KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD My Struggle: Book One. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
A fictionalised memoir that exposes the writer’s deepest being, lays everything bare and brings a new interpretation to the genre.
This autobiographical novel by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard provoked outrage in Norway when it was first published, largely due to the author’s refusal to change the names of the individuals whose lives and personalities he portrays with brutal honesty. Reading the book does have a quality of eavesdropping about it, of snooping in someone’s secret diary in which nothing has been censored. Everything – from the humiliations and disappointments of youth to the banality of adult responsibilities and the difficulties of relationships – is laid bare. Reflecting on his adolescent classmates, he describes the girls in his class with disarming precision:
Mette … was the one who liked Bruce Springsteen and always wore denim, the one who was so small and laughed all the time, the one who dressed in clothes that were as provocative as they were vulgar and smelled of smoke, the one whose gums were visible every time she smiled, attractive apart from that, but her laughter, a kind of constant giggle that accompanied everything she said, and all the stupid things she came out with, and the fact that she had a slight lisp, detracted from her beauty, in a way, or invalidated it.
These critical observations contradict his exterior narrative persona which, if not exactly effusive in nature, still endears him to the very people he portrays so ruthlessly. They are unaware of his true feelings about them, rendering his appropriation of their lives particularly unsettling. Readers are torn between relating to these characters and accepting Knausgaard’s inner opinions of them as reality. That these two clashing visions can co-exist is testament to the brilliance of My Struggle.
Pivotal to the examination of his life is the death of Knausgaard’s father. This event is the catalyst for the novel and drives the plot. It colours the writer’s perspective on everything as he navigates the poignancy of childhood memories, through adolescent angst, the difficulty of fatherhood, to the burial of his own father and back again. He traverses time seamlessly, shifting between memories in a perpetual looping motion. His present is informed by his past and vice-versa as he grapples with the larger questions of existence; mortality, life and meaning:
I had been away for a number of years now, and ever since I arrived I had noticed how the stream of impressions the place left you with was partly tied to the first world of memories, partly to the second, and thus existed in three separate time zones at once.
This transitioning between different periods of time also lends power to Knausgaard’s observations of his grandmother’s senility, a condition that affects the human mind, leading it to constantly ‘relive’ the past:
‘Unravelling’ was our family euphemism for senility. Grandad’s brother, Leif, his brain ‘unravelled’ when, on several occasions, he wandered from the old people’s home to his childhood home, where he hadn’t lived for sixty years, and stood shouting and banging on the door all through the night. His second brother, Alf, his mind had started unravelling in recent years; it was most obvious in his merging of the present and the past.
Another affliction to plague generations of his family is that of alcoholism. Towards the beginning of the book Knausgaard gives an account of his first experience of alcohol, and the intoxicating and pleasant sensations it stirred in him. He takes this further in a heavily detailed account of the lengths he went to to in order to be able to drink as an adolescent. One New Year’s Eve, he and a friend plan to get drunk together. This entails the procurement of alcohol (not easy, as they were both under age), keeping the alcohol hidden and getting it to the party they are attending. The heavily detailed description of the drinking preparations is long and protracted, ultimately leading to a kind of flatness, the anti-climax of the prose matching the inebriated rhythms of alcohol’s effect on the body. This early description of Knausgaard’s own experiences of alcohol later becomes laced with insidious meaning. Alcoholism is the cause of his father’s decline and death. It is an inter-generational affliction, affecting the grandmother as well as the sons:
I didn’t dare ask her if she wanted anymore. There was a limit, it had something to do with decency, and it had been crossed ages ago. I reached for the bottle and poured a drop into Yngve’s glass, then my own. But after I had done that, her eyes met mine.
‘One more?’ I heard myself ask.
‘A little one perhaps,’ she replied. ‘It’s late.’
‘Yes, it’s late on earth,’ I said.
Book One of My Struggle (also known as A Death in the Family) is a deep and lustrous work. Knausgaard bravely confronts the big questions, exposing his own inner world even more ruthlessly than the reality of his present and past. Plummeting to the depths of his identity, he rips out his heart and soul, bringing a new interpretation to the genre of fictional memoir. In exploring what it means to be a writer; to be a son; to be a father; to be a brother; to be a husband; to be a man, he discovers what it means to be human. Ultimately the reader can only benefit from the illumination.
Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle: Book One Farrar Straus Giraux 2013 PB 448pp, $28.95
Lou Murphy is the author of the crime novel, Squealer, and has worked a mix of jobs including on the Sydney dockyards, in crime reporting and in hospitality: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LouMurphy
You can buy this book from Abbey’s here.
My Struggle: Book Two (AKA A Man in Love) can also be bought from Abbey’s. Book Three of the six-volume work will be published in English later this year.
To see if Books One and Two are available from Newtown Library, click here.
