is like in the original.)
As for comparing him to Ferrante, his language is a modern one (see my comments about Proust) like that of Ferrante, and even if The Neopolitan Tetrology is more visceral and action-packed, the economy of means she uses to evoke a noisy Naples street or a discussion in a caf茅 or an argument is similar in its compact precision to that of KOK.
If I was to introduce one criticism that applies more to KOK than to Proust, it is the telescoping of certain events means that others get skipped over - more in Book 2 where we see the creative process that led to A Time for Everything but then we don't really get to see how he gets from there to Men Kamp. Similarly, also in Book 2, we skip over his life with Tonje after the death of his father to a few years later when he arrives in Stockholm and meets Linda. Perhaps he comes back to this in Book 6, I am not there yet. But sometimes the shifts like that are hard to follow and a bit frustrating for the reader. Back to your point on Proust, I felt that the narrative jumps in La Recherche (apart from the narrative issues with Swann and Odette between Parts 1 and 2 which are contradictory) were smoother and more justifiable.
In Book 1, Karl Ove loses his father and we get glimpses into shades of his past and this particularly difficult relationship. The man dies from drinking himself to death and we are treated to a painfully graphic description of the house where he dies, the grandmother witnessing her son's descent into hell. It is a painful thing to read, but strangely cathartic at the same time. I really enjoyed this passage about life and death, chaos and order:
"Chaos and unpredictability represent both the conditions of life and its decline, one impossible without the other, and even though almost all our efforts are directed towards keeping decline at bay, it does not take more than one brief moment of resignation to be thrust into its light, and not, as now, in shadow. Chaos is a kind of gravity, and the rhythm you can sense in history, of the rise and fall of civilisations, is perhaps caused by this. It is remarkable that the extremes resemble each other, in one sense at any rate, for in both immense chaos and a strictly regulated, demarcated world the individual is nothing, life is everything. In the same way that the heart does not care which life it beats for, the city does not care who fulfils its functions." (p.192)
And despite all this chaos, he describes quiet and concentration in no uncertain terms:
"I put on some water for another cup of coffee and while I was waiting for it to boil, I skimmed through what I had written so far. The dust hovering in the broad, angled shafts of light anxiously followed every current of air. The neighbour in the adjacent flat had begun to play piano, The kettle hissed." (p. 193). I actually thought of Faulkner sitting in his house in Mississippi as I read this initially, and could truly picture the anxious dust motes in his room.
There was another rant on page 218 that stuck out for me:
"Even the phenomena that kill us we know about and understand, such as the bacteria and viruses that invade our bodies, attack our cells, and cause them to grow or die...The whole of the physical world has been elevated to this sphere, everything has been incorporated into the immense imaginary realm from South American rain forests and the islands of the Pacific Ocean to the North African deserts and Eastern Europe's tired, grey towns. Our minds are flooded with images of places we have never been, yet we still know, people we have never met, yet still know and in accordance with which we, to a considerable extent, live our lives. The feeling this gives that the world is small, tightly enclosed around itself, without openings to anywhere else, is almost incestuous, and although I knew this to be deeply untrue since actually, we know nothing about anything, still I could not escape it. The longing I always felt, which some days was so great it could hardly be controlled, had its source here. It was partly to relieve this feeling that I wrote, I wanted to open the world by writing..." (p.218). I can identify with this sense of the absurdity of our modern life where we have these false feelings of proximity thanks to the internet and yet feel isolated to a great degree since there is less human contact.
I like how Karl Ove Knausg氓rd describes the world around and inside of himself and, even if we have different approaches to the banality of life, and we have had different experiences, I feel a certain kinship to him as a fellow human being thanks to this book. I aspire to write something that approaches the honesty and quality of this first instalment of My Struggle.
Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Book 4
Book 5
Book 6
A Time For Everything
I think there are two Proustian aspects to KOK: the autobiographical angle (the distance from Marcel of the book to Marcel the author is not very great even if often genders are transposed for societal reasons and situations shaked and baked to his narrative) is rather obvious. The other aspect is the roman fleuve and free association of thoughts and ideas which also reminds me of Faulkner. As much as I idolize Proust (I read it in the original French and it was like running a deca-marathon and was one of the greatest, most rewarding experiences of my reading life), I would hesitate to issue a value judgement of Proust being more satisfying. His descriptions are painstakingly accurate and his use of language is absolutely superb, but it is also archaic and often very hard to identify with since even in the Paris of 2019, no one speaks like that anymore. As for KOK, his language (in both English and French translation since I cannot, unfortunately, read the original in Norwegian) is the language of today and so easier to grasp. It also means that the reading time is more compressed: for one Proust book, I needed between one and three months because of the density of the text and the erudite quality of the language whereas I need a few days to a few weeks for a KOK book. This means that the beginnings of the books are still relatively fresh in my mind when I finish KOK whereas with Proust, sometimes I had to go back to refresh my memory. One warning though: I found that the English translation was far better and more "authentic" than the French one (again, big qualifier there because I have no clue what it is like in the original.)
As for comparing him to Ferrante, his language is a modern one (see my comments about Proust) like that of Ferrante, and even if The Neopolitan Tetrology is more visceral and action-packed, the economy of means she uses to evoke a noisy Naples street or a discussion in a caf茅 or an argument is similar in its compact precision to that of KOK.
If I was to introduce one criticism that applies more to KOK than to Proust, it is the telescoping of certain events means that others get skipped over - more in Book 2 where we see the creative process that led to A Time for Everything but then we don't really get to see how he gets from there to Men Kamp. Similarly, also in Book 2, we skip over his life with Tonje after the death of his father to a few years later when he arrives in Stockholm and meets Linda. Perhaps he comes back to this in Book 6, I am not there yet. But sometimes the shifts like that are hard to follow and a bit frustrating for the reader. Back to your point on Proust, I felt that the narrative jumps in La Recherche (apart from the narrative issues with Swann and Odette between Parts 1 and 2 which are contradictory) were smoother and more justifiable.
In Book 1, Karl Ove loses his father and we get glimpses into shades of his past and this particularly difficult relationship. The man dies from drinking himself to death and we are treated to a painfully graphic description of the house where he dies, the grandmother witnessing her son's descent into hell. It is a painful thing to read, but strangely cathartic at the same time. I really enjoyed this passage about life and death, chaos and order:
"Chaos and unpredictability represent both the conditions of life and its decline, one impossible without the other, and even though almost all our efforts are directed towards keeping decline at bay, it does not take more than one brief moment of resignation to be thrust into its light, and not, as now, in shadow. Chaos is a kind of gravity, and the rhythm you can sense in history, of the rise and fall of civilisations, is perhaps caused by this. It is remarkable that the extremes resemble each other, in one sense at any rate, for in both immense chaos and a strictly regulated, demarcated world the individual is nothing, life is everything. In the same way that the heart does not care which life it beats for, the city does not care who fulfils its functions." (p.192)
And despite all this chaos, he describes quiet and concentration in no uncertain terms:
"I put on some water for another cup of coffee and while I was waiting for it to boil, I skimmed through what I had written so far. The dust hovering in the broad, angled shafts of light anxiously followed every current of air. The neighbour in the adjacent flat had begun to play piano, The kettle hissed." (p. 193). I actually thought of Faulkner sitting in his house in Mississippi as I read this initially, and could truly picture the anxious dust motes in his room.
There was another rant on page 218 that stuck out for me:
"Even the phenomena that kill us we know about and understand, such as the bacteria and viruses that invade our bodies, attack our cells, and cause them to grow or die...The whole of the physical world has been elevated to this sphere, everything has been incorporated into the immense imaginary realm from South American rain forests and the islands of the Pacific Ocean to the North African deserts and Eastern Europe's tired, grey towns. Our minds are flooded with images of places we have never been, yet we still know, people we have never met, yet still know and in accordance with which we, to a considerable extent, live our lives. The feeling this gives that the world is small, tightly enclosed around itself, without openings to anywhere else, is almost incestuous, and although I knew this to be deeply untrue since actually, we know nothing about anything, still I could not escape it. The longing I always felt, which some days was so great it could hardly be controlled, had its source here. It was partly to relieve this feeling that I wrote, I wanted to open the world by writing..." (p.218). I can identify with this sense of the absurdity of our modern life where we have these false feelings of proximity thanks to the internet and yet feel isolated to a great degree since there is less human contact.
I like how Karl Ove Knausg氓rd describes the world around and inside of himself and, even if we have different approaches to the banality of life, and we have had different experiences, I feel a certain kinship to him as a fellow human being thanks to this book. I aspire to write something that approaches the honesty and quality of this first instalment of My Struggle.
Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Book 4
Book 5
Book 6
A Time For Everything
February 1, 2022
Part I
I can see the crystal clarity of the writing, and appreciate it. But so far the domestic subject matter is dull. Living with mother and father in that particular house, playing loud rock 鈥榥鈥� roll at a local shopping center. Meh. It鈥檚 only page 121 so my hopes remain keen. Knausgaard鈥檚 greatest strength is character. When he delves into local relationships the prose can feel a little like Mann鈥檚 .
Ugh, the petty vanity and lust and insecurity of teens. . . So far there鈥檚 no justification for recounting their blas茅 stories. There seems to be something stiff and ill at ease among the social interactions depicted here. The humor is thin and I can鈥檛 always be sure some of the formality, the stiffness, isn鈥檛 a peculiarity of the translation.
The translator Don Bartlett was interviewed in The Paris Review. He said: 鈥淧ersonally, I think Book Two is the best. I have suggested to people that they should start at the beginning, but I also know Book One has put some readers off. I think some readers check out very quickly because of the theme of death and the focus on self.鈥� -April 28, 2015.
I think the narrator鈥檚 obnoxious. He has been raised well and had every advantage. Happiness writes white. I want to see him fall, keep hoping for that, but that鈥檚 unlikely given the 5 volumes to follow.
Part 2
I much prefer the narrator here in his adult guise. There is agony to the book that鈥檚 completely unsettling. But very little mitigating humor. I speak of the way would use humor. And what is all this matter about art and intellect? It鈥檚 completely opaque. He should get back to telling a story. He鈥檚 not Schopenhauer.
I don鈥檛 believe that all the detail about getting on planes and kissing his wife and making coffee and looking out the window is actual memory, not that much description in an accurate sequence over pages and pages. No. And anyway he says his memory is bad, especially about childhood. Go figure.
鈥淎fter a few hundred pages of this, I started to grumble: I understood that this was "My Struggle"; but did it also have to be my struggle? 's captivating novel "Black Swan Green" has crossed this territory (roughly: the hideousness of a Northern European adolescence in the nineteen-eighties) with greater liveliness and comedy than
Knausgaard summons. And if we must have hundreds of pages of autopsied minutiae, then let them be as well written as the last two enormous volumes in 's unfinished project in novelistic micro-realism.鈥� 鈥攅xcept from James Wood鈥檚 review: The New Yorker, August 8, 2012.
Knausgaard鈥檚 comments here about nightowls struck me as a revelation. It鈥檚 that the night is a less structured time of day, as such it possesses a sense of freedom that one doesn鈥檛 get during the day because of it鈥檚 association with the 9 to 5 grind. Obvious, no doubt, but the explicit connection with freedom is one I had never made.
I stopped page 264. It was just too tedious to bear. Despite some inspired pages, I don鈥檛 care about this stranger. There was too little narrative pleasure. He did not delight this particular reader.
I can see the crystal clarity of the writing, and appreciate it. But so far the domestic subject matter is dull. Living with mother and father in that particular house, playing loud rock 鈥榥鈥� roll at a local shopping center. Meh. It鈥檚 only page 121 so my hopes remain keen. Knausgaard鈥檚 greatest strength is character. When he delves into local relationships the prose can feel a little like Mann鈥檚 .
Ugh, the petty vanity and lust and insecurity of teens. . . So far there鈥檚 no justification for recounting their blas茅 stories. There seems to be something stiff and ill at ease among the social interactions depicted here. The humor is thin and I can鈥檛 always be sure some of the formality, the stiffness, isn鈥檛 a peculiarity of the translation.
The translator Don Bartlett was interviewed in The Paris Review. He said: 鈥淧ersonally, I think Book Two is the best. I have suggested to people that they should start at the beginning, but I also know Book One has put some readers off. I think some readers check out very quickly because of the theme of death and the focus on self.鈥� -April 28, 2015.
I think the narrator鈥檚 obnoxious. He has been raised well and had every advantage. Happiness writes white. I want to see him fall, keep hoping for that, but that鈥檚 unlikely given the 5 volumes to follow.
Part 2
I much prefer the narrator here in his adult guise. There is agony to the book that鈥檚 completely unsettling. But very little mitigating humor. I speak of the way would use humor. And what is all this matter about art and intellect? It鈥檚 completely opaque. He should get back to telling a story. He鈥檚 not Schopenhauer.
I don鈥檛 believe that all the detail about getting on planes and kissing his wife and making coffee and looking out the window is actual memory, not that much description in an accurate sequence over pages and pages. No. And anyway he says his memory is bad, especially about childhood. Go figure.
鈥淎fter a few hundred pages of this, I started to grumble: I understood that this was "My Struggle"; but did it also have to be my struggle? 's captivating novel "Black Swan Green" has crossed this territory (roughly: the hideousness of a Northern European adolescence in the nineteen-eighties) with greater liveliness and comedy than
Knausgaard summons. And if we must have hundreds of pages of autopsied minutiae, then let them be as well written as the last two enormous volumes in 's unfinished project in novelistic micro-realism.鈥� 鈥攅xcept from James Wood鈥檚 review: The New Yorker, August 8, 2012.
Knausgaard鈥檚 comments here about nightowls struck me as a revelation. It鈥檚 that the night is a less structured time of day, as such it possesses a sense of freedom that one doesn鈥檛 get during the day because of it鈥檚 association with the 9 to 5 grind. Obvious, no doubt, but the explicit connection with freedom is one I had never made.
I stopped page 264. It was just too tedious to bear. Despite some inspired pages, I don鈥檛 care about this stranger. There was too little narrative pleasure. He did not delight this particular reader.
Read
October 9, 2019Reasons for Knausgaard's Reception (Notes on the Reviews)
This essay has three postscripts. What follows is a negative account of vol. 1, which I read when it was first out in English; now "My Struggle" is famous, and subsequent volumes have attracted some reflective reviews. Thoughts on those at the end. At the moment, there are three postscripts: I intend to add two more, about Fred Jameson's review and Toril Moi's essay. What is in need of explanation at this point (that is, after every other reader on the planet has tried "My Struggle") is the remarkably broad spectrum of indecision about his work: the fascination coupled with the disagreements about what "My Struggle" is. (This note added October 2019.)
- -
Notes on vol. 1, written c. 2013 (the original was published in 2009)
It鈥檚 possible this book may be memorable. It has structural, narrative, and tonal problems that may, in the end, turn out to be strengths. I have no idea why reviewers say it seems 鈥渓ike real life,鈥� or why 鈥渢he public have fallen to their knees in awe," but I do have some thoughts on its addictive and puzzling qualities.
For me, the compulsion of the reading experience turned on two qualities: perplexity about what Knausgaard imagined he was creating, and the strangeness of the incommensurability between what he apparently imagined, and what he created.
In another context, Knausgaard's endless inventories of uninteresting incidents could have been an emulation of one of Perec鈥檚 experiments in description, but Knausgaard has nothing to do with Oulipean ideas. Or they could have been demonstrations of the triviality of ordinary life, but Knausgaard is only a tiny bit like Kavanaugh and not at all like Larkin. Or they could have been intended to find the sublime or the poignant in the everyday, but that would not account for their length or lack of structure.
It becomes perplexing to decide just what the book is attempting, short of a total inventory of the author鈥檚 life, which the narrator knows is impossible. And that preplexity, for me, is one of the qualities that accounts for the book's hypnotic attraction for many readers. There is a kind of dogged deliberation in 鈥淢y Struggle,鈥� as if the only way to continue is to write, and the only way to write is to write everything: but at the same time Knausgaard doesn鈥檛 record systematically; 鈥淢y Struggle鈥� isn鈥檛 rule-bound or fanatical. It鈥檚 as if he has put all the energy and concentration he has into this project, writing year after year, writing out each memory in detail, omitting nothing, inventorying his entire remaining memory, but without any sense of what a complete life might look like, or any hope of stitching the parts together.
This sort of unsystematic, intermittently oblivious, partly uncaring attitude toward the obsessive compulsive project of plumbing his past produces strange effects. At first, a reader might expect that each episode will have some connection to others, or some special meaning or resonance -- as things usually do in novels. When that turns out not to be the case, a reader might reasonably conclude that the author is just writing as best as he can, about whatever he can remember, hoping the weight and inertia of the project will create, if not literature, then a sort of perplexity. He sometimes interrupts his narratives with meditations, which he apparently thinks are original or interesting; for me they usually aren鈥檛. Only a few of the stories in Part One are interesting or unusual. Here is an example of the sort of meditation that is apparently presented as insightful:
鈥淚 recognized the feeling, it was akin to the one some works of art evoke in me. Rembrandt鈥檚 portrait of himself as an old man in London鈥檚 National Gallery was such a picture, Turner鈥檚 picture of the sunset over the sea off a port of antiquity in the same museum, Caravaggio鈥檚 picture of Christ in Gethsemane. Vermeer evoked the same, a few of Claude鈥檚 paintings, some of Ruisdael鈥檚...鈥� (the list continues; p. 219)
Knausgaard did not have an unusual childhood, and he does not describe it in an inventive way. But there is a strange contradiction between the narrative he wants us to read and the one that emerges as I began to attend to what was going wrong with what I took to be his project of writing a raw, honest memoir.
An example of the strangeness: he spends 200 pages describing his childhood, but he opens Part Two with remarks like this:
鈥淚f I had forgotten something in my childhood it was probably due to repression鈥� (given as a throwaway line, and never developed; p. 216)
or
鈥淚 remembered hardly anything from my childhood.鈥� (p. 189)
Weirdly, he doesn鈥檛 think it鈥檚 worth noting that it sounds odd to say that sort of thing after having spent 200 pages describing his childhood in meticulous detail.
He opens the book with a story about a face he thought he鈥檇 seen in the sea, and it comes back at the opening of Part Two. But, strangely, he doesn't think it is puzzling to simply mention the face, but not draw any meaning from it -- and he never returns to it again. All he gives us is one throwaway line (p. 189):
鈥渢he remarkable thing was that I had forgotten it and now remembered.鈥�
And very strangely, he does not seem to notice that a reader might expect the story of the face in the sea to be of some interest to the narrator himself.
As I read, I became increasingly convinced that Knausgaard was not aware that the success of his project turns not on his anti-literary ambitions, but on the reader's perplexity about his inability and lack of interest in resolving his intentions, and in the strangeness of the results.
- -
First postscript, 2013
Volume 2 is now out in English, and there are signs Knausgaard will become a major figure. At the end of 2013 Rivka Galchen named vol. 2 as the "most interesting literary development" of the year, saying it is "substantive, comical, and artistically singular." (New York Times Book Review, Sunday, December 15, p. 43.) It is singular, but it is loose, unreflective about structure, unaware of readers' plausible expectations, and relentlessly simpleminded about how the everyday has been put into prose.
- -
Second postscript, May 2014
Volume 3 is now out in English, and it's gotten an excellent review by Ben Lerner, "Each Cornflake," London Review of Books, May 22, 2014. (I find this more convincing and clearer than the longer review by William Deresiewicz, " Why Has 鈥楳y Struggle鈥� Been Anointed a Literary Masterpiece?" The Nation, May 13, 2014.)
I am surprised at how widely it's being accepted that Knausgaard is a major novelist -- or, in Lerner's assessment, a largely successful anti-novelist, who is out to end the novel and literature in general by avoiding selection. (By recording everything.) As Lerner notes, that sets up a tension between the endlessness and lack of selectivity in the writing, in which the entire world spills onto the page, on the one hand, and the idea of plot, structure, or development, on the other. This is how Lerner puts it:
"Of course Knausgaard does leave things out (why, I wonder, is sex described in less detail than cornflakes?), selects among scenes and sentences, but we are caught up in the fiction that he doesn鈥檛. Yet that childish sense of open-endedness, in which everything is equally interesting, is countered by another fiction: that the meaning of 'My Struggle' will be revealed at its end, secured by the author鈥檚 death (at least his death qua author). The former fiction is a fiction of formlessness, the undifferentiated, an infinite verticality outside time; and the latter is a fiction that gives form, the imposition of shape on experience, a syntax of events. The constitutive tension of Knausgaard鈥檚 work, its internal struggle, is the push and pull between these two fictions."
Here "death" stands in for the novel and literature in general, and it is a reasonable synecdoche. For me Lerner's way of putting things raises two questions, both of which cannot be definitively answered for English-language readers until the final 3 volumes are translated. The two questions are:
1. Can the supposed lack of structure, choice, taste, plot, style, and skill 鈥� the things that ruined volume 1 for me 鈥� be adequately understood as a bid to escape from literature? I agree that "breaking of the vessel of art, the renunciation of fiction, literary suicide 鈥� these are fictions, and they鈥檙e the devices on which the power of 'My Struggle' depends"; but does the mass of unstructured writing actually work as an escape from fiction?
2. Can the supposed lack of structure, choice, taste, plot, style, and skill be understood as a representation of what Lerner calls "the undifferentiated mass of experience"? Can the flood of "raw" experiences, especially the uninteresting, unremarkable, everyday ones, represent experience?
These are two distinct questions. The first is about strategy: can a novelist put an end to the novel by putting everything into it except the structures that would have made it literature? The second is about experience: is it "experience" that is represented in "My Struggle"?
(I note that the first question is separate from the possibility, which Lerner ponders, that the book might conclude with death, and therefore conclude as literature: the question pertains to the strategy itself, not whether this 6-volume project succeeds. Apparently "My Struggle" does have an ending; is does end with "death": i.e., it has an arc, it does rehabilitate and motivate its formlessness. And apparently, too, Knausgaard has not defeated the novel, even for himself, because he has told an interviewer he is at work on another. But this first question is about strategy, not result.)
My answer to both questions is no. To the first question: I am not persuaded that proposing to have laid down the nameable skills of the novelist is a strategy to avoid literature. Some Oulipean strategies do bypass some parts of literature, but this strategy is too knowing, too deliberate, and 鈥� though I recognize this won't be a popular opinion, given the many enthusiastic reviews of "My Struggle" 鈥� too easy. It's too easy to fill 6 volumes with a spew of uncurated thoughts. It's true the novel "cracks," as Knausgaard himself says ("I thought of this project as a kind of experiment in realistic prose. How far is it possible to go into detail before the novel cracks and becomes unreadable?") but that does not mean literature is left behind or even effectively critiqued. It would be as if someone tried to "ruin" the sonnet by interpolating thousands of extra lines.
To the second question: the undifferentiated mass of experience supposedly rendered in "My Struggle" is itself a trope, an idea about the continuum of sensory experience that comes in part from Hume, Bergson, and de Certeau. "My Struggle" is a large-scale rehearsal of what counts, in such theories, as "raw" experience.
So I doubt the project of "My Struggle": it is not an effective anti-novel, and it does not break through conventions to represent real experience. We need to begin to ask more closely why we think, as Lerner does, that "it鈥檚 amazing."
- -
Third postscript, April 2016.
The fifth volume has just appeared. The New Yorker ran a long excerpt online ("At the Writing Academy," March 10, 2016), which is interesting because it includes photos taken of Knausgaard when he was at the writing academy in Bergen (the subject of the opening chapters of col. 5). The inclusion of images seems careless to me: I don't know the circumstances under which they were included, but I imagine the editors at The New Yorker imagined that they would lend appropriate veracity to an account that is itself a display of apparent unfiltered neutral observation. In relation to my own study of writing with images (online, under that name), these images are thoughtless, because Knausgaard's text is persistently slightly unbelievable in its apparent neutrality and directness, but the photographs are very direct in a much simpler manner. It's also curious that volume 5 opens with Knausgaard's observation that he kept his own photographs from that period, which are not reproduced in The New Yorker excerpt. (More on volume 5 later.)
This essay has three postscripts. What follows is a negative account of vol. 1, which I read when it was first out in English; now "My Struggle" is famous, and subsequent volumes have attracted some reflective reviews. Thoughts on those at the end. At the moment, there are three postscripts: I intend to add two more, about Fred Jameson's review and Toril Moi's essay. What is in need of explanation at this point (that is, after every other reader on the planet has tried "My Struggle") is the remarkably broad spectrum of indecision about his work: the fascination coupled with the disagreements about what "My Struggle" is. (This note added October 2019.)
- -
Notes on vol. 1, written c. 2013 (the original was published in 2009)
It鈥檚 possible this book may be memorable. It has structural, narrative, and tonal problems that may, in the end, turn out to be strengths. I have no idea why reviewers say it seems 鈥渓ike real life,鈥� or why 鈥渢he public have fallen to their knees in awe," but I do have some thoughts on its addictive and puzzling qualities.
For me, the compulsion of the reading experience turned on two qualities: perplexity about what Knausgaard imagined he was creating, and the strangeness of the incommensurability between what he apparently imagined, and what he created.
In another context, Knausgaard's endless inventories of uninteresting incidents could have been an emulation of one of Perec鈥檚 experiments in description, but Knausgaard has nothing to do with Oulipean ideas. Or they could have been demonstrations of the triviality of ordinary life, but Knausgaard is only a tiny bit like Kavanaugh and not at all like Larkin. Or they could have been intended to find the sublime or the poignant in the everyday, but that would not account for their length or lack of structure.
It becomes perplexing to decide just what the book is attempting, short of a total inventory of the author鈥檚 life, which the narrator knows is impossible. And that preplexity, for me, is one of the qualities that accounts for the book's hypnotic attraction for many readers. There is a kind of dogged deliberation in 鈥淢y Struggle,鈥� as if the only way to continue is to write, and the only way to write is to write everything: but at the same time Knausgaard doesn鈥檛 record systematically; 鈥淢y Struggle鈥� isn鈥檛 rule-bound or fanatical. It鈥檚 as if he has put all the energy and concentration he has into this project, writing year after year, writing out each memory in detail, omitting nothing, inventorying his entire remaining memory, but without any sense of what a complete life might look like, or any hope of stitching the parts together.
This sort of unsystematic, intermittently oblivious, partly uncaring attitude toward the obsessive compulsive project of plumbing his past produces strange effects. At first, a reader might expect that each episode will have some connection to others, or some special meaning or resonance -- as things usually do in novels. When that turns out not to be the case, a reader might reasonably conclude that the author is just writing as best as he can, about whatever he can remember, hoping the weight and inertia of the project will create, if not literature, then a sort of perplexity. He sometimes interrupts his narratives with meditations, which he apparently thinks are original or interesting; for me they usually aren鈥檛. Only a few of the stories in Part One are interesting or unusual. Here is an example of the sort of meditation that is apparently presented as insightful:
鈥淚 recognized the feeling, it was akin to the one some works of art evoke in me. Rembrandt鈥檚 portrait of himself as an old man in London鈥檚 National Gallery was such a picture, Turner鈥檚 picture of the sunset over the sea off a port of antiquity in the same museum, Caravaggio鈥檚 picture of Christ in Gethsemane. Vermeer evoked the same, a few of Claude鈥檚 paintings, some of Ruisdael鈥檚...鈥� (the list continues; p. 219)
Knausgaard did not have an unusual childhood, and he does not describe it in an inventive way. But there is a strange contradiction between the narrative he wants us to read and the one that emerges as I began to attend to what was going wrong with what I took to be his project of writing a raw, honest memoir.
An example of the strangeness: he spends 200 pages describing his childhood, but he opens Part Two with remarks like this:
鈥淚f I had forgotten something in my childhood it was probably due to repression鈥� (given as a throwaway line, and never developed; p. 216)
or
鈥淚 remembered hardly anything from my childhood.鈥� (p. 189)
Weirdly, he doesn鈥檛 think it鈥檚 worth noting that it sounds odd to say that sort of thing after having spent 200 pages describing his childhood in meticulous detail.
He opens the book with a story about a face he thought he鈥檇 seen in the sea, and it comes back at the opening of Part Two. But, strangely, he doesn't think it is puzzling to simply mention the face, but not draw any meaning from it -- and he never returns to it again. All he gives us is one throwaway line (p. 189):
鈥渢he remarkable thing was that I had forgotten it and now remembered.鈥�
And very strangely, he does not seem to notice that a reader might expect the story of the face in the sea to be of some interest to the narrator himself.
As I read, I became increasingly convinced that Knausgaard was not aware that the success of his project turns not on his anti-literary ambitions, but on the reader's perplexity about his inability and lack of interest in resolving his intentions, and in the strangeness of the results.
- -
First postscript, 2013
Volume 2 is now out in English, and there are signs Knausgaard will become a major figure. At the end of 2013 Rivka Galchen named vol. 2 as the "most interesting literary development" of the year, saying it is "substantive, comical, and artistically singular." (New York Times Book Review, Sunday, December 15, p. 43.) It is singular, but it is loose, unreflective about structure, unaware of readers' plausible expectations, and relentlessly simpleminded about how the everyday has been put into prose.
- -
Second postscript, May 2014
Volume 3 is now out in English, and it's gotten an excellent review by Ben Lerner, "Each Cornflake," London Review of Books, May 22, 2014. (I find this more convincing and clearer than the longer review by William Deresiewicz, " Why Has 鈥楳y Struggle鈥� Been Anointed a Literary Masterpiece?" The Nation, May 13, 2014.)
I am surprised at how widely it's being accepted that Knausgaard is a major novelist -- or, in Lerner's assessment, a largely successful anti-novelist, who is out to end the novel and literature in general by avoiding selection. (By recording everything.) As Lerner notes, that sets up a tension between the endlessness and lack of selectivity in the writing, in which the entire world spills onto the page, on the one hand, and the idea of plot, structure, or development, on the other. This is how Lerner puts it:
"Of course Knausgaard does leave things out (why, I wonder, is sex described in less detail than cornflakes?), selects among scenes and sentences, but we are caught up in the fiction that he doesn鈥檛. Yet that childish sense of open-endedness, in which everything is equally interesting, is countered by another fiction: that the meaning of 'My Struggle' will be revealed at its end, secured by the author鈥檚 death (at least his death qua author). The former fiction is a fiction of formlessness, the undifferentiated, an infinite verticality outside time; and the latter is a fiction that gives form, the imposition of shape on experience, a syntax of events. The constitutive tension of Knausgaard鈥檚 work, its internal struggle, is the push and pull between these two fictions."
Here "death" stands in for the novel and literature in general, and it is a reasonable synecdoche. For me Lerner's way of putting things raises two questions, both of which cannot be definitively answered for English-language readers until the final 3 volumes are translated. The two questions are:
1. Can the supposed lack of structure, choice, taste, plot, style, and skill 鈥� the things that ruined volume 1 for me 鈥� be adequately understood as a bid to escape from literature? I agree that "breaking of the vessel of art, the renunciation of fiction, literary suicide 鈥� these are fictions, and they鈥檙e the devices on which the power of 'My Struggle' depends"; but does the mass of unstructured writing actually work as an escape from fiction?
2. Can the supposed lack of structure, choice, taste, plot, style, and skill be understood as a representation of what Lerner calls "the undifferentiated mass of experience"? Can the flood of "raw" experiences, especially the uninteresting, unremarkable, everyday ones, represent experience?
These are two distinct questions. The first is about strategy: can a novelist put an end to the novel by putting everything into it except the structures that would have made it literature? The second is about experience: is it "experience" that is represented in "My Struggle"?
(I note that the first question is separate from the possibility, which Lerner ponders, that the book might conclude with death, and therefore conclude as literature: the question pertains to the strategy itself, not whether this 6-volume project succeeds. Apparently "My Struggle" does have an ending; is does end with "death": i.e., it has an arc, it does rehabilitate and motivate its formlessness. And apparently, too, Knausgaard has not defeated the novel, even for himself, because he has told an interviewer he is at work on another. But this first question is about strategy, not result.)
My answer to both questions is no. To the first question: I am not persuaded that proposing to have laid down the nameable skills of the novelist is a strategy to avoid literature. Some Oulipean strategies do bypass some parts of literature, but this strategy is too knowing, too deliberate, and 鈥� though I recognize this won't be a popular opinion, given the many enthusiastic reviews of "My Struggle" 鈥� too easy. It's too easy to fill 6 volumes with a spew of uncurated thoughts. It's true the novel "cracks," as Knausgaard himself says ("I thought of this project as a kind of experiment in realistic prose. How far is it possible to go into detail before the novel cracks and becomes unreadable?") but that does not mean literature is left behind or even effectively critiqued. It would be as if someone tried to "ruin" the sonnet by interpolating thousands of extra lines.
To the second question: the undifferentiated mass of experience supposedly rendered in "My Struggle" is itself a trope, an idea about the continuum of sensory experience that comes in part from Hume, Bergson, and de Certeau. "My Struggle" is a large-scale rehearsal of what counts, in such theories, as "raw" experience.
So I doubt the project of "My Struggle": it is not an effective anti-novel, and it does not break through conventions to represent real experience. We need to begin to ask more closely why we think, as Lerner does, that "it鈥檚 amazing."
- -
Third postscript, April 2016.
The fifth volume has just appeared. The New Yorker ran a long excerpt online ("At the Writing Academy," March 10, 2016), which is interesting because it includes photos taken of Knausgaard when he was at the writing academy in Bergen (the subject of the opening chapters of col. 5). The inclusion of images seems careless to me: I don't know the circumstances under which they were included, but I imagine the editors at The New Yorker imagined that they would lend appropriate veracity to an account that is itself a display of apparent unfiltered neutral observation. In relation to my own study of writing with images (online, under that name), these images are thoughtless, because Knausgaard's text is persistently slightly unbelievable in its apparent neutrality and directness, but the photographs are very direct in a much simpler manner. It's also curious that volume 5 opens with Knausgaard's observation that he kept his own photographs from that period, which are not reproduced in The New Yorker excerpt. (More on volume 5 later.)
August 28, 2013
For some reason, My Struggle (AKA, in the UK - 'A Death in the Family') made it into James Wood's Books of the Year 2012. Woods is, like Kakutani, a doyen of critics, and his word always carries a weight of sensitivity and intelligence gained from years of reading and teaching about literature. With Woods' nodding imprimatur bestowed upon it one would imagine the literary cachet of Knausgard's book is beyond reproach.
But having read my Struggle (and boy, what a struggle) I fear for Mr. Wood's critical acumen. (I nearly wrote "I think he's lost his god-damn mind"). Woods is such a perspicacious reader that I fear somehow I've read a different My Struggle or that he's read a different one, or that I'm in a parallel universe where my struggle with my Struggle is not the same as everyone elses - everyone else having from it, like, significant insights into the human condition, deep engagement with fictionalised wisdom, harrowing journeys into grief and sadness, the soul eclipsing throes of love, the constancy and Love for family etc., the sadness of growing older, etc etc.
The reason I say this, is that My Struggle Part 1 (AKA, in the UK 'A Death in the Family') was pretty damn bad. Boring bad. Pointless, bad. Why this is being compared to Proust is way beyond me. A handy way of selling more copies perhaps. All I know is that I don't think it is quite in the league of Proustian prose-majesty to reminisce how you went to the shop with your brother and bought a Lion bar and 1.5 litres of Sprite to wash it down with before spending the night watching TV getting hammered. Or wait, how you looked after your dementia-ridden grandmother for a while and on the trip to see her...you stopped off at the petrol station and bought a Bounty and had a ciggie leaning against the car. His brother calls him to say his dad has died and after they hang up he wanders to the shower and wonders whether he should "have a wank". This is hardly the realm of an enduring classic. 'War and Peace', this ain't. I truly don't think anyone will care about it in ten years time. I situate it in the "Scandanavian Cultural Renaissance" which has like some Nordic phagocyte, like the Vikings of old (but with less swords n' longboats) taken over the realms of detective novels, detective TV shows, detective movies, trendy retailing (H&M) haute-cuisine (Noma is the best restaurant in the world, say some.)Sure, they can do Volvos and cheap priced flat pack furniture but the world's eating their stuff up, and the Scans are happy. So, seeing a popularly written book about Weighty Subjects, the Scandi-media probably just saw an opportunity to make money from their native readers, and when people got reading it, it was decided to export the book by the bucketload by hyping it to the mesosphere. Notice many quotes about its Proustian might come from Scandanavian newspapers/magazines/reveiwers. Hmmmmmmmm....
Frankly the book was 400 page waste of my time, crammed full of trite observations. I would say "D minus. Could do better," but really I don't think he can. If I want to read detailed memoirs in I'll read them from someone who actually has something interesting to memoir about. Knausgard doesn't. In my defence, Wood says "even when I was bored, I was interested." at least Woods admits he was bored, and lets face it "I was interested" isn't quite "I was moved, I was edified, I was transported, I as shocked, I was touched," all those things we demand from quality fiction, but at least HE was interested. But, hey, I could be wrong. Maybe it picks up in books 2-6, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Sorry, Karl, but you'll have to struggle on without me.
But having read my Struggle (and boy, what a struggle) I fear for Mr. Wood's critical acumen. (I nearly wrote "I think he's lost his god-damn mind"). Woods is such a perspicacious reader that I fear somehow I've read a different My Struggle or that he's read a different one, or that I'm in a parallel universe where my struggle with my Struggle is not the same as everyone elses - everyone else having from it, like, significant insights into the human condition, deep engagement with fictionalised wisdom, harrowing journeys into grief and sadness, the soul eclipsing throes of love, the constancy and Love for family etc., the sadness of growing older, etc etc.
The reason I say this, is that My Struggle Part 1 (AKA, in the UK 'A Death in the Family') was pretty damn bad. Boring bad. Pointless, bad. Why this is being compared to Proust is way beyond me. A handy way of selling more copies perhaps. All I know is that I don't think it is quite in the league of Proustian prose-majesty to reminisce how you went to the shop with your brother and bought a Lion bar and 1.5 litres of Sprite to wash it down with before spending the night watching TV getting hammered. Or wait, how you looked after your dementia-ridden grandmother for a while and on the trip to see her...you stopped off at the petrol station and bought a Bounty and had a ciggie leaning against the car. His brother calls him to say his dad has died and after they hang up he wanders to the shower and wonders whether he should "have a wank". This is hardly the realm of an enduring classic. 'War and Peace', this ain't. I truly don't think anyone will care about it in ten years time. I situate it in the "Scandanavian Cultural Renaissance" which has like some Nordic phagocyte, like the Vikings of old (but with less swords n' longboats) taken over the realms of detective novels, detective TV shows, detective movies, trendy retailing (H&M) haute-cuisine (Noma is the best restaurant in the world, say some.)Sure, they can do Volvos and cheap priced flat pack furniture but the world's eating their stuff up, and the Scans are happy. So, seeing a popularly written book about Weighty Subjects, the Scandi-media probably just saw an opportunity to make money from their native readers, and when people got reading it, it was decided to export the book by the bucketload by hyping it to the mesosphere. Notice many quotes about its Proustian might come from Scandanavian newspapers/magazines/reveiwers. Hmmmmmmmm....
Frankly the book was 400 page waste of my time, crammed full of trite observations. I would say "D minus. Could do better," but really I don't think he can. If I want to read detailed memoirs in I'll read them from someone who actually has something interesting to memoir about. Knausgard doesn't. In my defence, Wood says "even when I was bored, I was interested." at least Woods admits he was bored, and lets face it "I was interested" isn't quite "I was moved, I was edified, I was transported, I as shocked, I was touched," all those things we demand from quality fiction, but at least HE was interested. But, hey, I could be wrong. Maybe it picks up in books 2-6, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Sorry, Karl, but you'll have to struggle on without me.
February 19, 2018
Now that all the hype over Karl Ove Knausg氓rd cycle is over I thought it鈥檚 time to finally meet the guy. Almost everything about My struggle was already said, both bad and good stuff. The author was accused of every thing imaginable, of being ungrateful sonofbitch that fouls own nest, that he was hypocrite and megalomaniac, that he hurt own family in hope of making money, that he did it to win plaudits, that he can鈥檛 write and the book is rubbish and pure graphomania and much more like that. On the other side there were these who found the novel original, who could appreciate its simplicity, who could accept banality even, who didn鈥檛 consider that detailed report to be exhibitionistic gibberish and to that group I count myself. I thought it was painfuly honest and gritty, excruciatingly intimate family portrait.
I don鈥檛 mind that kind of writing though I don鈥檛 feel it鈥檚 necessary to write about almost every cup of tea or bottle of beer or meal or shower or lighting cigarette but it didn鈥檛 feel fatiguing either. Sometimes it鈥檚 the only way to deal with horrible things. Just celebrate simple deeds. I thought Knausg氓rd primarily was writing for and to himself and only later to the reader. And it was device to tame the fear, clear head and calm down oneself. No, it didn鈥檛 enrich me but somehow felt right. There are parts in the novel that almost knock you down and it鈥檚 hard to read them. The level of sharing every nasty detail is really high and at times feels unbearably intimate, it鈥檚 like you were some voyeuristic jerk that witnesses how Karl鈥檚 father is drinking himself to death or sees how his grandmother lives. And it鈥檚 not a pleasant sight, believe me. Powerful but not pleasant. Then again there are pieces that KOK treats us truths and reflections on life that smacks of banality. And maybe there is a key to his success. To be painfully direct and make from banality and mundaneness a method.
I thought the writing was good, not especially quotable but solid and easy to follow. I found comparison to Proust rather laughable for the only thing in common is the length of the text. Knausg氓rd operates on well-known territory and discusses basic things and emotions. He works his life out, dismantles it, speaks of growing up, love, music, uncertainty, friends, first steps towards writing career, death, parents and grandparents, hatred to father and how it felt destructive. Plain writings, pure emotions, with his heart on his sleeve. There is no place for flamboyance here. No need for extravagance. For sure going to see how it goes and how the author progesses, both in personal and professional life.
November 16, 2021
It is said that this book is a modern rendition of Proust's Remembrances, making me an untrustworthy narrator for this review as I've never read the French giant's magnum opus of life's minutiae. Yes, I have Lydia Davis's new translation of Proust, but no, I haven't mustered the courage -- yet. Reading Knausg氓rd's book won't help. Rather than inspire me to read Proust, it inspires me to read . Such is life.
If plot's the thing, this 440-pager is probably not your best choice. Knausg氓rd is one of those characterization writers who gives every detail of every action. He's more into "exploding the moment," as they say in writing class, than "shrinking a century."
The book shares traits with Petterson's : a strong father-son theme, a strong coming-of-age theme, a distinct 70s flavor, and, what I like, a heavy dose of sensitivity and just noticing things. Like death. Our young protagonist is rather obsessed with it, and the book opens with a worthy "essay" on the subject (you will find others along the way as you read).
Death, Knausg氓rd notes, is just a concept -- one we are happy to discuss and expose ourselves to in reading or movie-viewing -- but make it REAL (that is, find a dead body on your front lawn or consider your own mortality when something goes wrong with your ticker) and it's a whole other matter. We are all fascinated with death -- our own -- and when we run into the real thing with, say, members of our family, we as a society like to keep it hidden, out of sight. In that sense, the Western view of death amounts to the rather lame descriptor: Eew.
Very modern of us, isn't it? I don't think it was always so. Once upon a time, dead bodies used to become part of the living room furniture for wakes and such. And people died in their own homes, as a rule, or out of doors, wherever the Reaper sharpened his scythe and took his harvest. Not much different from road kill, I guess.
Certainly there wasn't such nonsense such as dying in hospitals and special homes for the dying (read: hospices). That would come with capitalism. Death as economic driver. Back then it was just a case of "death happens -- to squirrels and people. Let's move on, thanking God it wasn't us."
In any event, Knausg氓rd has clearly given it a lot of thought, and you may enjoy his thoughts, too, because I happen to know that you have given mortality some meditation yourself. No one casts a spell like the Grim One.
But really, there's a lot of joyfully dumb adolescence to this first of a 6-book series, too. Young Karl Ove is finding his way -- with friends, with girls, with alcohol, with rock 'n roll, with books, with his one precious soul. He's the kind of sensitive loner most of us bookish, introspective introverts can identify with. Thus, the attention the book has drawn. Thus, the fact that I first discovered it via the New York Times ravings.
Is it THAT good? A classic to be? Please. But it's a great way to spend a slice of calendar. Recommended to fans of meandering, philosophical coming-of-age tomes -- and of Norway. And of hearing the Reaper say, "Not this time, Bud...not yet. Help yourself to another book, why don't you?"
If plot's the thing, this 440-pager is probably not your best choice. Knausg氓rd is one of those characterization writers who gives every detail of every action. He's more into "exploding the moment," as they say in writing class, than "shrinking a century."
The book shares traits with Petterson's : a strong father-son theme, a strong coming-of-age theme, a distinct 70s flavor, and, what I like, a heavy dose of sensitivity and just noticing things. Like death. Our young protagonist is rather obsessed with it, and the book opens with a worthy "essay" on the subject (you will find others along the way as you read).
Death, Knausg氓rd notes, is just a concept -- one we are happy to discuss and expose ourselves to in reading or movie-viewing -- but make it REAL (that is, find a dead body on your front lawn or consider your own mortality when something goes wrong with your ticker) and it's a whole other matter. We are all fascinated with death -- our own -- and when we run into the real thing with, say, members of our family, we as a society like to keep it hidden, out of sight. In that sense, the Western view of death amounts to the rather lame descriptor: Eew.
Very modern of us, isn't it? I don't think it was always so. Once upon a time, dead bodies used to become part of the living room furniture for wakes and such. And people died in their own homes, as a rule, or out of doors, wherever the Reaper sharpened his scythe and took his harvest. Not much different from road kill, I guess.
Certainly there wasn't such nonsense such as dying in hospitals and special homes for the dying (read: hospices). That would come with capitalism. Death as economic driver. Back then it was just a case of "death happens -- to squirrels and people. Let's move on, thanking God it wasn't us."
In any event, Knausg氓rd has clearly given it a lot of thought, and you may enjoy his thoughts, too, because I happen to know that you have given mortality some meditation yourself. No one casts a spell like the Grim One.
But really, there's a lot of joyfully dumb adolescence to this first of a 6-book series, too. Young Karl Ove is finding his way -- with friends, with girls, with alcohol, with rock 'n roll, with books, with his one precious soul. He's the kind of sensitive loner most of us bookish, introspective introverts can identify with. Thus, the attention the book has drawn. Thus, the fact that I first discovered it via the New York Times ravings.
Is it THAT good? A classic to be? Please. But it's a great way to spend a slice of calendar. Recommended to fans of meandering, philosophical coming-of-age tomes -- and of Norway. And of hearing the Reaper say, "Not this time, Bud...not yet. Help yourself to another book, why don't you?"
July 26, 2015
Di cosa parla alla fine Knausg氓rd? Beh, di un sacco di cose.
Gli amori adolescenziali, le prove con la band. Un padre inquieto e anaffettivo, una madre dolce e paziente. La festa di capodanno del 1985. Il quartiere residenziale e la vita di famiglia. Freddo e neve. Gli anni Settanta. Il rapporto indissolubile col fratello. I corsi di letteratura all鈥檜niversit脿 e le riflessioni sull鈥檃rte. Alcool e brodaglie di caff猫 a fiumi. Una casa da pulire. E poi, appunto, la morte del padre, che occupa in buona parte la seconda met脿 del volume.
Tutto memorabile? No, non direi. Ci sono i momenti noiosi, eccome. Se scrivi pi霉 di 3000 pagine divise in 6 volumi su una vita abbastanza ordinaria arrivi inevitabilmente a lungaggini e momenti infiniti che si potevano ridurre a qualche paragrafo.
Per貌 poi KOK ti ripaga sempre. E鈥� cos矛 diretto e sincero che ad un certo punto si trasforma in un vecchio amico che non vedevi da un po鈥�. Uno a cui volevi bene e con cui ti va di riprendere un rapporto. E quindi ti devi sorbire, un po鈥� alla volta, tutti i momenti della sua vita che nel frattempo ti sei perso.
E ad un certo punto capisci che da tutto questo ordinario non hai pi霉 voglia di staccarti. Che 猫 come se qualcuno ti stesse raccontando la tua, di vita.
Intervallati ai ricordi ci sono anche i momenti dell鈥檕ggi (ovvero del 2008). Knausg氓rd scrittore e padre di famiglia. Il tempo da riservare ai figli e quello da togliere alla scrittura. Questa parte 猫 assolutamente eccezionale, iperrealista, sei l矛 con lui davanti al pc con tutte le difficolt脿 che comporta raccontare qualcosa.
Credo che nel successo di questa 鈥渟aga鈥� ci sia anche un certo voyeurismo da parte del lettore. Metterci a nudo ci spaventa sempre un po' e quando sono gli altri a farlo al posto nostro siamo l矛 ad approfittarne. Un po鈥� come spesso fa Emmanuel Carr猫re che inserisce nei suoi romanzi momenti della sua vita privata, con percentuali notevoli in 鈥淟a vita come un romanzo russo鈥�.
E鈥� un libro potente, quasi da 鈥渂uona la prima鈥� come se l鈥檌mportante fosse pi霉 buttare sulla carta tutto quello che c鈥櫭� da raccontare nel modo meno mediato possibile piuttosto che cercare il modo migliore per dirlo.
Fate conto che sarebbero quattro stelle abbondanti ma non mi pare il caso di star qui a lesinare. [80/100]
Gli amori adolescenziali, le prove con la band. Un padre inquieto e anaffettivo, una madre dolce e paziente. La festa di capodanno del 1985. Il quartiere residenziale e la vita di famiglia. Freddo e neve. Gli anni Settanta. Il rapporto indissolubile col fratello. I corsi di letteratura all鈥檜niversit脿 e le riflessioni sull鈥檃rte. Alcool e brodaglie di caff猫 a fiumi. Una casa da pulire. E poi, appunto, la morte del padre, che occupa in buona parte la seconda met脿 del volume.
Tutto memorabile? No, non direi. Ci sono i momenti noiosi, eccome. Se scrivi pi霉 di 3000 pagine divise in 6 volumi su una vita abbastanza ordinaria arrivi inevitabilmente a lungaggini e momenti infiniti che si potevano ridurre a qualche paragrafo.
Per貌 poi KOK ti ripaga sempre. E鈥� cos矛 diretto e sincero che ad un certo punto si trasforma in un vecchio amico che non vedevi da un po鈥�. Uno a cui volevi bene e con cui ti va di riprendere un rapporto. E quindi ti devi sorbire, un po鈥� alla volta, tutti i momenti della sua vita che nel frattempo ti sei perso.
E ad un certo punto capisci che da tutto questo ordinario non hai pi霉 voglia di staccarti. Che 猫 come se qualcuno ti stesse raccontando la tua, di vita.
Intervallati ai ricordi ci sono anche i momenti dell鈥檕ggi (ovvero del 2008). Knausg氓rd scrittore e padre di famiglia. Il tempo da riservare ai figli e quello da togliere alla scrittura. Questa parte 猫 assolutamente eccezionale, iperrealista, sei l矛 con lui davanti al pc con tutte le difficolt脿 che comporta raccontare qualcosa.
Credo che nel successo di questa 鈥渟aga鈥� ci sia anche un certo voyeurismo da parte del lettore. Metterci a nudo ci spaventa sempre un po' e quando sono gli altri a farlo al posto nostro siamo l矛 ad approfittarne. Un po鈥� come spesso fa Emmanuel Carr猫re che inserisce nei suoi romanzi momenti della sua vita privata, con percentuali notevoli in 鈥淟a vita come un romanzo russo鈥�.
E鈥� un libro potente, quasi da 鈥渂uona la prima鈥� come se l鈥檌mportante fosse pi霉 buttare sulla carta tutto quello che c鈥櫭� da raccontare nel modo meno mediato possibile piuttosto che cercare il modo migliore per dirlo.
Fate conto che sarebbero quattro stelle abbondanti ma non mi pare il caso di star qui a lesinare. [80/100]
September 29, 2018
Ich setzte mich an meinen Schreibtisch, der trotz seiner M枚glichkeit der H枚henverstellbarkeit meist auf einem unteren Niveau verharrte, blickte aus dem Fenster und fragte mich, wie lange das warme Sp盲tsommerwetter noch anhalten w眉rde. W盲hrenddessen kippte der Nachbar im gegen眉berliegenden Haus sein K眉chenfenster, so dass die Sonne gespiegelt durch das Glas direkt in mein Gesicht schien, was mich st枚rte. Folglich 盲nderte ich die Sitzposition etwas nach links und verr眉ckte auch die Tastatur. Unter ihr kamen Kr眉mel von unbekannter Herkunft zum Vorschein, die mich daran erinnerten, die Sauberkeit in meinem Arbeitsraum zu verbessern. W盲hrend ich dem sich nach rechts ausbreitenden Balken der Startprogramm-Fortschrittsanzeige bei seiner Ver盲nderung zusah, strichen meine Finger 眉ber die moderne Tastatur und ich erinnerte mich, wie ich auf der Olympus damals meine Wehrdienstverweigerung tippte, mit den abrutschenden Fingern immer mal wieder zwischen den Tasten der Schreibmaschine h盲ngen blieb, was zu Hautabsch眉rfungen und der Verwendung eines Tippex-Streifens f眉hrte. Wie verletzungsunanf盲lliger doch das Schreiben geworden war. W盲hrend meine Fingerkuppen kreisend die kleinen Erhebungen auf den Tasten F und J erkundeten, fragte ich mich, warum ich eigentlich den PC hochgefahren hatte. Ach ja, ich wollte eine Rezension schreiben zu STERBEN鈥�
Ich k枚nnte das jetzt im Knausgard-Stil fortsetzen, in dem ich erstmal die fehlende M枚glichkeit beklagen w眉rde, das norwegische a mit Bommel obendrauf am PC zu schreiben, was auf dem iPad viel leichter zu finden ist. Das meine Ignoranz gegen眉ber den fremdsprachlichen Lettern mich eventuell unter Knausga(bommel)rdianern als wenig skandinavienaffin abqualifizierte. Doch sp盲testens nach dem zweiten Absatz w眉rden die an meiner Beurteilung des Buchs Interessierten sich fragen, wann dieser Semjon endlich mal auf den Punkt kommen w眉rde. Ich w眉rde dann entgegen, dass ich alle an meinem Findungsprozess bei der Frage, wie mir das Buch denn gefallen habe, m枚glichst authentisch teilhaben lassen wollte. Dass ein blo脽er Zweizeiler den 567 Seiten teils faszinierenden und teils erm眉denden Realismus des gerade Gelesenen nicht gerecht werden w眉rde. Ein Teil meiner Follower & Friends w眉rden mich gelangweilt entfreunden auf 欧宝娱乐, aber eine feste Schar an Semjonianern w眉rde k眉nftig an meinen Lippen kleben und die Echtheit in meinen Rezensionen feiern.
Kurz um: Das Buch, im Original MEIN KAMPF hei脽end, war 眉ber weite Strecken auch mein Kampf mit der Frage gewesen, ob das gute Literatur ist. Oder ist das sogar Kunst? Ich hatte in diesem Jahr ein Buch 眉ber Literaturwissenschaft von Prof. Gelfert gelesen und mich dabei etwas 眉ber den folgenden Satz lustig gemacht: 鈥濪as Prinzip der Dichtung ist die Einkleidung der auszudr眉ckenden Subjektivit盲t in den Schleier einer sinnlich wahrnehmbaren Form. Wenn der Schleier dabei zum Selbstzweck wird und das Verschleierte 眉bertrumpft, verstimmt das den Leser genauso wie schleierlose Subjektivit盲t.鈥�
Ich konnte mir nicht so recht vorstellen, was mit schleierlosen Subjektivit盲t gemeint sein soll. Nach dem Lesen von STERBEN, wei脽 ich es. Die Form des Buchs ist klar strukturiert und wie ein Musikst眉ck aufgebaut, bei dem der Komponist immer wieder zum eigentlichen Thema zur眉ckfindet und am Ende einen dort abholt, wo er einen zu Beginn hat stehen lassen. Der Stil ist nach meinem Empfinden aber keineswegs von einem kunstvollen sinnlichen Schleier gepr盲gt, sondern knallharte Detailverliebtheit bis zur Schmerzgrenze. Da kann sich der R眉ckblick auf einer Silvesterfeier in der Jugendzeit des Autors schon mal auf deutlich 眉ber 100 Seiten erstrecken. Der Autor hat in einem Interview gesagt, er wollte sich v枚llig entbl枚脽en, alles aufschreiben, was ihn betrifft, seine Gedanken, seine Erlebnisse, seinen Kampf mit den Widrigkeiten der Jugendzeit, der Familie und insbesondere mit dem Vater. Und die Leserschaft scheint dies zu lieben. Warum? Das war f眉r mich das eigentlich Interessante an dem Buch. Ich sehe da Parallelen zur Big Brother-Shows und Social Media. Und genauso ein leichter Zeitvertreib wie das Scrollen durch Instagramm und Facebook ist das Lesen von Knausgard f眉r mich. Ich kann hier jede Bewertung zwischen 2 bis 5 Sterne nachvollziehen. Ich war gerade im 1. Teil des Buchs sehr kritisch gegen眉ber dem Stil. Der 2. Teil, in dem Karl Ove mit seinem Bruder nach dem Tod des Vaters in die Heimatstadt f盲hrt, die Beerdigung organisiert und sich um die Gro脽mutter k眉mmert, hat mir wesentlich besser gefallen. Insofern kann ich mir durchaus vorstellen, auch die Folgeb盲nde zu lesen, aber nun brauche ich erstmal eine Authentizit盲tspause.
Ich k枚nnte das jetzt im Knausgard-Stil fortsetzen, in dem ich erstmal die fehlende M枚glichkeit beklagen w眉rde, das norwegische a mit Bommel obendrauf am PC zu schreiben, was auf dem iPad viel leichter zu finden ist. Das meine Ignoranz gegen眉ber den fremdsprachlichen Lettern mich eventuell unter Knausga(bommel)rdianern als wenig skandinavienaffin abqualifizierte. Doch sp盲testens nach dem zweiten Absatz w眉rden die an meiner Beurteilung des Buchs Interessierten sich fragen, wann dieser Semjon endlich mal auf den Punkt kommen w眉rde. Ich w眉rde dann entgegen, dass ich alle an meinem Findungsprozess bei der Frage, wie mir das Buch denn gefallen habe, m枚glichst authentisch teilhaben lassen wollte. Dass ein blo脽er Zweizeiler den 567 Seiten teils faszinierenden und teils erm眉denden Realismus des gerade Gelesenen nicht gerecht werden w眉rde. Ein Teil meiner Follower & Friends w眉rden mich gelangweilt entfreunden auf 欧宝娱乐, aber eine feste Schar an Semjonianern w眉rde k眉nftig an meinen Lippen kleben und die Echtheit in meinen Rezensionen feiern.
Kurz um: Das Buch, im Original MEIN KAMPF hei脽end, war 眉ber weite Strecken auch mein Kampf mit der Frage gewesen, ob das gute Literatur ist. Oder ist das sogar Kunst? Ich hatte in diesem Jahr ein Buch 眉ber Literaturwissenschaft von Prof. Gelfert gelesen und mich dabei etwas 眉ber den folgenden Satz lustig gemacht: 鈥濪as Prinzip der Dichtung ist die Einkleidung der auszudr眉ckenden Subjektivit盲t in den Schleier einer sinnlich wahrnehmbaren Form. Wenn der Schleier dabei zum Selbstzweck wird und das Verschleierte 眉bertrumpft, verstimmt das den Leser genauso wie schleierlose Subjektivit盲t.鈥�
Ich konnte mir nicht so recht vorstellen, was mit schleierlosen Subjektivit盲t gemeint sein soll. Nach dem Lesen von STERBEN, wei脽 ich es. Die Form des Buchs ist klar strukturiert und wie ein Musikst眉ck aufgebaut, bei dem der Komponist immer wieder zum eigentlichen Thema zur眉ckfindet und am Ende einen dort abholt, wo er einen zu Beginn hat stehen lassen. Der Stil ist nach meinem Empfinden aber keineswegs von einem kunstvollen sinnlichen Schleier gepr盲gt, sondern knallharte Detailverliebtheit bis zur Schmerzgrenze. Da kann sich der R眉ckblick auf einer Silvesterfeier in der Jugendzeit des Autors schon mal auf deutlich 眉ber 100 Seiten erstrecken. Der Autor hat in einem Interview gesagt, er wollte sich v枚llig entbl枚脽en, alles aufschreiben, was ihn betrifft, seine Gedanken, seine Erlebnisse, seinen Kampf mit den Widrigkeiten der Jugendzeit, der Familie und insbesondere mit dem Vater. Und die Leserschaft scheint dies zu lieben. Warum? Das war f眉r mich das eigentlich Interessante an dem Buch. Ich sehe da Parallelen zur Big Brother-Shows und Social Media. Und genauso ein leichter Zeitvertreib wie das Scrollen durch Instagramm und Facebook ist das Lesen von Knausgard f眉r mich. Ich kann hier jede Bewertung zwischen 2 bis 5 Sterne nachvollziehen. Ich war gerade im 1. Teil des Buchs sehr kritisch gegen眉ber dem Stil. Der 2. Teil, in dem Karl Ove mit seinem Bruder nach dem Tod des Vaters in die Heimatstadt f盲hrt, die Beerdigung organisiert und sich um die Gro脽mutter k眉mmert, hat mir wesentlich besser gefallen. Insofern kann ich mir durchaus vorstellen, auch die Folgeb盲nde zu lesen, aber nun brauche ich erstmal eine Authentizit盲tspause.
September 23, 2016
Ili sam ja sasvim mimo sveta, ili je po sredi ne拧to drugo, no, ve膰ina od onoga 拧to diljem interneta prikazuje Knausgorovu 鈥濵oju borbu鈥� nema veze sa mojim do啪ivljajem ove knjige. Prvo za膷u膽enje me strefilo kad sam videla koliko uop拧te ima tih prikaza na srpskom! Da se razumemo pri膷am o broju manjem od 7 - 8, 拧to nije zavredelo ni velikomu膷eno lektirstvo Ane Karenjine, a ni velikomu膷no (bez e!)... 拧ta god... one baka Pal膷ice 拧to nije Hrebeljanovi膰 ko Lazar, nego ono ne拧to sli膷no, a 拧to joj se knjige zovu 鈥炁絠vela Sveta Petka鈥� ili ne拧to sli膷no.
Skoro da bih pomislila da su sva ta napisanija pla膰eni oglasi, da je pla膰anje bilo 膷ega 拧to ima dodirnih ta膷aka sa kulturom u Srbiji uop拧te 鈥� dopustivo! Zaklju膷i膰u, dakle, da se pra拧ina digla sa realnih osnova. I osta膰u pri pretpostavci da sam mimo sveta, tj. da to 拧to isti膷u kao veli膷inu ovog romana ne smatram velikim. Ovako se meni 膷ini:
Najpre, Prust: budala拧tina iz vi拧e perspektiva je to pore膽enje. Sve i da je marketi拧ki potez, ne vidim mu smisao, jer Knausgor i Prust imaju veze taman koliko Markiz de Sad i D啪ejmi Oliver 鈥� ta, obojica su posve膰ena nekakvim telesnim zadovoljstvima, ve膰 prema volji. Prustov i Knausgorov 膷italac mogu biti ista osoba 鈥� kao 拧to i sadisti, izvesno, ne拧to jedu. U tom smislu, ne razumem 拧ta je marketing menad啪er hteo kasti tom oksimoronskom konstrukcijom 鈥瀞kandinavski Prust鈥�. (Prust mo啪e biti samo Francuz, pobogu!)
Da, Knausgor je deskriptivan. Da, ta mu je sposobnost dostojna zavisti i Bo啪anstva skribomanije li膷no, ali tu svaka veza sa Prustom prestaje.
Dalje, ni拧ta manje besmisleni komentari 鈥瀝emek delo鈥�, 鈥瀡e膰 imamo najve膰eg pisca veka鈥� 鈥瀙o zna膷aju prevazilazi knji啪evne okvire鈥� i tako redom. Alo, bre, fanovi Malog Princa, aj' malo na odeljenje za odrasle. Za po膷etak samo razgledajte.
Najzad 鈥� pisac je izveo samog sebe pred Stra拧ni sud鈥� 鈥瀞urovo iskrena ispovest 鈥�, 鈥瀖onumentalna autobiografija鈥� trt mrt.
艩to bi mene, 膷itaoca, za sve to bilo briga? Hamlet je 艩ekspir li膷no, pa? Ili nije? Opet lepo. Ginter Gras je Oskar? Dobro, va啪i. 艩ta sad da radim s tim saznanjem?
Ono sa paljenjem cele police sa slovom K u knji啪ari je simpa marketin拧ka fora. 'Ajd', neka bude i ono sa razvodom i demar拧om iz familije semena i plemena. U knjizi nisam na拧la ozbiljne povode za takve postupke, ali, kako vidim da deca i dalje rastu iako jedu Plazma keks (koji te 鈥濶e pu拧ta da odraste拧鈥�, kazao bilbord), shvatam da u promocijama sme da se la啪ucka.
鈥濵oja borba鈥� je roman koji je napisao pristojno obrazovan 膷ovek, nagla拧eno senzibilian, izrazito introvertan, prili膷no ve拧t, pismen kako i prili膷i nekome ko se pera la膰a. I to je to. Takav mu je i roman 鈥� pristojan, zadovoljavaju膰i, 膷itljiv, zaslu啪uje popularnost koju je, izgleda, i stekao i ni拧ta preko toga. A 拧ta vi拧e treba? Sve po拧teno, zavredelo da se mu拧terija ponovo vrati i kupi jo拧 ne拧to u toj radnji. Slike su mu jasne, jezik jednostavno lep, emocije bistre. Ne urla, ne cereka se, ne cmizdi (膷ak i kad nekontrolisano briznjava u pla膷 svako malo na dobranih 200 strana), ne pateti拧e, ne drami, ne pretenduje na celomudrenije i visokoparnost. Gleda i pri膷a o svemu (ba拧 svemu) 拧to vidi, kako on vidi. 膶ek je pristojno i uokvirio te slike, te ne pretenduje ni na nekakvu 鈥瀡rtoglavu鈥� formu koju recenzije spominju.
Knausgor je idealan tip za kom拧iju sa tre膰eg koji ne smara ispred lifta, ali je uvek ka啪e neku zanimljivost kad do膽e po dve ka拧i膷ice kafe: il' je gledao neki dokumentarac o amazonskom plemenu koje pi拧e na aramejskom, il' je na e bay-u kupio neko 膷udno soko膰alo, il' 膰e od ponedeljka da krene na ma膷evanje. A sve to iz zdrave radoznalosti, nikako iz ne鈥� znam 鈥� 拧ta 鈥� 膰u 鈥� od鈥� sebe.
Idealno vreme za 鈥濵oju borbu鈥� je onih nekoliko dana posle 1. januara, kad se u pid啪ami 拧eta od fri啪idera do daljinskog, po拧to se svim tetkama (sve啪e sekularizovanim na Vajber) uzvratilo 鈥濼ako膽e鈥� na rimuju膰u 膷estitku dugu pet skrolova.
Prevodilac Rado拧 Kosovi膰, na visini zadatka (lepo, ima tek preko 30).
Vrlo dobar, 4.
Skoro da bih pomislila da su sva ta napisanija pla膰eni oglasi, da je pla膰anje bilo 膷ega 拧to ima dodirnih ta膷aka sa kulturom u Srbiji uop拧te 鈥� dopustivo! Zaklju膷i膰u, dakle, da se pra拧ina digla sa realnih osnova. I osta膰u pri pretpostavci da sam mimo sveta, tj. da to 拧to isti膷u kao veli膷inu ovog romana ne smatram velikim. Ovako se meni 膷ini:
Najpre, Prust: budala拧tina iz vi拧e perspektiva je to pore膽enje. Sve i da je marketi拧ki potez, ne vidim mu smisao, jer Knausgor i Prust imaju veze taman koliko Markiz de Sad i D啪ejmi Oliver 鈥� ta, obojica su posve膰ena nekakvim telesnim zadovoljstvima, ve膰 prema volji. Prustov i Knausgorov 膷italac mogu biti ista osoba 鈥� kao 拧to i sadisti, izvesno, ne拧to jedu. U tom smislu, ne razumem 拧ta je marketing menad啪er hteo kasti tom oksimoronskom konstrukcijom 鈥瀞kandinavski Prust鈥�. (Prust mo啪e biti samo Francuz, pobogu!)
Da, Knausgor je deskriptivan. Da, ta mu je sposobnost dostojna zavisti i Bo啪anstva skribomanije li膷no, ali tu svaka veza sa Prustom prestaje.
Dalje, ni拧ta manje besmisleni komentari 鈥瀝emek delo鈥�, 鈥瀡e膰 imamo najve膰eg pisca veka鈥� 鈥瀙o zna膷aju prevazilazi knji啪evne okvire鈥� i tako redom. Alo, bre, fanovi Malog Princa, aj' malo na odeljenje za odrasle. Za po膷etak samo razgledajte.
Najzad 鈥� pisac je izveo samog sebe pred Stra拧ni sud鈥� 鈥瀞urovo iskrena ispovest 鈥�, 鈥瀖onumentalna autobiografija鈥� trt mrt.
艩to bi mene, 膷itaoca, za sve to bilo briga? Hamlet je 艩ekspir li膷no, pa? Ili nije? Opet lepo. Ginter Gras je Oskar? Dobro, va啪i. 艩ta sad da radim s tim saznanjem?
Ono sa paljenjem cele police sa slovom K u knji啪ari je simpa marketin拧ka fora. 'Ajd', neka bude i ono sa razvodom i demar拧om iz familije semena i plemena. U knjizi nisam na拧la ozbiljne povode za takve postupke, ali, kako vidim da deca i dalje rastu iako jedu Plazma keks (koji te 鈥濶e pu拧ta da odraste拧鈥�, kazao bilbord), shvatam da u promocijama sme da se la啪ucka.
鈥濵oja borba鈥� je roman koji je napisao pristojno obrazovan 膷ovek, nagla拧eno senzibilian, izrazito introvertan, prili膷no ve拧t, pismen kako i prili膷i nekome ko se pera la膰a. I to je to. Takav mu je i roman 鈥� pristojan, zadovoljavaju膰i, 膷itljiv, zaslu啪uje popularnost koju je, izgleda, i stekao i ni拧ta preko toga. A 拧ta vi拧e treba? Sve po拧teno, zavredelo da se mu拧terija ponovo vrati i kupi jo拧 ne拧to u toj radnji. Slike su mu jasne, jezik jednostavno lep, emocije bistre. Ne urla, ne cereka se, ne cmizdi (膷ak i kad nekontrolisano briznjava u pla膷 svako malo na dobranih 200 strana), ne pateti拧e, ne drami, ne pretenduje na celomudrenije i visokoparnost. Gleda i pri膷a o svemu (ba拧 svemu) 拧to vidi, kako on vidi. 膶ek je pristojno i uokvirio te slike, te ne pretenduje ni na nekakvu 鈥瀡rtoglavu鈥� formu koju recenzije spominju.
Knausgor je idealan tip za kom拧iju sa tre膰eg koji ne smara ispred lifta, ali je uvek ka啪e neku zanimljivost kad do膽e po dve ka拧i膷ice kafe: il' je gledao neki dokumentarac o amazonskom plemenu koje pi拧e na aramejskom, il' je na e bay-u kupio neko 膷udno soko膰alo, il' 膰e od ponedeljka da krene na ma膷evanje. A sve to iz zdrave radoznalosti, nikako iz ne鈥� znam 鈥� 拧ta 鈥� 膰u 鈥� od鈥� sebe.
Idealno vreme za 鈥濵oju borbu鈥� je onih nekoliko dana posle 1. januara, kad se u pid啪ami 拧eta od fri啪idera do daljinskog, po拧to se svim tetkama (sve啪e sekularizovanim na Vajber) uzvratilo 鈥濼ako膽e鈥� na rimuju膰u 膷estitku dugu pet skrolova.
Prevodilac Rado拧 Kosovi膰, na visini zadatka (lepo, ima tek preko 30).
Vrlo dobar, 4.
December 27, 2014
Estoy leyendo esta serie en desorden, este es el tercero que leo, y el primero de la serie. Da igual el orden en que lo he le铆do, y cada uno que leo me doy cuenta que leer茅 todos. Lleva la narrativa a otro nivel, y no es ficci贸n, un elemento que me causa conflicto y me encanta a la vez.
Lectura obligada. Y muy recomendada.
Lectura obligada. Y muy recomendada.
March 17, 2016
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 (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 Keifer fan (there's a Keifer on the cover). Fiction is fact selected, arranged, and charged with purpose, said Thomas Wolfe, but Knausgaard's acknowledged precedent is Proust. Narrator admits to gulping Proust down before writing this novel, memoir, "roman," something that maintains the circuituous 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 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. 4.5 stars for me -- I'll definitely read the next five or so volumes as they come out and maybe revisit this rating if moved to do so. I'm sure this will stick with me. A half-star off since 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, plus it's 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 ? 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 , too, although the word definitely appears.
(If interested, here are my reviews of Books Two, Three, Four, and Five.)
(If interested, here are my reviews of Books Two, Three, Four, and Five.)
March 27, 2023
(Re-editing of my review of 5 years ago).
There are many loose ends to this autobiographical novel, but it does intrigue. The difficult relationship between father and son Knausgard (the writer) is central to the story, that much is clear, but where does that bizarre, one-sided behavior from the father come from? Why exactly did Karl Ove (the writer) have such a fright for his father? And above all, how did the author evolve from a rather banal adolescent into a complex but very self-reflexive man? Occasionally small elements are provided, but my suspicion is that the next five parts of 鈥淢y Struggle鈥� (what a strange reference to Hitler's "Mein Kampf") hopefully will bring clarification.
The most remarkable thing about this first part were the large differences in register and tone throughout the book. It starts with a cultural philosophical reflection on the disguising of death in our society, then gives a beautiful, very recognizable portrait of how chaotic a family life with small children can be, followed by a very long section about Knausgard's time as a teenager, struggling with many classic-pubertal problems. Especially that part is written in a such a dry style, with long descriptions of trivial actions and many environmental details, that I thought I would close the book. Fortunately, shortly before halfway Knausgard suddenly changes tack and uses a very different, much richer timbre, focusing on the writer at a more mature age, writing a book, about to become a father, and very cleverly thinking about life and what he sees around him. The style of this part even made me think of W.G. Sebald, one of my favorite authors.
The last, and large, third part of the book suddenly jumps back to the period of the death of his father who had become completely marginalized, and is again set in a different register: a mixture of actions (the very intensive cleaning of the house of the grandmother, where father stayed at the end), flashbacks to the author's youth and again profound musings and self-reflections. That change of style registers suggests that this writer has a lot more to offer than he wanted to show here. That鈥檚 why I keep my rating for the whole book rather average, but I expect a bit more in the following parts.
(In the meanwhile I read the whole series, and eventually it became clear what a formidable self-reflexive exploit this whole cycle is. Not every part is toplevel, but Knausgards excruciating way of looking at reality - especially his own behavior - truly is mesmerizing. See my other reviews, or my global review /review/show...)
There are many loose ends to this autobiographical novel, but it does intrigue. The difficult relationship between father and son Knausgard (the writer) is central to the story, that much is clear, but where does that bizarre, one-sided behavior from the father come from? Why exactly did Karl Ove (the writer) have such a fright for his father? And above all, how did the author evolve from a rather banal adolescent into a complex but very self-reflexive man? Occasionally small elements are provided, but my suspicion is that the next five parts of 鈥淢y Struggle鈥� (what a strange reference to Hitler's "Mein Kampf") hopefully will bring clarification.
The most remarkable thing about this first part were the large differences in register and tone throughout the book. It starts with a cultural philosophical reflection on the disguising of death in our society, then gives a beautiful, very recognizable portrait of how chaotic a family life with small children can be, followed by a very long section about Knausgard's time as a teenager, struggling with many classic-pubertal problems. Especially that part is written in a such a dry style, with long descriptions of trivial actions and many environmental details, that I thought I would close the book. Fortunately, shortly before halfway Knausgard suddenly changes tack and uses a very different, much richer timbre, focusing on the writer at a more mature age, writing a book, about to become a father, and very cleverly thinking about life and what he sees around him. The style of this part even made me think of W.G. Sebald, one of my favorite authors.
The last, and large, third part of the book suddenly jumps back to the period of the death of his father who had become completely marginalized, and is again set in a different register: a mixture of actions (the very intensive cleaning of the house of the grandmother, where father stayed at the end), flashbacks to the author's youth and again profound musings and self-reflections. That change of style registers suggests that this writer has a lot more to offer than he wanted to show here. That鈥檚 why I keep my rating for the whole book rather average, but I expect a bit more in the following parts.
(In the meanwhile I read the whole series, and eventually it became clear what a formidable self-reflexive exploit this whole cycle is. Not every part is toplevel, but Knausgards excruciating way of looking at reality - especially his own behavior - truly is mesmerizing. See my other reviews, or my global review /review/show...)
July 18, 2017
When I started reading this I had a feeling similar to when I read Elena Ferrante for the first time鈥攖he feeling that I was reading a book that would be read, possibly even studied, for years to come. I can't put my finger on what exactly it is about this one though that made me feel that way. With Ferrante it was the historical context, observant writing, and vivid characters. With Knausg氓rd it might just be the ambition behind this series: a six-part autobiography.
Nevertheless, though his writing is interspersed with poignant and cutting remarks about life, death, love, family, and other highly universal and relatable themes, there is no denying this is a boring story. And I mean that with no malice. It's boring because it's a regular man telling a regular story about his upbringing in Norway between the 1970's and 80's. He's not particularly special, and he realizes that. But he decides to tell his story anyway. And somehow it's compulsively readable.
I did find myself more interested in his earlier life, and when the book changed directions about 1/3 of the way through I was a bit disappointed. I found the latter half to be too drawn out, despite his lush descriptions and insights which kept me reading till the end. That being said, I will continue with the series, I just may not be in much of a rush considering there are still about 3,000 pages to go. 3.5 stars
Nevertheless, though his writing is interspersed with poignant and cutting remarks about life, death, love, family, and other highly universal and relatable themes, there is no denying this is a boring story. And I mean that with no malice. It's boring because it's a regular man telling a regular story about his upbringing in Norway between the 1970's and 80's. He's not particularly special, and he realizes that. But he decides to tell his story anyway. And somehow it's compulsively readable.
I did find myself more interested in his earlier life, and when the book changed directions about 1/3 of the way through I was a bit disappointed. I found the latter half to be too drawn out, despite his lush descriptions and insights which kept me reading till the end. That being said, I will continue with the series, I just may not be in much of a rush considering there are still about 3,000 pages to go. 3.5 stars
March 9, 2015
I hadn鈥檛 really thought to read this despite it being 鈥渢he鈥� book of 2012, but I read (!) It was the funniest thing I鈥檇 ever read. Here is an author whose linked novel/memoirs has taken the literary world by storm and he is showing his utter unpreparedness for that world and the interactions it requires. I wanted to see if that tongue-in-cheek droll self-awareness was his constant subject.
As it turns out, his six-volume memoir cum fiction is much more than that. It has a vibrancy, truth-telling honesty, and relevance far beyond anything I expected. And the writing鈥ell, the writing was involving and exacting鈥nd addictive. For a man who doesn鈥檛 like to talk to strangers, he does an awful lot of talking to strangers.
My Struggle Volume I begins with a discussion about death and how the dead have been removed from our purview, we lucky ones in the Western world who do not experience street conflict. This is precisely the thing I have been mulling over lately, so he drew me in with his talk of death rather than put me off. Without even a pause or a section break from our dip into death鈥檚 icy waters in the first pages, Knausgaard relates a news event in his childhood he watched on television, in which some newscasters showed the waters of a fjord, explaining that some Nordic fishermen were lost on a ship that sunk without a trace. His parents had laughed at his eight-years-old imagination that he had seen a face in the waves on the newscaster鈥檚 film shot. He returns to that humiliation again and again as he grows older, for the sense of having seen something and the shame of having been laughed at never leave him.
There is a circular momentum to his narrative (a circling-the-drain quality, all facetiousness aside), for he returns to the death of his father in the second half of Volume One. But first we learn his age (39 years), and learn of his marriage, his children, his attempt to create something important, circling back to begin at the beginning, his birth and childhood. Knausgaard as a teen is not to be missed. The second half of the book is consumed with his father鈥檚 death, which occurred just before he turned thirty. When viewing his father's corpse he writes: "The idea that I could scrutinize this face unhindered for the first time was almost unbearable." Unhindered? What a remarkable thing to say. But, he goes on to say, "I was no longer looking at a person but something that resembled a person." His father, with all his personality, strengths and failures, was gone.
The very ordinariness of his days, and of his detail about those days makes the novel/memoir something extraordinary. Knausgaard says in that he was trying to get the detail "as close to life as possible," so we shouldn鈥檛 feel surprised to experience a palpable peristalsis of boredom followed by intense interest and inescapable need. The interminable house cleaning and grass mowing鈥e feel those details in our exhaustion, repugnance, and need to escape. The accretion of detail, the structure, the language鈥ll of it add up to something impossible to put down and impossible to forget.
Karl Ove, the narrator, shows us how he is his father鈥檚 son. He claimed to hate his father, but he loved him, too, and was more like him in his reserve than he dares mention. But we see it. We don鈥檛 get a clear or complete picture of his father--his father as son, his father as husband, as teacher, as neighbor--but the moments of his tenderness and of his decline flash from the book like beacons.
Observing Knausgaard鈥檚 intense reluctance to self-reveal in ordinary day-to-day interactions and conversation, one has to ask why Knausgaard wrote a book like this. The answer comes in a thousand ways, but it revolves around the breaking of accepted patterns, of standing outside so as to observe and understand more deeply, of the spaces between things, like language鈥hat it doesn鈥檛 describe, what it can鈥檛 catch. He seeks to make an experience, rather than just describe one. "Writing is more about destroying than creating." Well, he鈥檚 done something provocative here, and it is absolutely an experience reading this book.
As it turns out, his six-volume memoir cum fiction is much more than that. It has a vibrancy, truth-telling honesty, and relevance far beyond anything I expected. And the writing鈥ell, the writing was involving and exacting鈥nd addictive. For a man who doesn鈥檛 like to talk to strangers, he does an awful lot of talking to strangers.
My Struggle Volume I begins with a discussion about death and how the dead have been removed from our purview, we lucky ones in the Western world who do not experience street conflict. This is precisely the thing I have been mulling over lately, so he drew me in with his talk of death rather than put me off. Without even a pause or a section break from our dip into death鈥檚 icy waters in the first pages, Knausgaard relates a news event in his childhood he watched on television, in which some newscasters showed the waters of a fjord, explaining that some Nordic fishermen were lost on a ship that sunk without a trace. His parents had laughed at his eight-years-old imagination that he had seen a face in the waves on the newscaster鈥檚 film shot. He returns to that humiliation again and again as he grows older, for the sense of having seen something and the shame of having been laughed at never leave him.
There is a circular momentum to his narrative (a circling-the-drain quality, all facetiousness aside), for he returns to the death of his father in the second half of Volume One. But first we learn his age (39 years), and learn of his marriage, his children, his attempt to create something important, circling back to begin at the beginning, his birth and childhood. Knausgaard as a teen is not to be missed. The second half of the book is consumed with his father鈥檚 death, which occurred just before he turned thirty. When viewing his father's corpse he writes: "The idea that I could scrutinize this face unhindered for the first time was almost unbearable." Unhindered? What a remarkable thing to say. But, he goes on to say, "I was no longer looking at a person but something that resembled a person." His father, with all his personality, strengths and failures, was gone.
The very ordinariness of his days, and of his detail about those days makes the novel/memoir something extraordinary. Knausgaard says in that he was trying to get the detail "as close to life as possible," so we shouldn鈥檛 feel surprised to experience a palpable peristalsis of boredom followed by intense interest and inescapable need. The interminable house cleaning and grass mowing鈥e feel those details in our exhaustion, repugnance, and need to escape. The accretion of detail, the structure, the language鈥ll of it add up to something impossible to put down and impossible to forget.
"But as anyone with the least knowledge of literature and writing鈥攎aybe art in general鈥攚ill know, concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value."--
Karl Ove, the narrator, shows us how he is his father鈥檚 son. He claimed to hate his father, but he loved him, too, and was more like him in his reserve than he dares mention. But we see it. We don鈥檛 get a clear or complete picture of his father--his father as son, his father as husband, as teacher, as neighbor--but the moments of his tenderness and of his decline flash from the book like beacons.
"But still, there is much more to a relationship than what you can say. You just take one more step back into yourself. I鈥檝e never understood psychoanalysis. Mentioning things doesn鈥檛 change anything, doesn鈥檛 help anything, it鈥檚 just words. There is something much more deep and profound to a relationship than that. Revealing stories and quarrels鈥攖hat鈥檚 just words. Love, that鈥檚 something else."--
Observing Knausgaard鈥檚 intense reluctance to self-reveal in ordinary day-to-day interactions and conversation, one has to ask why Knausgaard wrote a book like this. The answer comes in a thousand ways, but it revolves around the breaking of accepted patterns, of standing outside so as to observe and understand more deeply, of the spaces between things, like language鈥hat it doesn鈥檛 describe, what it can鈥檛 catch. He seeks to make an experience, rather than just describe one. "Writing is more about destroying than creating." Well, he鈥檚 done something provocative here, and it is absolutely an experience reading this book.
November 19, 2018
Difficult - no, impossible - when beginning a book like this to ignore the adulation the book has received and not accumulate some sense of expectation; to anticipate a worthwhile return for your reading time when the author has been described as the Proust of our age and critics breathlessly annunciate their drug-like dependence on the authors prose and implore us to join them in appreciating "a memoir that burns with the heat of life", one which is "close to a work of genius" . Given all that, you could be forgiven for expecting that the book would, at the most basic and undemanding level, be a good read.
It doesn't take terribly long for doubts to filter into the mind, especially when one begins to notice an element of the narrative which will appear in various forms throughout the book: the lengthy and detailed description of some person or event which you begin to think must be of some significance, given the space being devoted to it, only to find that the subject is entirely incidental, like the jabbering of someone in your company whose nervousness is demonstrated by the need to fill every potentially silent moment with their own pointless observations. All of this would be more bearable if Knausgaard possessed any exceptional skill as a writer or a talent for original insights. Some element of style might transform the tedium into compelling prose. Instead we are stuck with writing that is (in, one presumes, a faithful translation) at best competent, or one might say, writing that matches the level of ennui that most of the subject-matter induces.
Only when the narrator's father dies does the book become briefly interesting (I almost said it comes to life). We are given descriptions of the circumstances in which the man and his mother lived which have a fascination that is at once repulsive and absorbing. But even here the effect is diminished by needless rambling, unimaginative descriptions and -something which is a feature of the entire book - a complete lack of humour. For when is humour more needed that at a time if death?
I have no idea why this book has been so adored and praised by critics and readers. But then I feel the same way about the film 'Boyhood' which was lauded and won prizes, but which I thought was lacking in any visual flair and whose clever construction masked a basic lack of soul or nerve. It bears a lot of similarities with the Knausgaard book, if not in specifics then certainly in the way that both are praised for their honest representation of truth. But the representation of truth does not necessarily exist in describing, or showing, someone walking along a street, with due attention to their clothes and the buildings and sky behind them. To understand the quiddity of that reality we need to have the experience reimagined for us so that we can be inside that scene and experience it as a transcendent moment, a moment of "enstrangement". That is why a book like 's is a book I adore and which seemed more real to me as I read it than any moment of Knausgaard's redundant demonstrations of "honesty".
It doesn't take terribly long for doubts to filter into the mind, especially when one begins to notice an element of the narrative which will appear in various forms throughout the book: the lengthy and detailed description of some person or event which you begin to think must be of some significance, given the space being devoted to it, only to find that the subject is entirely incidental, like the jabbering of someone in your company whose nervousness is demonstrated by the need to fill every potentially silent moment with their own pointless observations. All of this would be more bearable if Knausgaard possessed any exceptional skill as a writer or a talent for original insights. Some element of style might transform the tedium into compelling prose. Instead we are stuck with writing that is (in, one presumes, a faithful translation) at best competent, or one might say, writing that matches the level of ennui that most of the subject-matter induces.
Only when the narrator's father dies does the book become briefly interesting (I almost said it comes to life). We are given descriptions of the circumstances in which the man and his mother lived which have a fascination that is at once repulsive and absorbing. But even here the effect is diminished by needless rambling, unimaginative descriptions and -something which is a feature of the entire book - a complete lack of humour. For when is humour more needed that at a time if death?
I have no idea why this book has been so adored and praised by critics and readers. But then I feel the same way about the film 'Boyhood' which was lauded and won prizes, but which I thought was lacking in any visual flair and whose clever construction masked a basic lack of soul or nerve. It bears a lot of similarities with the Knausgaard book, if not in specifics then certainly in the way that both are praised for their honest representation of truth. But the representation of truth does not necessarily exist in describing, or showing, someone walking along a street, with due attention to their clothes and the buildings and sky behind them. To understand the quiddity of that reality we need to have the experience reimagined for us so that we can be inside that scene and experience it as a transcendent moment, a moment of "enstrangement". That is why a book like 's is a book I adore and which seemed more real to me as I read it than any moment of Knausgaard's redundant demonstrations of "honesty".
August 16, 2019
賱賲 兀賯乇兀 亘毓丿 乇賵丕賷丞 (丕賱亘丨孬 毓賳 丕賱夭賲賳 丕賱賲賮賯賵丿) 賱亘乇賵爻鬲 賮賷 兀噩夭丕亍賴丕 丕賱爻亘毓 賵亘賲丕 兀賳 丕賱賰賱 賷噩賲毓 亘兀賳 賴匕賴 丕賱乇賵丕賷丞 鬲卮亘賴 乇賵丨賷丕賸 鬲賱賰 賮賯丿 夭丕丿 丕賱兀賲乇 賲賳 丨賲丕爻丞 賵賱賴賮丞 賱廿賳鬲馗丕乇 丕賱胤亘毓丞 丕賱鬲賷 爻賵賮 鬲氐丿乇 賯乇賷亘丕賸 毓賳 丿丕乇 丕賱噩賲賱
貙乇賵丕賷丞 "貨賰丕乇賱 兀賵賮賴" 鬲禺鬲夭賱 兀亘噩丿賷丕鬲 丕賱丨賷丕丞 賲賳匕 丕賱賳卮兀丞 亘鬲賮丕氐賷賱 賲乇賰夭丞 賯丿 賷賰賵賳 鬲乇賰賷夭賴丕 亘兀賰孬乇 賲丕 賷賲賰賳 兀賳 賷鬲賵賯毓賴 丕賱賯丕乇卅 鬲賱賰 丕賱鬲賮丕氐賷賱 丕賱丿賯賷賯丞 貙 貙丕賱丨丕乇賯丞貙 丕賱賲丕囟賷丞貙 丕賱氐賱亘丞丕賱賲賮乇胤丞 丨丿 丕賱鬲禺賲丞 賮賷 廿賮乇丕胤賴丕 賵丕賱賲卮丨賵賳丞 亘賲卮丕毓乇 賵兀丨丕爻賷爻 丨賯賷賯賷丞 ....賴匕丕 丕賱廿賮乇丕胤 賴賵 爻乇 丕賱乇賵丕賷丞 丕賱鬲賷 兀乇丕賴賳 毓賱賶 兀賳 毓丿丿 賰亘賷乇 賲賳 丕賱賯乇丕亍 賱賳 賷鬲毓丿賶 胤賷丕鬲 丕賱禺賲爻賷賳 氐賮丨丞 賵賷鬲乇賰賴丕
鬲丨賮丞 兀丿亘賷丞 賵鬲賲乇丿 毓賱賶 賮賰乇丞 丕賱乇賵丕賷丞 丕賱兀丿亘賷丞 鬲噩毓賱 賲賳 賴匕丕 丕賱賳氐 毓賲賱丕賸 賲鬲賯賳丕賸 賷睾乇丿 禺丕乇噩 丕賱爻乇亘 賵賲賳毓胤賮丕賸 鬲丕乇賷禺賷丕賸 賱丌賮丕賯 賱丕 丨丿賵丿 賱賴丕
賷賳賯爻賲 丕賱毓賲賱 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 丕賱兀賵賱 廿賱賶 賯爻賲賷賳 兀乇賶 兀賳賳賷 丕賳噩匕亘鬲 廿賱賶 賯爻賲賴 丕賱兀賵賱 亘毓丕胤賮丞 兀賰亘乇 賮賴賵 賷噩賵亘 亘賰 毓丕賱賲 丕賱孬賲丕賳賷賳賷丕鬲 賲賳 丕賱賯乇賳 丕賱賲賳氐乇賲 賵賱丕 賷賯賱賱 匕賱賰 賲賳 兀賴賲賷丞 賯爻賲賴 丕賱孬丕賳賷 丕賱匕賷 亘丕丿乇 亘賴 丕賱賰丕鬲亘 爻乇丿賴 賮賷 丕賱丨丿賷孬 毓賳 丕賱兀賱賮賷丞 丕賱孬丕賳賷丞 賮賷 亘丿丕賷丕鬲賴丕....爻乇丿 亘乇賵丨 爻賷乇丞 賷爻鬲丨賯 丕賱禺賲爻丞 賳噩賵賲
貙乇賵丕賷丞 "貨賰丕乇賱 兀賵賮賴" 鬲禺鬲夭賱 兀亘噩丿賷丕鬲 丕賱丨賷丕丞 賲賳匕 丕賱賳卮兀丞 亘鬲賮丕氐賷賱 賲乇賰夭丞 賯丿 賷賰賵賳 鬲乇賰賷夭賴丕 亘兀賰孬乇 賲丕 賷賲賰賳 兀賳 賷鬲賵賯毓賴 丕賱賯丕乇卅 鬲賱賰 丕賱鬲賮丕氐賷賱 丕賱丿賯賷賯丞 貙 貙丕賱丨丕乇賯丞貙 丕賱賲丕囟賷丞貙 丕賱氐賱亘丞丕賱賲賮乇胤丞 丨丿 丕賱鬲禺賲丞 賮賷 廿賮乇丕胤賴丕 賵丕賱賲卮丨賵賳丞 亘賲卮丕毓乇 賵兀丨丕爻賷爻 丨賯賷賯賷丞 ....賴匕丕 丕賱廿賮乇丕胤 賴賵 爻乇 丕賱乇賵丕賷丞 丕賱鬲賷 兀乇丕賴賳 毓賱賶 兀賳 毓丿丿 賰亘賷乇 賲賳 丕賱賯乇丕亍 賱賳 賷鬲毓丿賶 胤賷丕鬲 丕賱禺賲爻賷賳 氐賮丨丞 賵賷鬲乇賰賴丕
鬲丨賮丞 兀丿亘賷丞 賵鬲賲乇丿 毓賱賶 賮賰乇丞 丕賱乇賵丕賷丞 丕賱兀丿亘賷丞 鬲噩毓賱 賲賳 賴匕丕 丕賱賳氐 毓賲賱丕賸 賲鬲賯賳丕賸 賷睾乇丿 禺丕乇噩 丕賱爻乇亘 賵賲賳毓胤賮丕賸 鬲丕乇賷禺賷丕賸 賱丌賮丕賯 賱丕 丨丿賵丿 賱賴丕
賷賳賯爻賲 丕賱毓賲賱 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 丕賱兀賵賱 廿賱賶 賯爻賲賷賳 兀乇賶 兀賳賳賷 丕賳噩匕亘鬲 廿賱賶 賯爻賲賴 丕賱兀賵賱 亘毓丕胤賮丞 兀賰亘乇 賮賴賵 賷噩賵亘 亘賰 毓丕賱賲 丕賱孬賲丕賳賷賳賷丕鬲 賲賳 丕賱賯乇賳 丕賱賲賳氐乇賲 賵賱丕 賷賯賱賱 匕賱賰 賲賳 兀賴賲賷丞 賯爻賲賴 丕賱孬丕賳賷 丕賱匕賷 亘丕丿乇 亘賴 丕賱賰丕鬲亘 爻乇丿賴 賮賷 丕賱丨丿賷孬 毓賳 丕賱兀賱賮賷丞 丕賱孬丕賳賷丞 賮賷 亘丿丕賷丕鬲賴丕....爻乇丿 亘乇賵丨 爻賷乇丞 賷爻鬲丨賯 丕賱禺賲爻丞 賳噩賵賲
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