[ed. Pretty good description of Knausgaard's style. The anti-novel.]
In a recent interview, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard said that “a [romantic] relationship is based on lies and lies and lies . . . If you don’t lie it collapses.” His relationship with his readers, on the surface at least, depends on an opposite pact: that he will lie about nothing.
Knausgaard’s intensely autobiographical six-novel cycle, My Struggle, has become a literary monument to the aesthetic value of tactlessness. Across its thousands of pages he explores his feelings towards his loved ones with brutal candour. This commitment to the truth not only challenges the mutual illusions of family life, but also deprives his prose of the traditional novel’s formal excitements: narrative pace, suspense, symbolism. Most of our days are not, in reality, the stuff of page-turners. His characters walk around nude, stripped of all their novelistic vestments; their only meaning comes from the fact that Knausgaard has experienced them. And yet, the charisma of these books, a combination of critical acclaim, commercial success and the strange brilliance of their form, has made being hypnotised by their extensive descriptions of ordinary Norwegian life a sort of cultural obligation.
The mystery remains: how do we stomach reading Knausgaard? How does the novel form survive his onslaught against its well-tested seductions? In the first volume, the death of Karl Ove’s father gives dramatic structure to the final section. He and his brother travel to the house where their father had been living in isolated, drunken squalor with their demented grandmother. They begin obsessively disinfecting and clearing out soiled clothes. Karl Ove’s wish to hold the wake in the house — an act of redemption and reclaiming — gives urgency to the protracted accounts of bleach and garbage bags. The symbolic quality of human death rituals piggybacks symbolism into Knausgaard’s anti-novelistic novel.
Some Rain Must Fall, the fifth book of the cycle to be translated into English, returns briefly to this haunted house. Karl Ove is back scything the long grass out front. More coffee is brewed. Or perhaps it is the same coffee as before. Knausgaard gives us a few new vistas on to these mournful days, including the funeral itself. One of the startling joys of My Struggle’s looping, non-chronological form is that reading collides with the processes of memory. When Knausgaard revisits the same detail thousands of pages and, perhaps for the reader, several years apart, he manages to transfer the author’s act of recollection on to us. At these strange junctures, where two strands of the story cross, it is as though author and reader are remembering together, simultaneously.
But in the scheme of this volume this return to the father’s death is a glimpse through a keyhole. The other 600 pages must do without this traumatic epicentre, and earn their keep elsewhere. This volume concerns Karl Ove’s 14-year residence in the provincial town of Bergen, where he pursues various studies and jobs, takes summer breaks, drinks heavily, falls in and out of love and, most crucially, turns himself into a writer.
If the first book built itself towards one particular death, the fifth encodes death into its microstructure; it is felt on every page. One evening Karl Ove tells us: “I got dressed and went downstairs, death, out of the door, death, up the hill, death, through the underpass, death, down the road, death, along the fjord, death, and into the park, which wrapped itself around me with its living yet sleeping darkness.” These thoughts arise between him masturbating in the shower and having “a couple of beers” in the café before his brother turns up.
On one hand this passage is part of a familiar novelistic tradition of the young male anti-hero — morbid, horny, banal — mired in existential crisis. On the other, it is a shorthand for the latest book’s power. These Bergen years are infused with death, not because of Karl Ove’s gauche tussles with mortality, but because they belong to a dead age. We know already which love affairs will endure and which will not, and so death oversees the hungover waffle-eating. It crawls under the duvet with Karl Ove and his cosy, doomed relationships. Part of Knausgaard’s wizardry is that our knowledge of his story doesn’t drain this book-length flashback of intensity, but rather enhances it. The mundane details of this period — the cyclical drunkenness and self-loathing, the days spent reading and failing to write well — are rendered exquisite because the reader can feel the loss of them. Dramatic irony, generated when the audience’s knowledge of the fictional universe exceeds that of the characters, is this volume’s cold-blooded pulse.
The same irony animates the account of Karl Ove’s writerly ambitions. He feels he lacks the necessary imagination: “Everything I wrote was connected to reality and my own experiences.” This volume foreshadows the huge project that is to come, of which it, in fact, is a part. One evening he wonders: “Why actually should you write about actions? X loves Y, Z kills W, F commits embezzlement and is caught by G . . . ” Here he questions the cause-and-effect of traditional narrative. As with previous volumes, Some Rain Must Fall has exchanged novelistic plotting for the relative formlessness of life, where the causes of our effects are often hidden.
In a recent interview, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard said that “a [romantic] relationship is based on lies and lies and lies . . . If you don’t lie it collapses.” His relationship with his readers, on the surface at least, depends on an opposite pact: that he will lie about nothing.
Knausgaard’s intensely autobiographical six-novel cycle, My Struggle, has become a literary monument to the aesthetic value of tactlessness. Across its thousands of pages he explores his feelings towards his loved ones with brutal candour. This commitment to the truth not only challenges the mutual illusions of family life, but also deprives his prose of the traditional novel’s formal excitements: narrative pace, suspense, symbolism. Most of our days are not, in reality, the stuff of page-turners. His characters walk around nude, stripped of all their novelistic vestments; their only meaning comes from the fact that Knausgaard has experienced them. And yet, the charisma of these books, a combination of critical acclaim, commercial success and the strange brilliance of their form, has made being hypnotised by their extensive descriptions of ordinary Norwegian life a sort of cultural obligation. The mystery remains: how do we stomach reading Knausgaard? How does the novel form survive his onslaught against its well-tested seductions? In the first volume, the death of Karl Ove’s father gives dramatic structure to the final section. He and his brother travel to the house where their father had been living in isolated, drunken squalor with their demented grandmother. They begin obsessively disinfecting and clearing out soiled clothes. Karl Ove’s wish to hold the wake in the house — an act of redemption and reclaiming — gives urgency to the protracted accounts of bleach and garbage bags. The symbolic quality of human death rituals piggybacks symbolism into Knausgaard’s anti-novelistic novel.
Some Rain Must Fall, the fifth book of the cycle to be translated into English, returns briefly to this haunted house. Karl Ove is back scything the long grass out front. More coffee is brewed. Or perhaps it is the same coffee as before. Knausgaard gives us a few new vistas on to these mournful days, including the funeral itself. One of the startling joys of My Struggle’s looping, non-chronological form is that reading collides with the processes of memory. When Knausgaard revisits the same detail thousands of pages and, perhaps for the reader, several years apart, he manages to transfer the author’s act of recollection on to us. At these strange junctures, where two strands of the story cross, it is as though author and reader are remembering together, simultaneously.
But in the scheme of this volume this return to the father’s death is a glimpse through a keyhole. The other 600 pages must do without this traumatic epicentre, and earn their keep elsewhere. This volume concerns Karl Ove’s 14-year residence in the provincial town of Bergen, where he pursues various studies and jobs, takes summer breaks, drinks heavily, falls in and out of love and, most crucially, turns himself into a writer.
If the first book built itself towards one particular death, the fifth encodes death into its microstructure; it is felt on every page. One evening Karl Ove tells us: “I got dressed and went downstairs, death, out of the door, death, up the hill, death, through the underpass, death, down the road, death, along the fjord, death, and into the park, which wrapped itself around me with its living yet sleeping darkness.” These thoughts arise between him masturbating in the shower and having “a couple of beers” in the café before his brother turns up.
On one hand this passage is part of a familiar novelistic tradition of the young male anti-hero — morbid, horny, banal — mired in existential crisis. On the other, it is a shorthand for the latest book’s power. These Bergen years are infused with death, not because of Karl Ove’s gauche tussles with mortality, but because they belong to a dead age. We know already which love affairs will endure and which will not, and so death oversees the hungover waffle-eating. It crawls under the duvet with Karl Ove and his cosy, doomed relationships. Part of Knausgaard’s wizardry is that our knowledge of his story doesn’t drain this book-length flashback of intensity, but rather enhances it. The mundane details of this period — the cyclical drunkenness and self-loathing, the days spent reading and failing to write well — are rendered exquisite because the reader can feel the loss of them. Dramatic irony, generated when the audience’s knowledge of the fictional universe exceeds that of the characters, is this volume’s cold-blooded pulse.
The same irony animates the account of Karl Ove’s writerly ambitions. He feels he lacks the necessary imagination: “Everything I wrote was connected to reality and my own experiences.” This volume foreshadows the huge project that is to come, of which it, in fact, is a part. One evening he wonders: “Why actually should you write about actions? X loves Y, Z kills W, F commits embezzlement and is caught by G . . . ” Here he questions the cause-and-effect of traditional narrative. As with previous volumes, Some Rain Must Fall has exchanged novelistic plotting for the relative formlessness of life, where the causes of our effects are often hidden.
by Laurence Scott, Financial Times | Read more:
Image: Anne Rose
