“KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD’S MY STRUGGLE HAS AN ODDLY MEDIEVAL FORM: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the Norwegian author’s life.”
“In his magnum opus, Knausgaard has dispensed with most of the narrative conventions inscribed in realist fiction – no plot, no genre, no varnish.”
“At first, the books read as exercises in self-scrutiny without aesthetic agenda, an uncut abundance of descriptive detail, where the absence of any clear hierarchy of interest makes for peculiarly flat prose.”
“A passage on smuggling out beer for a New Year’s Eve party when a teenager is as vividly evoked as falling in love as an adult. It’s a weird effect, disappointing for those who crave the relief of a fictive superstructure, but it gives the reader a sense of living at the level of first-hand experience, where the longing for a drink can be as strong to a boy as feelings for his wife are to a man.”
“Knausgaard’s achievement is not so much to tell the truth about his life, but to write it in a way that reflects that honesty, a veracious style, if you will.”
“And perhaps the strangest thing about it is that it works like the best fantasy – by creating a comprehensive parallel world of words.”
“At first, the books do not appear artful. The writing is myopic, raw, chaotic, wandering; the author prone to introspection and wont to veer”
“This is not new, finding meandering precedent in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and James Joyce’s Ulysses, but the difference is that Knausgaard doesn’t seem to share the radical aims of these historic authors. His writing is a desperate truth-telling putsch, its shaggy sprawl the stuff of dogged honesty rather than formal invention.”
“He hit upon this modus operandi by rejecting the contemporary trends in creative writing. Against a school of honed minimalism and refined intellectualization, or elaborate fictive construct, he opened up his prose and poured himself in.”
“This has brought to his books a rare energy, as well as no small amount of infamy. One man set fire to the K section of a Malmö bookshop in a fit of anti-Knausgaard rage. Haters have pilloried the arrogance and tedium of his rambling, the self-obsession of his perspective. At its worst, it might be lousy craftsmanship masquerading as technique but at best a more animate and intimate way of composing literature – writing that seems closer to life as we live it.”
“None of this is as arbitrary as the nonchalant and wayward delivery might suggest and the process of selection serves to create a more faithful, or representative portrait than a diary could – the reader sees the spread of incidents and interrelated elements that make up this life – without introducing the artifice of an all-seeing narrator.”
“Numerous literary traditions are also in evidence throughout the novels: epic, adventure quest, bildungsroman and Norse saga – the latter discernible in those places where the author makes a virtue of repetition, turning his everyday rituals and compulsive personality into something like ancient pattern.”
“There are also individual literary influences at work: most obviously Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose presence is felt in the unbound energy of the writing, Knausgaard’s manifest obsession with self-destructive masculinity, his yearning for the sublime, occasional indulgence in swashbuckling Romanticism, recourse to guilt-racked confessional, Puritanical spirit, and, most specifically, the way in which he coordinates seemingly divergent philosophical reflections with the sweep of his own family drama.”
“But Dostoevsky is a world away from the banality of nappies and tea-making, far from the frustrations a contemporary man might feel in feminist culture, a few elegant eras shy of Knausgaard’s brutal frankness.”
“The more common comparisons between Knausgaard and Proust, though justified in light of the length and intensely personal nature of the My Struggle cycle, also miss the character and quality of these novels. They are not works of crystalline brilliance or clear, controlled method, starker than either of these literary forebears.”
“Proust’s immaculate surfaces might hold so many polished mirrors up to life; and Dostoevsky offer gothic-rose, dirt-spotted windows on the world, but Knausgaard gives us the subjective jelly of an eye.”
“Knausgaard has an unrivalled ability to depict ordinary incidents with bracing clarity and depth, and has brought a new force of truth to many clichés of experience. He tells commonly-shared stories in all their original oddity, offsetting them with anecdotes specific to himself and in this way reinvests clichés with meaning, a rare and significant achievement in and of itself.”
“Europe and in the British broadsheets, incurring hyperbolic praise from the likes of Rachel Cusk and Zadie Smith. And with good reason. The My Struggle cycle alters the parameters of literature in a way that calls to mind the moment in art history when the YBAs rendered all objects potentially art-worthy.”
“Knausgaard’s books are not primarily about art, and especially not about their own status as art (though this is not off topic either). It is precisely the creative self-involvement of postmodernism that Knausgaard is trying to escape, as he makes clear in A Death in the Family:”
“Art has become an unmade bed, a couple of photocopiers in a room, a motorbike in an attic. And art has come to be a spectator of itself. Art does not know a beyond… Those in this situation who call for more intellectual depth, more spirituality, have understood nothing, for the problem is that the intellect has taken over everything. The limits of that which cannot speak to us – the unfathomable – no longer exist. We understand everything, and we do so because we have turned everything into ourselves.”
“There is a degree of hypocrisy here. Knausgaard is after all writing about writing, and the function of art. Some smart savants will also point out a certain philosopher he has neglected to read who proves that, for us humans, there is indeed nothing outside of our heads. But of course there is, he argues; the fact that we may not be able to access it as thinking beings only makes it more compelling as a ‘beyond’. What makes his position here both refreshing and old-fashioned is that he still seeks a ‘beyond’ at all, and furthermore, one that precludes language and intellect, configuring literature as a secondary phenomena, to be shaped by the primary pressures of life.”
“In some ways, it’s a more hopeful premise than the de-humanised emphasis on formal pyrotechnics pioneered by the literary likes of Thomas Pynchon and feted since the seventies.”
“These could only be novels, never poetry, nor paintings for they consist of passages that even the most modest meter, faintest colour might make more beautiful than true. Whereas words, in Knausgaard’s writing, can seem artlessly direct.”
“The cycle is, of course, the work of a seriously skilled, middle-aged man of letters, but it has much of the guileless honesty and literal sensitivity of a boy.”
“Together they offer a fuller sense of identity, not only Knausgaard’s own, but that of every adult with a past, whose view of the present is informed by a host of former selves.”
“And if Knausgaard doesn’t ever retrieve his younger self’s instinctive ability to find sense in the world, he does at least seek out grown-up equivalents. A sadness the books acknowledge, in the tradition of J M Barrie, Lewis Carroll and company, is how much harder this becomes with age. The process is more haphazard and laborious, no longer spontaneous – an act of art rather than impulse of imagination.”
“It is a process on which Knausgaard, as a father, often muses; here, aptly, on a playground:
The bell had rung. The sounds here were new and unfamiliar to me, the same was true of the rhythm in which they surfaced, but I would soon get used to the rhythm of them, to such an extent that they would fade into the background again. You know too little and it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how to get there?”
“For Knausgaard and Bolaño the ‘secret’ is the obvious truth passed over, the shallow insight.”
“There are many shades of darkness in Knausgaard’s books: black-outs of shame, moments of obscure mysticism and the omnipresence of death in his thinking. But there is also an everyday darkness in those easily-missed elements that form the greater part of his life: the weather, people, objects, natural phenomena, and much that might seem mundane beyond mention, though it informs everything.”
“Knausgaard’s writing is an attempt to recreate a life in all its indiscriminate detail; it is ‘the expression of, and at the same time, the fabric of the particular’.”
“This comes about through an excoriating effort of description, but also intuition and belief, through feeling out those areas of omission that underwrite all known fact, thought and emotion.”
“Part of this process is giving the lie to the edited face of literature, illuminating the way it tidies life’s grey areas into chiaroscuro.”
“But Knausgaard wants both nature and the novel: the uncomprehended hinterland of experience and its shapely literary afterlife.”
“Meaning lies in the encounter between the two, which he coordinates in a present historic narrative that is as muddled and bleak as it is consolingly accurate and desperately beautiful. It is a great act of flattening, the creation of a literary plane on which everything – lofty musing, crude observation, social commentary, private thought, the seen world and its shadow – is of a richly ragged piece.”