Which would prevail — Scandinavian high literature or Meghan Markle?
This is the question that dogged me between May and August of this year, during which time I devoted myself to two cultural undertakings: reading all of “My Struggle” and watching all of “Suits.” “My Struggle,” as readers of this or any other literary publication will know, is the sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious, intermittently frustrating and always genre-defying 3,600-page autobiographical novel by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard that became a phenomenon among Anglo-American literati when the translation of Book 1 appeared here, in 2012, and whose sixth and last volume appears this month.
“Suits,” as readers of pretty much every other publication will have known since Prince Harry of Wales became engaged last autumn to Markle, one of the show’s stars, is a popular USA Network legal drama, currently in its eighth season — now of course sans Markle, who has abandoned fictional dramas forever, although whether being a member of the British royal family (currently the subject of another popular TV series) constitutes “reality” is a question beyond the scope of this essay.
But it is within the scope of this essay to ponder some implications of the differences between the two fictions, as I found myself doing over the course of the four months during which I was wrapped up in both — not the least of those implications being questions about precisely what fiction is and how it relates to reality, and the extent to which traditional narrative can be a delivery vehicle for saying something true about life. These, as it happens, lie at the intellectual and aesthetic heart of Knausgaard’s huge undertaking.
Both “My Struggle” and “Suits” are serial entertainments, with the difference that the TV show is a turbid middlebrow melodrama that places all of its aesthetic chips on plot — patently contrived story lines engineered to generate further incident. (The gimmick that sets the whole drama in motion is typically high concept: The brilliant young lawyer who is the show’s hero never actually went to law school — a dire secret that motivates his, and eventually more and more of his colleagues’, actions, as they go to increasingly desperate lengths to conceal his past.) “My Struggle,” by contrast, has no plot. Confidently bestriding the increasingly popular gray zone that lies between fiction and autobiography (the genre the French call “autofiction”), it purports to be a minutely accurate reconstruction of the author’s life from earliest childhood to the present, populated by characters who bear the names of, or are identifiable with, people he knows in real life, its meandering narrative dutifully reproducing events as they unfolded with few visible attempts to shape or edit their flow to suit expectations of “story.” All this is an expression of the author’s conviction, announced in Book 1, that “our ludicrously inconsequential lives … had a part in this world.”
The great technical ambition of this work is the attempt to reconstruct the rich inconsequentiality of our quotidian experience in prose stripped of the usual novelistic devices. Before embarking on “My Struggle,” Knausgaard had published two atmospheric novels — one an eccentric but rather beautiful re-creation of Genesis in a Norwegian setting, complete with angels — and since then he’s produced a series of four gossamer volumes, each named after a season and filled with artfully etched observations about everyday things and experiences; but in the magnum opus he claims to eschew any prettifying literary technique. Every object, every event, it seems, is reduced to its bare mechanical particulars: There’s a reason that an account of teenagers trying to get some booze for a New Year’s Eve party, which might have occupied a paragraph in another kind of novel, takes 70 pages. Where some authors might write “He drove off,” Knausgaard gives us “Yngve plumped down in the seat beside me, inserted the key in the ignition, twisted it, craned his head and began to reverse down the little slope.”
Likewise, the volumes obey few of the laws of narrative structure; the most you can say for each is that it covers some phase of the author’s life, although not necessarily in chronological order. Book 1 is set in motion by the death, in the late 1990s, of Knausgaard’s schoolteacher father — by far the most powerful “character” here, a grandiose alcoholic whose abusiveness is elliptically yet indelibly evoked in a series of long flashbacks to the author’s childhood. These alternate with scenes set in the present, at the funeral home and the house where the father ended his days sordidly, sitting in his own excrement and surrounded by empty bottles. This first installment is by far the most artful (many would say the most successful) of the six, not least because it self-consciously emulates Proust, to whose own multivolume autobiographical novel Knausgaard acknowledges his indebtedness. Some readers of Book 1 will feel as though they’re on a treasure hunt for allusions to the French masterpiece: There are reflections on how different rooms feel, meditations on famous paintings, a preoccupation with a beloved grandmother, early fumblings with girls that result in premature ejaculations.
Through all this, the author’s past is reconstituted at a level of detail so dense that you’re persuaded of the narrative’s factuality even as you’re forced to acknowledge that it has to have been, at the least, greatly enhanced, however close to some emotional truth or memory an individual scene or stretch of dialogue may be. This technique raises — as Knausgaard wants it to — questions about the limits both of memory and of fictional representation. “The 14 years I lived in Bergen,” he writes at the beginning of Book 5, “are long gone, no traces of them are left” — a sly claim, given that the 614 pages that follow constitute a seemingly “factual” re-creation of that very period.
This faux factuality is the hallmark of all six volumes. Book 2 begins in the “present” of 2008, when Knausgaard, nearing 40, is living in Malmo, Sweden, with his wife, Linda, and their children, contemplating the novel that would become “My Struggle.” These scenes alternate with flashbacks to the period several years earlier when he had left Norway for Sweden; it is there, crippled by emotional and intellectual insecurities, that he arduously courts Linda, a poet with psychological troubles of her own. Book 3 leapfrogs back in time to provide an unexpected and often charming glimpse of his childhood and teenage years — the source of those awful insecurities (he describes his childhood as a “ghetto-like state of incompleteness”); in this volume, the author’s desire to recreate every aspect of the past extends to descriptions of his bowel movements. Book 4 finds the 18-year-old Karl Ove living in a tiny town in northern Norway, where he spends a year as a schoolteacher, struggling with an increasingly alarming drinking problem, his attraction to some of the underage girls in his class and his attempts to write serious fiction. Book 5 moves on to the author’s 20s and early 30s — those 14 years during which he lived in Bergen and experienced his first literary failures and successes, as well as an early marriage that collapsed in part because of his infidelity.
As this summary suggests, the life recounted here is one of unusually intense emotional extremes of the sort that can make for powerful writing. The childhood abuse, the alcoholism, the affairs and breakups are the stuff of many a memoir — a genre that, curiously, doesn’t figure at all in the numerous digressions on literature that dot the landscape of intentional quotidian banality here, even though “My Struggle” has far more in common with memoir than it does with fiction. (I suspect that Knausgaard decided to call his work a novel because memoir continues to be seen as a “soft” genre, and he’s after bigger literary game.)
And yet, despite all the emotional drama, I was rarely moved by this vast and often impressive work. As with some blogs or soap operas, the ongoing narration, however tedious it often is, can be weirdly addictive, and the suggestive play with fact and fiction can be intriguing. But in the end, the books left me cold and, not infrequently, exasperated.
by Daniel Mendelsohn, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Rachell Sumpter
This is the question that dogged me between May and August of this year, during which time I devoted myself to two cultural undertakings: reading all of “My Struggle” and watching all of “Suits.” “My Struggle,” as readers of this or any other literary publication will know, is the sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious, intermittently frustrating and always genre-defying 3,600-page autobiographical novel by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard that became a phenomenon among Anglo-American literati when the translation of Book 1 appeared here, in 2012, and whose sixth and last volume appears this month.
“Suits,” as readers of pretty much every other publication will have known since Prince Harry of Wales became engaged last autumn to Markle, one of the show’s stars, is a popular USA Network legal drama, currently in its eighth season — now of course sans Markle, who has abandoned fictional dramas forever, although whether being a member of the British royal family (currently the subject of another popular TV series) constitutes “reality” is a question beyond the scope of this essay.But it is within the scope of this essay to ponder some implications of the differences between the two fictions, as I found myself doing over the course of the four months during which I was wrapped up in both — not the least of those implications being questions about precisely what fiction is and how it relates to reality, and the extent to which traditional narrative can be a delivery vehicle for saying something true about life. These, as it happens, lie at the intellectual and aesthetic heart of Knausgaard’s huge undertaking.
Both “My Struggle” and “Suits” are serial entertainments, with the difference that the TV show is a turbid middlebrow melodrama that places all of its aesthetic chips on plot — patently contrived story lines engineered to generate further incident. (The gimmick that sets the whole drama in motion is typically high concept: The brilliant young lawyer who is the show’s hero never actually went to law school — a dire secret that motivates his, and eventually more and more of his colleagues’, actions, as they go to increasingly desperate lengths to conceal his past.) “My Struggle,” by contrast, has no plot. Confidently bestriding the increasingly popular gray zone that lies between fiction and autobiography (the genre the French call “autofiction”), it purports to be a minutely accurate reconstruction of the author’s life from earliest childhood to the present, populated by characters who bear the names of, or are identifiable with, people he knows in real life, its meandering narrative dutifully reproducing events as they unfolded with few visible attempts to shape or edit their flow to suit expectations of “story.” All this is an expression of the author’s conviction, announced in Book 1, that “our ludicrously inconsequential lives … had a part in this world.”
The great technical ambition of this work is the attempt to reconstruct the rich inconsequentiality of our quotidian experience in prose stripped of the usual novelistic devices. Before embarking on “My Struggle,” Knausgaard had published two atmospheric novels — one an eccentric but rather beautiful re-creation of Genesis in a Norwegian setting, complete with angels — and since then he’s produced a series of four gossamer volumes, each named after a season and filled with artfully etched observations about everyday things and experiences; but in the magnum opus he claims to eschew any prettifying literary technique. Every object, every event, it seems, is reduced to its bare mechanical particulars: There’s a reason that an account of teenagers trying to get some booze for a New Year’s Eve party, which might have occupied a paragraph in another kind of novel, takes 70 pages. Where some authors might write “He drove off,” Knausgaard gives us “Yngve plumped down in the seat beside me, inserted the key in the ignition, twisted it, craned his head and began to reverse down the little slope.”
Likewise, the volumes obey few of the laws of narrative structure; the most you can say for each is that it covers some phase of the author’s life, although not necessarily in chronological order. Book 1 is set in motion by the death, in the late 1990s, of Knausgaard’s schoolteacher father — by far the most powerful “character” here, a grandiose alcoholic whose abusiveness is elliptically yet indelibly evoked in a series of long flashbacks to the author’s childhood. These alternate with scenes set in the present, at the funeral home and the house where the father ended his days sordidly, sitting in his own excrement and surrounded by empty bottles. This first installment is by far the most artful (many would say the most successful) of the six, not least because it self-consciously emulates Proust, to whose own multivolume autobiographical novel Knausgaard acknowledges his indebtedness. Some readers of Book 1 will feel as though they’re on a treasure hunt for allusions to the French masterpiece: There are reflections on how different rooms feel, meditations on famous paintings, a preoccupation with a beloved grandmother, early fumblings with girls that result in premature ejaculations.
Through all this, the author’s past is reconstituted at a level of detail so dense that you’re persuaded of the narrative’s factuality even as you’re forced to acknowledge that it has to have been, at the least, greatly enhanced, however close to some emotional truth or memory an individual scene or stretch of dialogue may be. This technique raises — as Knausgaard wants it to — questions about the limits both of memory and of fictional representation. “The 14 years I lived in Bergen,” he writes at the beginning of Book 5, “are long gone, no traces of them are left” — a sly claim, given that the 614 pages that follow constitute a seemingly “factual” re-creation of that very period.
This faux factuality is the hallmark of all six volumes. Book 2 begins in the “present” of 2008, when Knausgaard, nearing 40, is living in Malmo, Sweden, with his wife, Linda, and their children, contemplating the novel that would become “My Struggle.” These scenes alternate with flashbacks to the period several years earlier when he had left Norway for Sweden; it is there, crippled by emotional and intellectual insecurities, that he arduously courts Linda, a poet with psychological troubles of her own. Book 3 leapfrogs back in time to provide an unexpected and often charming glimpse of his childhood and teenage years — the source of those awful insecurities (he describes his childhood as a “ghetto-like state of incompleteness”); in this volume, the author’s desire to recreate every aspect of the past extends to descriptions of his bowel movements. Book 4 finds the 18-year-old Karl Ove living in a tiny town in northern Norway, where he spends a year as a schoolteacher, struggling with an increasingly alarming drinking problem, his attraction to some of the underage girls in his class and his attempts to write serious fiction. Book 5 moves on to the author’s 20s and early 30s — those 14 years during which he lived in Bergen and experienced his first literary failures and successes, as well as an early marriage that collapsed in part because of his infidelity.
As this summary suggests, the life recounted here is one of unusually intense emotional extremes of the sort that can make for powerful writing. The childhood abuse, the alcoholism, the affairs and breakups are the stuff of many a memoir — a genre that, curiously, doesn’t figure at all in the numerous digressions on literature that dot the landscape of intentional quotidian banality here, even though “My Struggle” has far more in common with memoir than it does with fiction. (I suspect that Knausgaard decided to call his work a novel because memoir continues to be seen as a “soft” genre, and he’s after bigger literary game.)
And yet, despite all the emotional drama, I was rarely moved by this vast and often impressive work. As with some blogs or soap operas, the ongoing narration, however tedious it often is, can be weirdly addictive, and the suggestive play with fact and fiction can be intriguing. But in the end, the books left me cold and, not infrequently, exasperated.
by Daniel Mendelsohn, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Rachell Sumpter
[ed.Knausgaard seems to be one of those authors you either "get" or don't. I don't (and would add the likes of Bolano and Calvino to that list as well, among many others). God help anyone that actually made it through all six volumes (I barely made it through the first). They can be great sleeping aids though.]
