My Struggle: Book One – Reading & Writing Blog

My Struggle: Book 1, Karl Ove Knausgaard, 2009

It surprises me that I got through to the end of this first installment of Knausgaard’s six… and that I’m considering reading on?? Not because I didn’t enjoy it—Knausgaard’s writing is beautiful and peculiar, haunting in its candidness and brilliantly keen in its memory of the mundane—but I think it’s fair for even god to wonder at why my 27 year old feminine, romantic, and absurdly busy mind would be interested even at all in reading the autofiction account of a mid-life Norwegian man’s reminiscing on a grade school New Years Eve party or the time he made tea for his Grandmother when his father died.

Ok so maybe these are bad examples. A Norwegian man reminiscing about a grade school NYE party has a lot of potential to be interesting, and anyone in grief may find comfort at a tea scene for a grieving Grandma, but… these scenes go on. Knausgaard’s moments are concentrated and precise; a single scene could be so densely packed that it will take hours of reading time. Yet he makes this arduous task satisfying. You aren’t able to push past a single word you don’t digest or any tacit feeling you don’t ingest completely. And there are so many of them! Knausgaard has an emotion in like, every line. I bet I could fall in love with him.

It would be difficult to exactly share the book’s soul. I don’t believe my plot summary will suffice: Knausgaard is a middle aged writer, married to a woman he loves incidentally, and is ruining his marriage to laboriously write a novel in which he reflects on all the things in his youth that feel defining or formative to him. His wife is a bit irrelevant to the immediate story by the way, but I wonder if in real time, it’s his mundanity in his marriage which drills him to rediscover himself so soddenly. He wonders most in his dynamic with his father and his first experiences partying. Later, in Part II, after the death of his father, the story forms a theme around his first experience with close grief. I was much more invested in Part I than in Part II.

Since that plot summary gave you no essence, let me also caveat that it may not have even been accurate. Through much of the narrative, I was actually quite disengaged, though I say that hesitantly because I don’t mean it as a negative. I’d argue that Knausgaard’s memory is so keen and penetrating because he wants us to enjoy it on a micro scale—on the level of the scene—rather than as a whole. I mean, yeah I’m sure he wants readers to think I like that book, but the form and care with which he crafts his individual scenes leads me to believe he’d much rather his readers say I loved that scene, or I felt nostalgic at that memory, or I felt like I was there at that moment.

Here is a quote from around the mid-point that I thought was pretty accurate about what the book is intended for.

“There is no one who does not understand their own world. Someone who understands very little, a child, for example, simply moves in a more restricted world than someone who understands a lot. However, an insight into the limits of understanding has always been part of understanding a lot…When I, as a nineteen-year-old, was confronted with the contention that the world is linguistically structured I rejected it with what I called sound common sense, for it was obviously meaningless, the pen I held, was that supposed to be language?” (220).

Do you see?

This is an obsessively-compulsed man, would you say so? The ruminations, the self-doubt, the need to understand, almost sickly so? The memoir (memoir??) is filled with inquiries that go turtles all the way down. I’ve heard criticism that Knausgaard is self-absorbed, and that by that fact, his work is uninteresting. His work is not uninteresting (declarative), and I disagree that he is self-absorbed. Or I agree, but I disagree that it is negative commentary to say so. I’ve extrapolated so much from the way Knausgaard has linguistically crafted his life (“…confronted with the contention that the world was linguistically structured…”). To be able to have given me that—such extrapolation!—his curation must have been of a selfless intent, no? There had to be an awareness of humanity in it—an awareness of my humanity, even.

His point quite tickles my qualified fancy. If his thesis is for subjectivity (“There is no one who does not understand their own world”), then yes, the autofiction form would be the most effective way to prove it. His world is subjective, as yours is, as mine is. Intensely examining his life is a direct approach to create a conduit with other people—in a real badass and meta way, and probably healing (or degenerating; one or the other) too.

The caution in which Knausgaard has studied, judged, and questioned his interior world feels like the inverse of self-absorption. His great feat is his candidness, but the art of a self-absorbed man would reflect untruth and ignorance. His art reflects neither of these things. He is a master of perceiving and attaining meaning.

My Struggle: Book One is basically a manuscript in which Knausgaard positions himself in how he is affected by other people. Girls, or friends, or his uncle or brother or father. Even, in another respect, Knausgaard seeks to situate himself in position to objects, or locations, or familial structures, or weather. This is the most self-aware a man can be, no? He has done something better than the rest of us, and that is thinking about himself as a thing in relation to a set of unpredictable outcomes—an agent of patterns that he can only consider, and he can desire to control.

Quotes instructions: hear his beautiful, singular voice!! (I am a writer mess right now and my quotes are written in many different notepads, so let me do my best at collecting them) (starting at my copy’s page 204 because my earlier quotes were written and left in a different state):

“Time had passed him by, and with it, the world” (204).

“August Strindberg once claimed in his profound, deranged seriousness that the stars in the sky were peepholes in a wall” (205).

“I knew sleep was around the corner. It was just a question of lowering myself into its dark vaults” (212).

“I was almost thirty years old when I saw a dead body for the first time. It was the summer of 1998, a July afternoon, in a chapel in Kristiansand. My father had died. He was laid out on a table in the middle of the room, the sky was overcast, the light in the room dull, outside the window a lawn mower was circling around a lawn. I was there with my brother” (226).

“The notion of having children one day was not without its complications for me, and when Yngve told me that KariAnne was pregnant it had been impossible to imagine what kind of father Yngve would make, whether what dad had handed down to us was in our marrow or whether it would be possible to break free, maybe even without a problem” (273).

(About Yngve as a father) “He never rejected them, he always had time for them…and he never tried to get close to them, by which I mean he didn’t make them compensate for something in himself, or in his life” (273).

“It felt as if we were driving into a memory. As if what we were moving through was just a kind of backdrop for my youth” (275).

“…the hatred I felt for him was no more than a brook is to an ocean, a lamp to the night” (322).