What a strange and occasionally frustrating book. I was very close to giving up, on multiple occasions, but then he would pull through just in time. SWhat a strange and occasionally frustrating book. I was very close to giving up, on multiple occasions, but then he would pull through just in time. Singularity is good, it's worth reading, and it's relatively unique. Certainly it's better than like 90% of published novels. But it doesn't really 'work' as a novel, and I'm actually mildly annoyed that it took up two weeks of my life?
Really we have 5-6 novellas that are almost unrelated: #1 the public defender courtroom scenes, #2 the insane heist with Dane, #3 the Benitez narrative, #4 the terrible philosopher-roommates thing, #5 death row in Florida, #6 Casi's family. These are badly-halfway-tied together through a somewhat grating but often brilliant narrative voice. Half the novellas are really good (#1, #2, #3, and #6 isn't bad?) but #4, among the most lengthy ones, is definitely not. Like the Greenwich Village party scenes in The Recognitions, this should have been left on the cutting-room floor.
One of the big issues is that virtually zero percent of the dialogue is believable, at all, apart from the court transcript stuff; it's fun to read, in a way, but it was almost impressive how every character sounded the same and also lacked all plausibility. Pynchon characters breaking into song while explaining quantum mechanics or whatever are more believable than the dialogue in this book. I guess it's maybe similar to Gaddis, where the characters are just = Gaddis talking? But that's the least appealing aspect of Gaddis. I was mostly reminded of the maximalist Infinite Jest narrative style, but in dialogue.
Oh did I mention Infinite Jest? Because holy shit does this guy blatantly copy IJ. And no, I'm not saying that every 650+ page novel with any degree of postmodern/formal trickery is "copying IJ," what I mean is that I think this novel, in all seriousness, may have began its life as IJ fan-fiction that just got out of hand. If you're going to copy a book, I mean, why not? It's a good book! I'm not even sure if anything better came out that decade (possibly McCarthy's border trilogy?).
But even then . . . de la Pava uses the exact same metaphors in the same sports-related context as DFW ("he was the kind of guy a prime fighter like Benitez ate for lunch"). He brings up exactly the same rat + pellets + experiment addiction thing that forms the thematic centerpiece of IJ; de la Pava uses such similar language in this case that I have to wonder if he was being meta? (on page 339 especially). He capitalizes 'Television' and overemphasizes its importance in this really weird and dated way, somehow, even though the book was published in 2008, lol; hadn't most people cancelled cable by then? He uses the same cringe acronyms (S.E.R.P.E.N.T, C.O.C.K., etc.), which, yes, DFW stole from Pynchon but come on.
So yeah, mostly reminded of DFW, and not always in a bad way, and then also echoes of Tom Wolfe, Gaddis, Pynchon, Bolaño, The Wire ("Season 6: Bunk and McNulty explore the world of public defenders!"), etc.
Also it's clearly a 'postmodern' novel, but thankfully de la Pava mostly avoids the self-conscious 'I'm writing experimental fiction, look at me!' touches, the most annoying aspect of postmodern lit (see Coover, Barth, pre-1995 DFW, Moore, Gass, most Oulipo, etc.), the winking/nudging 'metafiction haha amirite' thing.
Singularity is not twee, it's not MFA-ish, it's not pretentious (somehow! it really should be). It includes court documents, letters, transcripts, etc. -- the usual 'we're not just writing fiction anymore!' stuff -- but, impossibly, it isn't glib, and it somehow succeeds.
Exhibit A: at one point early on, Casi is talking about eating his mother's empanadas, and how they're amazing etc., and then says, look, if you don't believe me here's the recipe! At which point de la Pava spends three pages writing out an extraordinarily detailed recipe for empanadas. But it somehow isn't annoying; it doesn't feel like he's playing a meta-literary game.
And the key, I realized later on, is the (thinly-veiled autobiographical) character in question, Casi himself; I've known guys precisely like this, I actually used to BE someone like this, an overly talkative grad student type who would tell you a story about his 24th birthday party at his mom's house and then would literally stop the anecdote to give you the recipe for the empanadas because he's an intense/funny/talkative person who would actually do that.
And the empanada recipe exemplifies the main thing Singularity has going for it -- the humor, the lightness, the fun; similar to IJ, this is really the only way to make such a novel work. (IJ is, at the very least, the funniest novel of the past few decades.) But in general I think it's important to note that the maximalist style (if not the novel itself) 'working' in this case is due to the fact that de la Pava really thought about WHY the novel was written in a maximalist style. I feel like some authors use such a style without really understanding why they're using it; is there a thematic or story-based or reality-based reason that you're writing in this style? In the case of Singularity, there definitely is.
Well, he did it; somehow he made a 1250-page novel work, even with a 450-page essay in the middle. It seems clear to me that Knausgaard was forced intWell, he did it; somehow he made a 1250-page novel work, even with a 450-page essay in the middle. It seems clear to me that Knausgaard was forced into this sitation by his six-book contract with his publisher; Book 6 should have focused on Gunnar and the reception of the first book, Book 7 should have focused on Linda et al. and their reception of the later books, and Book 8 should have been the capstone essay on Celan/Hitler. But, as I said, it does somehow work; I wonder if Knausgaard had Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve in mind, as he’s a big fan of Proust -- the same idea of combining a novel with a related (and quite lengthy) literary essay.
Books �6� and �7� are on par with the high quality of Books 1 and 2, finding beauty in the quotidian, etc.; his descriptions of family life included some curiously ‘meta� experiences, in my case -- there was a point last month where I was making breakfast for my three small children while reading a description of Knausgaard making breakfast for his three small children (!).
I also found the spiraling meta-meta-meta timeline of the end of the book to be mildly amusing, e.g. where Knausgaard includes an account of a stop on his book tour for Book 6 in the book itself (this is probably a first for world literature?) and catches us up on the pre-publication process until on the final page he actually writes “I am now finished writing the novel� . . . lol.
It was also interesting to learn more about the genesis and reception of the earlier novels; for example, the somehow unsurprising fact that he wrote Book 5 in eight weeks (?!); similar to Faulkner writing As I Lay Dying in a few weeks in the evenings, after working at his full-time job all day, I guess some artists are just different than the rest of us.
Generally speaking, the first thing that struck me is that I take Knausgaard a bit more seriously now; I had thought of him as somewhat of a savant who had halfway-innocently stumbled upon the next step in fiction without 100% understanding why/how he had done it, but really I had just been tricked by his self-presentation of “gosh, I'm just a humble self-doubting writer experiencing the world and talking about things naively, I'm so incompetent and unworthy of your attention, but I guess I'll try to pull something together,� where actually this is (as evidenced by Book 6) clearly untrue, given his deep familiarity with all recent European literature as well as the strength of the Hitler essay.
Also the impressiveness of Book 6 really drove home to me the absurdity of various reviewers who have dismissed My Struggle as ‘airport reading,� as too ‘easy to read,� and so on; I don't know of any tactful way to put this, but if you think that Knausgaard has published lazy, easy prose that anyone can write, then you are confused about how writing works, and you have also failed to see how carefully crafted his writing is. Yes, it's very limpid and very easy to read; it is also very, very good. Combining “easy to read� and “very, very good� is almost impossible, which is at least partially why so many authors use self-conscious literary language. Anyone can see that Joyce is a good writer, it's obvious from one sentence; I'll grant that it's not quite as immediately obvious with Knausgaard how good the prose is, sure, but it should definitely be clear to any reader after a few chapters. Also, Knausgaard is perfectly capable of writing standard literary poetic prose (see A Time for Everything), but has simply chosen not to in this case. Proust and Joyce and Gaddis are very good writers; Le Guin and Lagerkvist and Knausgaard are also very good writers, despite writing in a more unassuming style.
* * *
So, okay, this Hitler essay . . . honestly it was hard for me to believe that this topic -- a very, very played-out topic that I’ve probably read too many books about -- could possibly be made fresh or interesting in any way. Also it was hilarious trying to explain it to my wife, who has been hearing me talk about Min Kamp for a couple weeks per year over the course of, actually, our entire marriage by this point: "So the Norwegian guy� -- she also calls him 'Car Love Knapsack' -- “is writing an essay about Hitler now? I thought that was supposed to be a novel about his life?"
So I have to explain that, well, yes, 3,000 pages into an autobiographical novel, in the midst of a painstaking 150-page description of grocery shopping with his kids and his friend Geir, Knausgaard abruptly segues into a 450-page analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the context of totalitarianism/art/culture in early twentieth-century Germany, and that this essay is not only incredibly engrossing, but I literally wish he would go on writing about the topic for longer. It is hard to believe.
Unfortunately, while the Hitler essay itself is very good, the preceding Celan analysis and interstitial bits of theology and philosophy are awkward and amateurish; I was particularly unimpressed by basically everything he said about Hamlet, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, the Romantic “I,� the Utøya massacre, Christianity, etc. These bits reminded me of James Wood trying to write a novel (behold, the worst novel ever written by a great literary critic); Knausgaard is very talented and he can obviously write great nonfiction as long as he sticks to something that he knows well, but he does not know most of these topics well. Somehow these belles lettres sections ‘worked� in Books 1 and 2, I suppose because in brief 5-10 page interludes they really add something to the narrative (i.e. his meditations on death in Book 1, his analysis of Swedish culture in Book 2), but not so much here.
While the essay is quite good overall, in these instances I was reminded of nothing more than an eager undergraduate talking to you at a party at 3 a.m. who is very very focused on imparting some random halfway-specious chains of reasoning (“but see, it's like angels in the Old Testament! And it's like where Heidegger said this thing once about language! And you know, death in Joyce! it's all connected!�), and you’re just nodding along, saying “oh yeah, totally,� while also trying to quickly finish your beer so you can escape.
I was also incredibly irritated by Knausgaard stating, repeatedly, that Heidegger was a committed Nazi, which just shows that he hasn’t really done the reading; Heidegger, who was somewhat naïve politically, briefly joined the Nazi party in 1933-34 with the aim of helping to shape it into something far better than it was (a noble goal, certainly) and realized very quickly -- far more quickly than many of his peers -- that the party was not redeemable, at which point he consistently (and as carefully as possible without getting arrested) attacked Nazi principles in his lectures up through the 1940s. Knausgaard is surprised that Celan visited Heidegger after WW2, but in fact this is not at all surprising, because, again, Heidegger was not a Nazi.
Thankfully, however, with the Hitler essay itself, you could tell that in this case Knausgaard had actual expertise and had done the reading, there wasn’t an “eager undergraduate playing with concepts� vibe but rather this was a serious essay, a book-length essay that could easily be published as a successful monograph. It is difficult for me to put it into words without my usual awkward adverb-laden superlatives or whatever, but I can’t remember being so captivated and impressed by a piece of nonfiction writing probably since reading DFW’s essays back in 2005.
Also, even though I knew that it was coming, I seriously felt like the cop in the interview room at the end of The Usual Suspects, looking from wall to wall and realizing that Keyser Soze has been sneakily leading me up to this point all along. It was right there in the title of the book, even! It turns out that Min Kamp was not, in fact, an accidental or ill-advised borrowing of the title of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (as the early reviewers argued); rather Knausgaard has been very intentionally writing the precise opposite of Hitler’s book all along.
What is Mein Kampf? Well, as Knausgaard explains, “the book takes the form of a bildungsroman, in which we follow the author from birth, through the first character-shaping years of childhood, through his teenage years and into adulthood� (!), in which we learn that the author hated his domineering and cruel father (!), idolized his mother (!), was trapped in a petit-bourgeois mindset and yet strove to escape it through art (!), had problems forming relationships with others (!), exalted and elevated women and had anxiety in their company (!) . . . in other words, to say the least, as Knausgaard writes on page 888, “Hitler’s youth resembles my own.�
However, what are the shortcomings of Hitler’s book, besides the obvious? Well, the fact that he “makes himself one with his politics, makes himself one with his role . . . invariably, the personal experiences he describes are hooked up to the political, and if the book has any biographical axis at all, it is considered from such a remote distance that everything personal and private, relating only to him, to his own person and character, the idiosyncratic, vanishes from sight.�
Ultimately, the horrors of Nazism were “made possible by a shift in the language, displayed in its purest form in Mein Kampf, which� � and here Knausgaard borrows from his Celan analysis � “contains no ‘you,' only an 'I,' and a 'we,' which is what makes possible to turn 'they' into 'it.' In 'you' was decency. In 'it' was evil."
And to this, what does Knausgaard’s Min Kamp say, repeatedly and earnestly? “I am you." Knausgaard emphasizes that “the yearning for reality, for the authentic, and for nature is not dangerous. The dangerous force of Nazism was the exact opposite, remoteness to the world and the regimentation of the human that all ideological thinking creates."
And so, again, what does Min Kamp express, repeatedly? Precisely the opposite of Mein Kampf, i.e., the truth of art, where we “stand up close to each individual, so close as to hear each name as it is whispered, to look into each pair of eyes, where the soul of every human is revealed, unique and inalienable, and listen attentively to the story of a day in the life of each and every one of them, a day in the company of loved ones, families, and friends . . ." DING DING DING.
In other words, this shaggy 4,000-page autobiographical novel, where a Norwegian man writes beautifully and sincerely about his friends, his kids, his writing career, his hopes, his fears, has, all along, been a conscious artistic refutation of the style and content of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Hitler focuses on the abstract, remote ‘I,� the social ‘we,� he turns ‘you� into ‘they� and ‘it�; Knausgaard does the exact opposite. Mein Kampf has two lines describing “the happiest year� of Hitler’s childhood; Min Kamp has 500 pages describing the happiest year of Knausgaard’s childhood.
(And yes, it’s fair to say that it does seem, at some level, a little inappropriate for Knausgaard to place his own autobiography in the context of Hitler and the Shoah, like it’s almost a step too far, but I think that he mostly makes the case for this not being absurd.)
Entirely apart from his autobiographical inversion of Hitler’s text, Knausgaard also writes a powerful (if not completely original) analysis of the very everydayness of Nazism itself: "what happened was not inhuman at all, but human, and that this is what makes it so terrible and so closely bound up with our own selves . . . if we view Hitler as a 'bad' person, with categorically negative characteristics even as a child and a young man, all pointing toward subsequently escalating 'evil,' then Hitler is of 'the other,' and surely not of us . . . only his innocence can bring his guilt into relief."
Knausgaard also describes, in some of his strongest passages, the appeal that Nazism had for the German people in 1933 and 1934, arguments that echo Orwell’s of Mein Kampf, probably my favorite essay by him, which concludes, much in line with Knausgaard’s analysis:
Hitler has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive� thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,’� Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,� and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number� is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end� is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
Anyway I’m mostly just bummed out that the journey is over, no more Min Kamp; you’ve been taken on this epic journey through Knausgaard’s life, but then suddenly he's let you off the train. Bits and pieces of his post-2011 life have been mentioned in the news, of course, such as his recent divorce, which is an unfortunate addendum to his account at the end of Book 6; also his book Spring serves as a quasi-appendix to Book 6, but somehow the reader is left wanting more. As crazy as this might sound, if Knausgaard were to publish another 15,000 pages of Min Kamp, releasing one book per year for the next thirty years, I would read all of it with zero hesitation....more
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