Vol. 1: My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard

How did Karl Ove Knausgaard surpass the banal aspect of therapeutic journalling? It might have been an adventitiously humorous book of worries with a referential title that leads us to expect bad days in the bunker as its culmination and yet it seems more than that: a map of the commonplace that does not underline its insights.

He begins with a disquisition on death which I hope reads better in Norwegian. He is inclined to indulge in tiresome pondering, the danger of a literary education crossed with serious person persona. The main source of his miserabilism is his lack of a sense of humour. Without that scale life’s contours are mountainous and the logistics of getting beer to a New Year’s party as a teenager can run to 100 pages. Don’t take less.

Immersion in the longueurs of life is the path with heart for Karl Ove. Flatness is all. He discovers this by moving from the meditation on death to what Yeats would have call a ‘masterful vision’, the face in the sea that appeared during a tv report on a trawler accident. His father sneers – ‘was it Jesus you saw’ and continues to ply a sledge on a rock in the garden. Hey Karl Ove we get it – too much hatred can make a rock of the heart.

This was in 1976. Then he is 8, his father was 32 and the writer is 39. The interpenetrating cones a la Bergson, or the Yeatsian gyres, produce the initial plane or palate on which memories coruscate. This is his portal leading into ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. The fate to which his father succumbed, that of an alcoholic living in his mother’s house as if it was a foul squat and dying there in a pool of blood and shit which his sons clear up over several days. He tells us the names of all the products he uses as he goes through the rooms piled high with stinking clothes and filth and empties. Cry breaks and coffee breaks and trips to the shops. In states like that you notice everything, perceptual straws to cling to. The shop assistant leaves the change on the counter when his palm is outstretched for it. Why would she do that?

That section of the book is its intent. He gives his father a Christian burial when we were told that he was anti-Christian. Imposing your will on the dead is not a victory and death will have its sting. Peeping out between the lines of the ‘journal’ are indications that Karl Ove is bent on replication of his father’s life, he drinks and is divorced from his first wife and I read that he is now parted from his second wife and four children. Maybe you are headed for a moral bunker with literary lunches, launches, holiday cabins and writing, writing, writing.

The success of it is that I am beginning to read the second book and notice the same triangulation that fixes us in time and duration. Now it’s a children’s party with members of a vegetarian kindergarten co-op. Only Karl Ove could fail to make that funny.