My Struggle
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Books 1-6, 3600 pages.
I brought Book 1 on Thanksgiving vacation to Tampa two years ago. It was one of those rare days when I got to read all day. I barely moved from bed. My in-laws played with our newborn daughter, Arwen, just a couple months old. At the time, I didn’t know anything about Knausgaard, the controversial release of My Struggle in Europe, I just knew that the voice in Book 1, the narrator was attempting something genuine, something fierce.
I read Book 1 and 2 in rapid fashion, just a couple months—I couldn’t stop. Arwen was an infant then, barely able to roll over, bottles and diapers and a wonderful smile.
She’s two now and has endless energy, sings all day, and pets puppies with frenzied joy. I finished Book 6 last week, and mostly, I feel a little empty, feel like I’ve said goodbye to an old friend. I’ve been tempted to go back and read Books 1 and 2 again. It’s been so long that I can’t recall them in detail.
I drive 70 miles from Atlanta to north Georgia where I teach each day. It makes for great book time. Listening to Books 3-6 was a joy, a companion in my ear for so many hours over the last year. Edoardo Ballerini does an amazing job narrating.
My Struggle—all six volumes—is worth the time. I wouldn’t skip any of them, not a page. I wrote about Joyce’s Ulysses back in the summer, and I considered why it’s a difficult read. That book, at the sentence level, with its alien interior, and mashed up narratives is just, flat-out, a work-out to read. This is not the case with Knausgaard’s novels. Instead, sheer mass is in play here. My office mate, Justin, just read Book 1: he loved it, thought it brilliant, but he’s hesitant to dive into the whole series. He had to “resist” jumping right into Book 2. I know what he means. There is something electric, haunting, and frenetic in the first couple of books.
Knausgaard’s My Struggle is a story about family, death, marriage, divorce, writing, the creative world, the natural world, city life, art work, history, sex, food, cigarettes, Nazis, Hitler, Europe, the ocean, fathers and sons, modern literature, the Old Testament, brothers, alcohol abuse, fathers and children, small history, epic history, money, debt, music, loving mothers, irate relatives, piss and shit and the universe—there’s nothing too quotidian, too low-brow, too celestial. All is here.
Sometimes this day-to-day focus makes for some slower passages—I wonder how many cigraettes and cups of coffee are consumed in the course of My Struggle? But this focus on the daily circuit—one that we each run—also lends to the force of his novels. Sections would seem like they were drifting, or without real direction and then hundreds of pages would come to a head in one shattering moment. Much of Knausgaard’s childhood memories seem banal, every day, without significance, but then you see how much his father really hurt him, how much his father warped him. And ultimately, what are we but our day-to-day? We are those moment to moment people who become our habits.
I try to explain to people, how these six volumes feel to read. One thing: I think I know more about Knausgaard than many of my own family members. I mentioned this to Justin and he mentioned that our outer lives are often sanitized, cleaned-up for social media presentation. I agree, and here, I think Knausgaard excels. Of course, he’s not shown us EVERYTHING, but he has shown us much of his core, his fears, his shame, his unending self-censorship in day-to day life. I have spent 3600 pages or 100 plus hours listening to this man talk about himself, his world, his desires: Knausgaard as boy, as teen, as twenty, as a father, as a 40 year old looking back. My Struggle ends, really, in the middle of life, not a true ending at all. The struggle isn’t over.
Book 6 features a 400 page essay about Hitler growing up in pre-WWII Europe and it’s the only part of Book 6 that made any sense to me, was organized and concise. Book 6 is long, at well over a thousand pages. It’s the only volume that I thought needed serious editing or trimming. But, but, but the essay on Hitler is brilliant. If you only read that, it’s worth picking up 6. Knausgaard attempts the impossible: to humanize Adolf Hitler, to portray the man as a person who should be “hated for what he did, not who he was.” Knausgaard implies several parallels between himself and young Hitler: both were struggling artists, both hated bourgeois culture, both had strained relationships with their fathers, both went from small towns to city life. But, these are where the similarities end. Knausgaard cites a slow, meticulous, biography on Hitler. It’s a brilliant piece of writing in the middle of Book 6. How did a struggling artist, a WWI vet, and nobody rise to ultimate power? and in that role as German leader, orchestrate the Holocaust? How do we still view this person as a human and not just a monster? How do you humanize Hitler? How do we live in the shadow of the early 20th century? For Knausgaard, this moment in history is a critical moment, a moment where society shifted towards the modern, the fragmented; it was the world he grew up in in 1970’s Norway. A Norway only 30 years removed from WWII, still embedded with abandoned Nazi coastal bunkers.
Ultimately, the struggle, for Knausgaard, is one with his father, the ghost, the ever present authoritarian spirit. Knausgaard makes some interesting points about fathers and sons in Ulysses, Hamlet, and the New Testament. All feature sons and fathers at odds, or in utterly different roles. Knausgaard was physically abused by his father, but the daily emotional abuse is what left a decades long shadow over him. He can never truly overcome the legacy of his father, the alcoholism, the terrible death, but the novels are a form of catharsis at least, a way for Knausgaard to push back against his father’s control.
What is a life worth living? For Knausgaard, it’s writing, it’s about being present, it’s being close to his family, even when they are driving him mad, it’s saying to the world: I’m going to tell this story, even if I must pay dearly for it. At the core of this novel is a question: What is authentic? Can any fiction be worthwhile? I’ve thought about this for the last couple years as I seek my own writing identity. What is worth writing about really asks, what is worth living with, thinking about, for we are what we write. The stories we retell become new and alive to us. For Knausgaard, at least with My Struggle, he could no longer write fiction; he had to deal with his own narrative. This shift closer to non-fiction, this fusion of autobiography and novel is wonderful to read and cost Knausgaard much, perhaps, as he concludes Book 6, too much.