While doing some poetry readings at a literature and music festival this summer, my wife became friendly with a Welsh poet who is rising on the UK scene. At some point they both discovered that they shared an affinity for the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. By my wife’s own admission, two serious women—published books of poetry, multiple advanced degrees, and years of reading tons of books between them—giggled like schoolgirls over Knausgaard’s prose, both confessing to a kind of literary crush. The Welsh poet—who I’ll leave nameless—had actually been backstage with Knausgaard at a reading! Can you believe it!? On telling me this when my wife returned home, I rolled my eyes in a way that can only be called theatrical, and wondered not so quietly if their fascination really had absolutely nothing to do with Knausgaard’s craggy rock-star good looks.
What, exactly, explains the appeal of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six volume work on his own life? How, exactly, did this writer convince someone to publish six doorstop worthy books on his own life? How did he then begin to command the kind of enthralled audiences he has both in his native Norway, as well as all over much of the literate world (the books have been translated into at least fifteen languages since 2009) without getting tarred and feathered as the most shameless narcissist since, well, Narcissus? As if that wasn’t enough, he gives the work a title that—in Norwegian—deliberately evokes Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Yet my wife’s reaction is shared by no less a literary heavyweight than Zadie Smith, who likens the books to a drug addiction.
I’m not even sure how to review My Struggle, Volume 1. The typical review is supposed to summarize some relevant details, perhaps mention something about the writer’s past work, before evaluating a few of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. If reviewing fiction—especially mystery or thriller fiction—the judicious reviewer will avoid saying too much about the conclusion of the plot. As a reviewer, I am required to have given the potential book buyer enough temptation to try and read a good book, or enough discouragement to avoid a bad book, without having taken away whatever pleasures the book itself might hold should the reader decide to fork over hard-earned money to the book merchant and take the plunge.
Yet the book—is it memoir? creative-nonfiction? autobiography? or a novel?—makes me want to protect its narrative secrets. That alone—the fact that I just typed a sentence that included the phrase ‘narrative secrets’ in it—is nothing less than absolutely hilarious. For 90% of the book, possibly more, is centered around a handful of relatively banal days from the writer’s actual life. The book has no chapter breaks, and is very simply divided into two parts. Most of Part 1 is framed around one New Year’s Eve Party, wherein our teenage Norwegian hero tries his rural best to get as drunk as possible and talk to a girl he has a crush on. Most of Part 2 concerns a bleak week in the writer’s early adulthood cleaning his grandmother’s house after his father’s death. Yet he manages to pull this narrative witchcraft off to the extent that I’m worried that I might give something away, much the way that I might fret about accidentally revealing the killer while reviewing a mystery.
On top of that difficulty, it is also true that telling you more about what is in the book would be a bit like giving you a basic recipe for homemade bread to explain the pleasures of a loaf pulled fresh out of the oven: there’s no way that you will understand the appeal of My Struggle from reading about the yeast, the flour, and the water than went into making this book.
My own relationship with the book is a strange one, but perhaps will tell you something about the book. This January, while going through another round with bronchitis, my wife read sections of Volume 1 out loud to me while I laid in bed. I was amused by the writer’s descriptions of his boyhood. This man, I thought, is a good writer. He’s very funny, especially when talking about being in a school rock band in Norway in the 80s (the episode is full of “Smoke on the Water” and self-loathing, like much of the early 1980s). Despite that favorable reaction I was not compelled to return to the book. This summer, watching my wife get completely seduced by the series, I decided to give them another go while I waited for some books to arrive at the post office. For the first few days I meandered through the text, a few pages after supper here, a few pages before going to sleep there. Around the end of Part 1 I began to get a whiff of what all the fuss was actually about, and found that I was really enjoying myself. I began Part 2 with a freshly open mind while trying to keep half an eye on my toddler son as he played on the beach one overcast morning. Within a few pages, I knew that I really must clear the rest of the day to complete reading the book. Some fifteen hours later, at around 3:30 am, having ignored wife and child for the better part of a day to bolt down over 200 pages, I came away from the novel–which is what I have decided to call it–somewhat stunned.
Had I just read the best thing since reading James Joyce’s “The Dead”? Had Knausgaard managed to evoke both Proust and Dostoevsky and compare favorably with them? Had a 400-page meditation on the death of a writer’s father just kept me completely enthralled? Could Knausgaard keep anyone enthralled, with anything? What in all holy hell was going on here? And for god’s sakes what was my wife doing sleeping at 3:30 am when there were books to discuss, damn it all!
I’m not ready to answer all of those questions just yet. But I will say that, despite about three hours of sleep, I practically skipped down the stairs to breakfast the next morning, vibrating with the urgent need to talk to my wife about the book. I was as crushed out as the rest of them. For the last week hardly a meal goes by in my little house without a pretty close discussion of exactly how Knausgaard is pulling off his literary high wire act. Now it is my toddler son rolling his eyes every time his parents bring up the Norwegian writer’s name again.
Perhaps there is nothing more to be said, good or bad, than this: at the end of breakfast that morning I demanded to know where my wife had stashed Volume 2 of My Struggle.
Nathan Elliott manages to teach in Georgia while living in Newfoundland, thanks to the power of the internets. He spends the rest of his time looking after a toddler, reading, riding a bike, and trying to write a little.
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