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Min kamp #6
My Struggle: Book 6
The final installment in the long-awaited, internationally celebrated My Struggle series.
The full scope and achievement of Knausgaard’s monumental work is evident in this final installment of his My Struggle series. Grappling directly with the consequences of Knausgaard’s transgressive blurring of public and private, Book 6 is a troubling and engrossing look into the mind of one of the most exciting artists of our time. Knausgaard includes a long essay on Hitler and Mein Kampf, particularly relevant (if not prescient) in our current global climate of ascending dictatorships.
1161 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2011
938 people are currently reading
6300 people want to read
About the author
Karl Ove Knausgård
75 books7,580 followersNominated to the 2004 Nordic Council’s Literature Prize & awarded the 2004 Norwegian Critics’ Prize.
Karl Ove Knausgård (b. 1968) made his literary debut in 1998 with the widely acclaimed novel Out of the World, which was a great critical and commercial success and won him, as the first debut novel ever, The Norwegian Critics' Prize. He then went on to write six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle (Min Kamp), which have become a publication phenomenon in his native Norway as well as the world over.
Karl Ove Knausgård (b. 1968) made his literary debut in 1998 with the widely acclaimed novel Out of the World, which was a great critical and commercial success and won him, as the first debut novel ever, The Norwegian Critics' Prize. He then went on to write six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle (Min Kamp), which have become a publication phenomenon in his native Norway as well as the world over.
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February 16, 2020
It's hard to talk about a 1148-page book that's only one of six (here are my impressions of the complete My Struggle series). Book Six, the final installment, is unlike the others, unlike anything I've ever read, and as I read it there was nothing else I really wanted to do. As you may have figured out if you looked at the previous reviews I've written, I find this project entirely engrossing, engaging, sticky/retentive, easy, enjoyable, serious, thoughtful, perceptive, and an enhancer of perception. But this one raises the thematic stakes, errs wholly and exaggeratedly on the side of HEFT, and does so in a way that drops a boulder from on high into your memory and understanding of the ~2500 pages you've read so far. Major themes include the interpenetration of external and internal worlds (KOK's recent Seasons Quartet seems mostly about this too) including the social and the personal, which extends to memory and reality (what we remember and what really happened), which extends to the nature of representation in memoir, literature, art, which evolves into elaboration on the processes of dehumanization (the Nazi dehumanization of Jews -- "we" transforms into "they" transforms into "it" -- and, more interestingly, the post-WWII dehumanization of Nazis in general and Hitler in particular), ultimately ending with dramatization of his wife's manic and depressive episodes, her hospitalization and recovery, all while reflecting on the dynamics of domestic life, child-rearing, writing, friendship, emergent fame, and love.
Very broadly, the structure is something like this: first part is about family reaction to the manuscript of Book 1, particularly his uncle Gunnar's extremely negative take that makes KOK question his memory and representation of reality in the second half of Book 1 (his father's death, cleaning his grandmother's house). A visit from Geir and his young son follows, mostly talk about how to react to reactions to what he's written, but also somewhat about Geir's 1000-page book about living in Baghdad as a human shield during the American invasion. In this part, KOK interrupts the usual dialogue-replete easy dramatization and drops a 10-page essay on influence and the I into the proceedings, an essay that feels absolutely cut and pasted into the text, with a different texture/feel, but it's just an introduction/taste of what's to come: a dense 50-page close-reading of a Paul Celan poem about the Holocaust, the most difficult reading by far in the whole project, a vast chunk of interpretative reading unlike anything I've ever seen in a novel, a wall at which many eyes will probably either close and cease progress or simply leap over, although this part is thematically essential in that it introduces the "we, they, it" theme, which refracts the light of everything the project/series has been about so far and in turn acts as a thematic launchpad for the following 400 pages of essay about Hitler, primarily a linear analysis starting with his youth, family, upbringing (his father beat him senseless), teen years, early artistic endeavors in part as a reaction to his father's dreary civil servanthood, living in parks and painting on the street for money, concocting an opera without knowing how to write music, re-designing cities in his head, ultimately finding himself in WWI, after which he discovers his gift for public speaking, as well as anti-Semitism, wondering what so many of his fellow soldiers died for, a Germany reduced in defeat, totally devalued, and so begins his quest to elevate Germany again, in part so all those millions of young men won't have died for nothing, all of which (the WWI influence on Hitler's thinking and spirit) I found particularly interesting, especially since in the past few years I've read and loved Zweig's The World of Yesterday, Enrich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and Ernst Junger's Storms of Steel, and so felt "prepared" for this in a way, like we'd done a lot of the same reading -- all this with really interesting interspersed excerpts from various biographies that describe similar times in Hitler's life in different ways, for example presenting the teenage Hitler as a latent monster, inherently inhuman from the start (a method KOK rejects -- he says it's important to humanize Hitler so he's not an "it" but part of the "we," emphasizing what we're capable of), intermittently interspersed with examples of the artistic upbringing of canonical European writers of around the same generation or a little older (Hamsun, Kafka, Zweig, Mann, Junger), followed by excerpts and analysis of Hitler's "Mein Kampf," which I've never read and have never really considered reading, which therefore feels transgressive in what otherwise had been a novel about doing dishes and pushing three kids around in a stroller while trying to write. And then it returns to the project's traditional mode of dramatization with sometimes lengthy expository interjections about his wife's mental health, including their purchase of a cabin they can't upkeep, totally evocative description and dramatization of a trip to the Canary Islands when Linda was still pregnant with their third child John and they almost bought a timeshare they couldn't possibly afford, a trip during which KOK reads Gombrowicz's Diary and pretty much conceives of the project of writing about his life (they also consider moving to Argentina), ending with the sale of the cabin and purchase of a summer home near the southeastern coast of Sweden that becomes their full-time home. I don't think any of this really counts as "spoilers" since it's not so much about what happens as the ideas, the experience, the extreme solidity and weight of the book in your hands (at one point while walking and reading it at lunch, it actually made my left arm sore and I wondered if I was maybe having a heart attack or I'd just been holding the book in my left hand too long).
Amazingly, this all not only "works," it succeeds, I think, in that it does what KOK loves to do, which is lay out a long stretch during which you're questioning why you're reading yet propelled by the quickness and easy charisma of the text until he eventually interrupts the proceedings in a way that makes you consider everything so far. I first noticed this while reading A Time for Everything when the story of the flood and Noah's ark comes after maybe 70 pages of domestic life that made me feel like the novel was slipping in quality but then was revealed eventually as their last moments alive before drowning and therefore entirely significant, all their little domestic movements were not meaningless at all, which KOK then elaborates in My Struggle to all the little domestic movements of the day with the children, trying to write etc, ultimately shifted in significance by the flood of text about Hitler's autobiography/biography as a reflection on his own -- all of which also in comparison belittles the transgression of representing his life as it is, his father's demise, all the personal private things that in Scandinavian society one does not reveal to the world. In "A Time for Everything," KOK also complexifies the story of Cain and Abel, humanizing Cain, the first human considered evil -- in this, he complexifies the story of Hitler, the Michael Jordan/GOAT of evil. In my review of "A Time for Everything," I wrote: Dramatizing the complexity of black/white archetypes is something really great lit does best -- I don't like to think about lit/art as something that "serves society," that's functional or necessary or useful per se, but Complexity Emphasis is one of the arguments in lit's defense. And that really applies here. Not only does KOK complexify the typical understanding of Hitler to emphasize that he is not a monster, a dehumanized "it," but a human being like us, part of the "we," but he uses Hitler's story to complexify his own story, to show that in different circumstances Hitler could've been like him, and vice versa, and also that the sin of what he's done with "My Struggle" is really not all that bad at all compared for example TO WHAT HITLER DID!!! Ultimately the project attempts to present everything unspoken that's relayed in an instant simply by looking someone else in the eye for an extended moment.
But there's also the last section after the Hitler essay about Linda's depressive and then manic episodes -- hanging out the dirty laundry of the relationship in such a way that news last year that they divorced seems more inevitable than surprising. At one point he writes that he writes this as he does since he has nothing to lose, he doesn't care anymore, he's essentially reached the point of saying "fuck it" all the time and doesn't worry about the consequences -- but then he softens and professes his love and remembers when they first met and knowing that they'd have three children together (now four). Yet at the end of Book Six it seems like they'll be OK, they've found a new home, a proper home to raise the three kids in, not a messy urban apartment, so knowing that they've divorced post-publication of the original Book Six makes the dedication at the end even more poignant.
About twenty years ago (1997/8) I wrote a book of autobiographical essays (Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World) that was published in 2004 -- it was propelled in part by a quotation from Thomas Wolfe: "Fiction is fact selected, arranged, and charged with purpose." But also a response to my first real depressive stretch, an attempt to write my way out of it in a way. It also was an expression of a native impulse that fiction is best when it doesn't read like fiction at all (the archetype for a lot of this who's often unspoken or unacknowledged due to lack of literary prestige is Kerouac, not so much "On the Road" but the later ones like "The Subterraneans" and "Big Sur" -- also KOK says he wrote the 500+-page Book Five in five weeks, which suggests Kerouac's weekends of "athletic" writing fueled by coffee and speed). Later I read Moody's "Demonology" story about his sister's death and Lorrie Moore's famous story about blood in her daughter's diaper, both of which were touchstones for me of fiction that's not fiction, that goes against fiction in a way by emphasizing its reality but then by doing so elevates itself as a sort of supreme fiction. Since then the genre of "autofiction" has emerged, with primary recipients of attention being Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station; 10:04); Tao Lin (Shoplifting from American Apparel; Taipei), Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?; Motherhood), and more recently Rachel Cusk (Outline; Transit; Kudos). All of these have their merits and I've been attracted to them and felt like they were up my alley but when it comes to what I look for in writing as a reader (audacity, authority, execution, heft, oomph), the My Struggle series completely fulfills its exaggerated ambition, and by doing so fulfills the need I felt in 1997 or so when I felt like it felt right to write about my life. It's hard to explain. It's like there was a sense that conventional fiction wasn't sufficient and that by writing about life like in DFW's essays or a less "hip"/annoying explicitly Buddhist way like Keroauc there was an under-occupied space and way forward. Now, it's clear that "My Struggle" has not only occupied that space but will be a sort of black hole warping the light of all further autofictional energy. At the end, in the last line, he says he's no longer a writer, something he's since disproven. But there's something about this that's like he's put it all out, eviserated himself and stretched the entrails out like Keroauc's unfurled scroll along a shuffleboard table. He's exhausted his capacities. And I'm sure that's something that many writers have wanted to do at one point but never come close to achieving.
Stray thoughts:
Very few similes. At one point I noted "no similes" and then a few pages later three appeared on one page. But generally very few similes. Eschews those little metaphorical flourishes that so often signal that the writer is intent on achieving Proper Literary Tone, which KOK purposefully tries to avoid.
Very little social media -- not until the end of Book Six is Linda posting updates on Facebook. Otherwise, I can't imagine what this project would be like if the author posted all the time on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. In many ways, it's the anti-thesis of social media updates by writers. Definitely not character restricted, not going for the laugh, no group think, not concerned with pop culture or self-promotion. Reading this book actually felt like the antidote to social media -- I was off it other than Goodreads as I read this. It felt good never to reach for my phone to scroll through updates when I needed to take a break from it.
The translators will win all the awards for this I'm sure -- it seems like one of them handled the dramatized parts and the other handled the essayistic parts. The tone is similar but not exact, although that of course could have more to do with KOK than the translator.
I liked that the cover is the same color as my 2014 novel The Shimmering Go-Between.
Will I re-read Book 1 now? Like with In Search of Lost Time, I would love to read a volume each year, over and over forever, but lord knows if I will.
Very broadly, the structure is something like this: first part is about family reaction to the manuscript of Book 1, particularly his uncle Gunnar's extremely negative take that makes KOK question his memory and representation of reality in the second half of Book 1 (his father's death, cleaning his grandmother's house). A visit from Geir and his young son follows, mostly talk about how to react to reactions to what he's written, but also somewhat about Geir's 1000-page book about living in Baghdad as a human shield during the American invasion. In this part, KOK interrupts the usual dialogue-replete easy dramatization and drops a 10-page essay on influence and the I into the proceedings, an essay that feels absolutely cut and pasted into the text, with a different texture/feel, but it's just an introduction/taste of what's to come: a dense 50-page close-reading of a Paul Celan poem about the Holocaust, the most difficult reading by far in the whole project, a vast chunk of interpretative reading unlike anything I've ever seen in a novel, a wall at which many eyes will probably either close and cease progress or simply leap over, although this part is thematically essential in that it introduces the "we, they, it" theme, which refracts the light of everything the project/series has been about so far and in turn acts as a thematic launchpad for the following 400 pages of essay about Hitler, primarily a linear analysis starting with his youth, family, upbringing (his father beat him senseless), teen years, early artistic endeavors in part as a reaction to his father's dreary civil servanthood, living in parks and painting on the street for money, concocting an opera without knowing how to write music, re-designing cities in his head, ultimately finding himself in WWI, after which he discovers his gift for public speaking, as well as anti-Semitism, wondering what so many of his fellow soldiers died for, a Germany reduced in defeat, totally devalued, and so begins his quest to elevate Germany again, in part so all those millions of young men won't have died for nothing, all of which (the WWI influence on Hitler's thinking and spirit) I found particularly interesting, especially since in the past few years I've read and loved Zweig's The World of Yesterday, Enrich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and Ernst Junger's Storms of Steel, and so felt "prepared" for this in a way, like we'd done a lot of the same reading -- all this with really interesting interspersed excerpts from various biographies that describe similar times in Hitler's life in different ways, for example presenting the teenage Hitler as a latent monster, inherently inhuman from the start (a method KOK rejects -- he says it's important to humanize Hitler so he's not an "it" but part of the "we," emphasizing what we're capable of), intermittently interspersed with examples of the artistic upbringing of canonical European writers of around the same generation or a little older (Hamsun, Kafka, Zweig, Mann, Junger), followed by excerpts and analysis of Hitler's "Mein Kampf," which I've never read and have never really considered reading, which therefore feels transgressive in what otherwise had been a novel about doing dishes and pushing three kids around in a stroller while trying to write. And then it returns to the project's traditional mode of dramatization with sometimes lengthy expository interjections about his wife's mental health, including their purchase of a cabin they can't upkeep, totally evocative description and dramatization of a trip to the Canary Islands when Linda was still pregnant with their third child John and they almost bought a timeshare they couldn't possibly afford, a trip during which KOK reads Gombrowicz's Diary and pretty much conceives of the project of writing about his life (they also consider moving to Argentina), ending with the sale of the cabin and purchase of a summer home near the southeastern coast of Sweden that becomes their full-time home. I don't think any of this really counts as "spoilers" since it's not so much about what happens as the ideas, the experience, the extreme solidity and weight of the book in your hands (at one point while walking and reading it at lunch, it actually made my left arm sore and I wondered if I was maybe having a heart attack or I'd just been holding the book in my left hand too long).
Amazingly, this all not only "works," it succeeds, I think, in that it does what KOK loves to do, which is lay out a long stretch during which you're questioning why you're reading yet propelled by the quickness and easy charisma of the text until he eventually interrupts the proceedings in a way that makes you consider everything so far. I first noticed this while reading A Time for Everything when the story of the flood and Noah's ark comes after maybe 70 pages of domestic life that made me feel like the novel was slipping in quality but then was revealed eventually as their last moments alive before drowning and therefore entirely significant, all their little domestic movements were not meaningless at all, which KOK then elaborates in My Struggle to all the little domestic movements of the day with the children, trying to write etc, ultimately shifted in significance by the flood of text about Hitler's autobiography/biography as a reflection on his own -- all of which also in comparison belittles the transgression of representing his life as it is, his father's demise, all the personal private things that in Scandinavian society one does not reveal to the world. In "A Time for Everything," KOK also complexifies the story of Cain and Abel, humanizing Cain, the first human considered evil -- in this, he complexifies the story of Hitler, the Michael Jordan/GOAT of evil. In my review of "A Time for Everything," I wrote: Dramatizing the complexity of black/white archetypes is something really great lit does best -- I don't like to think about lit/art as something that "serves society," that's functional or necessary or useful per se, but Complexity Emphasis is one of the arguments in lit's defense. And that really applies here. Not only does KOK complexify the typical understanding of Hitler to emphasize that he is not a monster, a dehumanized "it," but a human being like us, part of the "we," but he uses Hitler's story to complexify his own story, to show that in different circumstances Hitler could've been like him, and vice versa, and also that the sin of what he's done with "My Struggle" is really not all that bad at all compared for example TO WHAT HITLER DID!!! Ultimately the project attempts to present everything unspoken that's relayed in an instant simply by looking someone else in the eye for an extended moment.
But there's also the last section after the Hitler essay about Linda's depressive and then manic episodes -- hanging out the dirty laundry of the relationship in such a way that news last year that they divorced seems more inevitable than surprising. At one point he writes that he writes this as he does since he has nothing to lose, he doesn't care anymore, he's essentially reached the point of saying "fuck it" all the time and doesn't worry about the consequences -- but then he softens and professes his love and remembers when they first met and knowing that they'd have three children together (now four). Yet at the end of Book Six it seems like they'll be OK, they've found a new home, a proper home to raise the three kids in, not a messy urban apartment, so knowing that they've divorced post-publication of the original Book Six makes the dedication at the end even more poignant.
About twenty years ago (1997/8) I wrote a book of autobiographical essays (Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World) that was published in 2004 -- it was propelled in part by a quotation from Thomas Wolfe: "Fiction is fact selected, arranged, and charged with purpose." But also a response to my first real depressive stretch, an attempt to write my way out of it in a way. It also was an expression of a native impulse that fiction is best when it doesn't read like fiction at all (the archetype for a lot of this who's often unspoken or unacknowledged due to lack of literary prestige is Kerouac, not so much "On the Road" but the later ones like "The Subterraneans" and "Big Sur" -- also KOK says he wrote the 500+-page Book Five in five weeks, which suggests Kerouac's weekends of "athletic" writing fueled by coffee and speed). Later I read Moody's "Demonology" story about his sister's death and Lorrie Moore's famous story about blood in her daughter's diaper, both of which were touchstones for me of fiction that's not fiction, that goes against fiction in a way by emphasizing its reality but then by doing so elevates itself as a sort of supreme fiction. Since then the genre of "autofiction" has emerged, with primary recipients of attention being Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station; 10:04); Tao Lin (Shoplifting from American Apparel; Taipei), Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?; Motherhood), and more recently Rachel Cusk (Outline; Transit; Kudos). All of these have their merits and I've been attracted to them and felt like they were up my alley but when it comes to what I look for in writing as a reader (audacity, authority, execution, heft, oomph), the My Struggle series completely fulfills its exaggerated ambition, and by doing so fulfills the need I felt in 1997 or so when I felt like it felt right to write about my life. It's hard to explain. It's like there was a sense that conventional fiction wasn't sufficient and that by writing about life like in DFW's essays or a less "hip"/annoying explicitly Buddhist way like Keroauc there was an under-occupied space and way forward. Now, it's clear that "My Struggle" has not only occupied that space but will be a sort of black hole warping the light of all further autofictional energy. At the end, in the last line, he says he's no longer a writer, something he's since disproven. But there's something about this that's like he's put it all out, eviserated himself and stretched the entrails out like Keroauc's unfurled scroll along a shuffleboard table. He's exhausted his capacities. And I'm sure that's something that many writers have wanted to do at one point but never come close to achieving.
Stray thoughts:
Very few similes. At one point I noted "no similes" and then a few pages later three appeared on one page. But generally very few similes. Eschews those little metaphorical flourishes that so often signal that the writer is intent on achieving Proper Literary Tone, which KOK purposefully tries to avoid.
Very little social media -- not until the end of Book Six is Linda posting updates on Facebook. Otherwise, I can't imagine what this project would be like if the author posted all the time on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. In many ways, it's the anti-thesis of social media updates by writers. Definitely not character restricted, not going for the laugh, no group think, not concerned with pop culture or self-promotion. Reading this book actually felt like the antidote to social media -- I was off it other than Goodreads as I read this. It felt good never to reach for my phone to scroll through updates when I needed to take a break from it.
The translators will win all the awards for this I'm sure -- it seems like one of them handled the dramatized parts and the other handled the essayistic parts. The tone is similar but not exact, although that of course could have more to do with KOK than the translator.
I liked that the cover is the same color as my 2014 novel The Shimmering Go-Between.
Will I re-read Book 1 now? Like with In Search of Lost Time, I would love to read a volume each year, over and over forever, but lord knows if I will.
October 11, 2018
UPDATE: Here is my interview with Knausgaard on the book!: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...
I'll write more toward the publication date, but this is a fascinating ending to my favorite series from the last few years. Like the party at the end of Proust, Knausgaard collapses the past into the present with a meta-textual focus that gives the backstory of each of the 5 previous books. The long, interpolated essay on Hitler will slow down some readers, like it did me, but it's worth reading. There are harrowing heart-in-throat moments during the finale, and excellent humor, and most importantly, as ever: the horror of the mundane; the beauty of the world.
I'll write more toward the publication date, but this is a fascinating ending to my favorite series from the last few years. Like the party at the end of Proust, Knausgaard collapses the past into the present with a meta-textual focus that gives the backstory of each of the 5 previous books. The long, interpolated essay on Hitler will slow down some readers, like it did me, but it's worth reading. There are harrowing heart-in-throat moments during the finale, and excellent humor, and most importantly, as ever: the horror of the mundane; the beauty of the world.
August 30, 2018
[from Min kamp 5]
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As with the other volumes, I am hesitant to give this more than three or at most four stars; but the series as a whole, which we now see is one coherent book, clearly rates the full five. It was enormously enjoyable to work out for myself just what the hell Min kamp is actually about, and if you like doing that kind of thing I strongly advise you to stop here and not come back until you've also finished it. Just be assured that there is most definitely a point.
For people who don't feel up to reading 3500 pages of Norwegian, (Update, several years later: it's finally all available in English),
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As with the other volumes, I am hesitant to give this more than three or at most four stars; but the series as a whole, which we now see is one coherent book, clearly rates the full five. It was enormously enjoyable to work out for myself just what the hell Min kamp is actually about, and if you like doing that kind of thing I strongly advise you to stop here and not come back until you've also finished it. Just be assured that there is most definitely a point.
For people who don't feel up to reading 3500 pages of Norwegian, (Update, several years later: it's finally all available in English),
December 12, 2019
After over 3000 pages of incredible prose, My Struggle comes to an explosive and satisfying end in Vol 6. This volume covers his life with Linda having published Vol 1 of the eponymous autobiography and dealing with the objections of his uncle Gunnar, reactions from his family and friends, and dealing with serious crises - particularly with a dark episode for his wife Linda. There is also a long 400+ page diversion talking about a Paul Celan poem and a biographical sketch of Hitler, where KOK talks about the differences between the "I" and the "we" and how the manipulation of these concepts was central to Celan's poem and to the way that Hitler changed as a person into the monster we know about from history books and how the German people became willing accomplices for the most part in one of the 20th centuries most lurid and horrific atrocities. But, what truly amazed me was the sense of closure I got at the very end as he finishes Vol 6 and says goodbye.
The entire work of My Struggle is a monument to perseverance and an incredibly fast-paced read given its length and seemingly banal subject.
Fino's KOK Reviews:
Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Book 4
Book 5
Book 6
A Time For Everything
The entire work of My Struggle is a monument to perseverance and an incredibly fast-paced read given its length and seemingly banal subject.
Fino's KOK Reviews:
Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Book 4
Book 5
Book 6
A Time For Everything
November 2, 2018
I have been a fan of Karl Ove Knausgaard for as long as I can remember, and this series has been absolutely wonderful, so I was expecting a fine and fitting conclusion. Unfortunately, this let the entire series down. No-one is more sorry about that than me. Don't get me wrong, I was bound to be disappointed at some point given my super-high expectations, but I never imagined it would be by Knausgaard.
The main issue is simply that the book is too long. It could've worked like a charm had an editor have cut it down by quite a substantial amount of pages, so it dragged on and on and felt as though we literally weren't moving anywhere. The middle section of the book was the worst part and so disastrous that I almost gave up on reading it in order to substitute it for something more enjoyable. A decent editor could've really made this taut and tight and tuned it up properly. The narrative at times was so difficult to get through as it felt like wading through treacle - at a complete standstill. Each time this happened there was a loss of momentum and for a reader attempting to appreciate the story, this was extremely hard work, not to mention tedious. The structure only added to the problem - many overlong sentences naturally made it hard work.
Overall, this is not a book I would recommend, that makes me incredibly sad to say that as the author's works are usually reliably engaging, excellent and masterpieces. However, I would pass on this one and spend your time on something with more finesse.
The main issue is simply that the book is too long. It could've worked like a charm had an editor have cut it down by quite a substantial amount of pages, so it dragged on and on and felt as though we literally weren't moving anywhere. The middle section of the book was the worst part and so disastrous that I almost gave up on reading it in order to substitute it for something more enjoyable. A decent editor could've really made this taut and tight and tuned it up properly. The narrative at times was so difficult to get through as it felt like wading through treacle - at a complete standstill. Each time this happened there was a loss of momentum and for a reader attempting to appreciate the story, this was extremely hard work, not to mention tedious. The structure only added to the problem - many overlong sentences naturally made it hard work.
Overall, this is not a book I would recommend, that makes me incredibly sad to say that as the author's works are usually reliably engaging, excellent and masterpieces. However, I would pass on this one and spend your time on something with more finesse.
Read
July 26, 2016After 18 months and 3600 pages, I have finished the 6th and final volume of this tremendous saga. I am speechless. It has been wonderful, heartbreaking, real, awkward, upsetting and honest. It has been the greatest literary experience of my life. It was grandiose, and it was epic. Fucking changed my life is what it did.
June 7, 2017
[continued from here]
At 0% of this book, and that’ll probably stay for a while. During my monthly check on the availability of Min Kamp 6 in German translation I still couldn’t find it on the publisher’s website, not even an announcement. Volume 5 came out about a year ago, so I figured it’s about f****** time now for #6!
I emailed the publisher as well as the translator and I’m curious what they have to say. Stay tuned, German Knausgård readers!
·•●•·
Still at 0%. A mere two days later Paul Berf, the translator, wrote back. Nice guy (from the few messages we exchanged).
The Good news: Min Kamp 6 will be published in German! I admit, I feared the publisher perhaps has got cold feet. After all, this book also deals with Hitler’s work of the same name, and that is still kind of a sensitive topic here in ‘schland.
Mediocre news: The publishing date has been postponed to spring 2017. I guess that’s okay. I will hold out until then (assuming the world does too).
The best news: Knausgård’s first novel Ute av verden will also be published in German! This book is hovering over vols 4 and 5 of Min Kamp somehow, and I’ll be glad to check it out myself one day. No publishing date so far.
As you can see: No bad news from the Knausgård front.
A day later a response from the publisher (pretty quick IMO). They say the sixth volume is in the planning stage, but a release date has not been fixed yet. They advised me to check on their website (in other words: the place where I started from). At least I got some new information: The tentative title of Min Kamp 6 in German is: .
(three months later)
I checked the publisher’s website again and - lo and behold - vol 6 will be available in German on May 22, 2017. Finally!
With a whopping page count of 1200 (hardcover) the book apparently needed two translators: the above mentioned Paul Perf, who already translated volumes 1, 2, 3, and 5, as well as Ulrich Sonnenberg who translated volume 4. The cover looks rather simple. The authors name, the book’s title in red, and the publisher’s name on a girly-pinkish background. Rather silly, if you ask me:
·•●•·
At 6%. Finally started the last of the six volumes of Knausgård’s übernovel. The whole thing got so long that the publication of the first volume plays a central part in the plot of the last one, at least up until now. Karl Ove anxiously awaits the reaction of the people, especially his uncle, who are mentioned in the first volume, and to whom he sent the manuscript. Meanwhile he picked up his three children from kindergarten and takes them to a playground. A lively scene and I could hear the kids and yelling rollicking about. It fits well that I’m living directly next to a kindergarten and with the windows open and when the little “beasts” are released (like now) the children’s voices echo in the apartment. I don’t mind. A little idyllic world sometimes is quite nice.
·•●•·
At 16%. It seems like after an estimated 4.500 pages in the whole novel series KOK finally approaches the, or at least one of the, heart(s) of the matter: How do you present reality without adding something that it doesn’t have? What is it that it “has” or “doesn’t have”? What is actual, what is not-actual? Where lies the border between the staged and the non-staged? Does such a border exist at all? Is the world something other than our idea of it?
Essayist Knausgård pushes to the fore!
·•●•·
At 39%. Oh dearie me... Karl Ove analyses a poem by Paul Celan. It’s called Engführung (something like narrowing, or maybe constriction?) and KOK admits he’s not very good at poetry. But he gives it a go. Every single word of the poem is scrutinized and used as a source for further digressions from the novel’s main plot. Or maybe this is the main plot, and the story before, with family and friends was just a prelude.
Älter werden heißt nicht, mehr zu verstehen, es heißt zu wissen, dass es mehr zu verstehen gibt.
That’s so true, Karl Ove. And some things I’ll never understand.
You can read Celan’s poem here while listening to the poet reciting it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Bk9...
·•●•·
At 49%, almost half way there. Today is such a beautiful day. It’s almost perfect – as for the weather. There is no trace of climate change, at least today, and at least around these parts. I should really go outside, and listen to the birds.
Instead, my thoughts revolve around two men, both of which can not be more repulsive.
About one man Knausgård writes in detail in the central part of his book. Actually, he lets another author write, because there are numerous longer passages from a biography of said man here in Min Kamp, which a youth friend published in 1953, entitled The Young Hitler I Knew. For fun I searched all six Knausgård volumes for the word “Hitler”. I would have thought he was mentioned more frequently, but in Volume 1 to 5 there are only three mentions. And in volume 6? There are 824! At least know I’m positive that the title Min Kamp wasn’t chose by chance. Hitler’s book was not forbidden in Germany (in this case Knausgård is mistaken), but could not be published, as long as the copyright lies with the state of Bavaria. This copyright has expired on January 1, 2016 and now I have both the Critical Edition, which was published in 2016, as well as the original book (213. edition of 1936). I just opened it to compare a quote from this book with the original, and on the first page this madman stares at me with his penetrating eyes – a glossy photo with a facsimile signature, so I closed the book again. Maybe later, when the weather is not so nice.
I think I don’t need much to say about the second repulsive man. Yesterday, in a rose garden, he once more demonstrated that one simply cannot distinguish his two main body orifices. If he only had mucked the roses instead!
PS: I just remember that there is a third man to think about: The student Benno Ohnesorg, who died today exactly 50 years ago, gunned down point blank by a policeman during a demonstration in West Berlin. History, huh?! — it’s just one damned thing after another…
·•●•·
At 60%. Dear Diary — Today I read about the following people in Karl Ove Knausgård’s book: Thomas von Aquin, Jorge Luis Borges, Linda Boström Knausgård, Dante Alighieri, Hermann Broch, Max Brod, Olav Duun, Sigmund Freud, René Girard, Knut Hamsun, Martin Heidegger, Adolf Hitler, Homer, James Joyce, Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, August Kubizek, Alfred Kubin, Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Lorrain, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Marcuse, Karl Marx, Edvard Munch, Paracelsus, Sir William Petty, Pablo Picasso, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Simmel, J.M.W. Turner, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stefan Zweig, and God. — *Phew*
·•●•·
At 72% — at the end of the essay “THE NAME AND THE NUMBER”. Wow! 486 pages (in the German hardcover) seems a little more than “just” an essay. In a sense, this was probably Knausgård’s real “Min Kamp”. I mean to write this text, in the middle section of the last volume. How long did it take him? I also wonder whether the embedding of this was planned from the start? In any case, I think here KOK showed his true face. Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”? Up yours!
·•●•·
At 92%. Linda really gets me down. How Karl Ove disposed of the two buckets of shit in their garden lot was quite nice. But Linda… I wanted to finish the book today but I think it won’t work. Nothing works today. I should go back to bed. But I’m already in the office. How did I get here?
·•●•·
Finished! The six volumes of Knausgård have become part of my own “Kamp”. The fun lasted two years – a total of 55 reading days. Dying – Loving – Playing – Living – Dreaming – Fighting: these are the (translated) titles of the German editions. It has indeed develeoped an incredible pull, this fictional autobiography. What is true and what is invented? I suppose not even Karl Ove Knausgård is 100% sure about that. I guess when reading it again by knowing how it ends, some things would become clearer. But should I do that again? 4,600 pages of Knausgård?? Ååååååååååååå!
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At 0% of this book, and that’ll probably stay for a while. During my monthly check on the availability of Min Kamp 6 in German translation I still couldn’t find it on the publisher’s website, not even an announcement. Volume 5 came out about a year ago, so I figured it’s about f****** time now for #6!
I emailed the publisher as well as the translator and I’m curious what they have to say. Stay tuned, German Knausgård readers!
·•●•·
Still at 0%. A mere two days later Paul Berf, the translator, wrote back. Nice guy (from the few messages we exchanged).
The Good news: Min Kamp 6 will be published in German! I admit, I feared the publisher perhaps has got cold feet. After all, this book also deals with Hitler’s work of the same name, and that is still kind of a sensitive topic here in ‘schland.
Mediocre news: The publishing date has been postponed to spring 2017. I guess that’s okay. I will hold out until then (assuming the world does too).
The best news: Knausgård’s first novel Ute av verden will also be published in German! This book is hovering over vols 4 and 5 of Min Kamp somehow, and I’ll be glad to check it out myself one day. No publishing date so far.
As you can see: No bad news from the Knausgård front.
A day later a response from the publisher (pretty quick IMO). They say the sixth volume is in the planning stage, but a release date has not been fixed yet. They advised me to check on their website (in other words: the place where I started from). At least I got some new information: The tentative title of Min Kamp 6 in German is: .
(three months later)
I checked the publisher’s website again and - lo and behold - vol 6 will be available in German on May 22, 2017. Finally!
With a whopping page count of 1200 (hardcover) the book apparently needed two translators: the above mentioned Paul Perf, who already translated volumes 1, 2, 3, and 5, as well as Ulrich Sonnenberg who translated volume 4. The cover looks rather simple. The authors name, the book’s title in red, and the publisher’s name on a girly-pinkish background. Rather silly, if you ask me:
·•●•·
At 6%. Finally started the last of the six volumes of Knausgård’s übernovel. The whole thing got so long that the publication of the first volume plays a central part in the plot of the last one, at least up until now. Karl Ove anxiously awaits the reaction of the people, especially his uncle, who are mentioned in the first volume, and to whom he sent the manuscript. Meanwhile he picked up his three children from kindergarten and takes them to a playground. A lively scene and I could hear the kids and yelling rollicking about. It fits well that I’m living directly next to a kindergarten and with the windows open and when the little “beasts” are released (like now) the children’s voices echo in the apartment. I don’t mind. A little idyllic world sometimes is quite nice.
·•●•·
At 16%. It seems like after an estimated 4.500 pages in the whole novel series KOK finally approaches the, or at least one of the, heart(s) of the matter: How do you present reality without adding something that it doesn’t have? What is it that it “has” or “doesn’t have”? What is actual, what is not-actual? Where lies the border between the staged and the non-staged? Does such a border exist at all? Is the world something other than our idea of it?
Essayist Knausgård pushes to the fore!
·•●•·
At 39%. Oh dearie me... Karl Ove analyses a poem by Paul Celan. It’s called Engführung (something like narrowing, or maybe constriction?) and KOK admits he’s not very good at poetry. But he gives it a go. Every single word of the poem is scrutinized and used as a source for further digressions from the novel’s main plot. Or maybe this is the main plot, and the story before, with family and friends was just a prelude.
Älter werden heißt nicht, mehr zu verstehen, es heißt zu wissen, dass es mehr zu verstehen gibt.
That’s so true, Karl Ove. And some things I’ll never understand.
You can read Celan’s poem here while listening to the poet reciting it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Bk9...
·•●•·
At 49%, almost half way there. Today is such a beautiful day. It’s almost perfect – as for the weather. There is no trace of climate change, at least today, and at least around these parts. I should really go outside, and listen to the birds.
Instead, my thoughts revolve around two men, both of which can not be more repulsive.
About one man Knausgård writes in detail in the central part of his book. Actually, he lets another author write, because there are numerous longer passages from a biography of said man here in Min Kamp, which a youth friend published in 1953, entitled The Young Hitler I Knew. For fun I searched all six Knausgård volumes for the word “Hitler”. I would have thought he was mentioned more frequently, but in Volume 1 to 5 there are only three mentions. And in volume 6? There are 824! At least know I’m positive that the title Min Kamp wasn’t chose by chance. Hitler’s book was not forbidden in Germany (in this case Knausgård is mistaken), but could not be published, as long as the copyright lies with the state of Bavaria. This copyright has expired on January 1, 2016 and now I have both the Critical Edition, which was published in 2016, as well as the original book (213. edition of 1936). I just opened it to compare a quote from this book with the original, and on the first page this madman stares at me with his penetrating eyes – a glossy photo with a facsimile signature, so I closed the book again. Maybe later, when the weather is not so nice.
I think I don’t need much to say about the second repulsive man. Yesterday, in a rose garden, he once more demonstrated that one simply cannot distinguish his two main body orifices. If he only had mucked the roses instead!
PS: I just remember that there is a third man to think about: The student Benno Ohnesorg, who died today exactly 50 years ago, gunned down point blank by a policeman during a demonstration in West Berlin. History, huh?! — it’s just one damned thing after another…
·•●•·
At 60%. Dear Diary — Today I read about the following people in Karl Ove Knausgård’s book: Thomas von Aquin, Jorge Luis Borges, Linda Boström Knausgård, Dante Alighieri, Hermann Broch, Max Brod, Olav Duun, Sigmund Freud, René Girard, Knut Hamsun, Martin Heidegger, Adolf Hitler, Homer, James Joyce, Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, August Kubizek, Alfred Kubin, Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Lorrain, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Marcuse, Karl Marx, Edvard Munch, Paracelsus, Sir William Petty, Pablo Picasso, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Simmel, J.M.W. Turner, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stefan Zweig, and God. — *Phew*
·•●•·
At 72% — at the end of the essay “THE NAME AND THE NUMBER”. Wow! 486 pages (in the German hardcover) seems a little more than “just” an essay. In a sense, this was probably Knausgård’s real “Min Kamp”. I mean to write this text, in the middle section of the last volume. How long did it take him? I also wonder whether the embedding of this was planned from the start? In any case, I think here KOK showed his true face. Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”? Up yours!
·•●•·
At 92%. Linda really gets me down. How Karl Ove disposed of the two buckets of shit in their garden lot was quite nice. But Linda… I wanted to finish the book today but I think it won’t work. Nothing works today. I should go back to bed. But I’m already in the office. How did I get here?
·•●•·
Finished! The six volumes of Knausgård have become part of my own “Kamp”. The fun lasted two years – a total of 55 reading days. Dying – Loving – Playing – Living – Dreaming – Fighting: these are the (translated) titles of the German editions. It has indeed develeoped an incredible pull, this fictional autobiography. What is true and what is invented? I suppose not even Karl Ove Knausgård is 100% sure about that. I guess when reading it again by knowing how it ends, some things would become clearer. But should I do that again? 4,600 pages of Knausgård?? Ååååååååååååå!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
April 20, 2023
Re-edit of my review of 5 years ago
Again a very peculiar reading experience, this sixth and last installment of the “My Struggle”-series. In the first 400 pages of this book (a monster of 1081 pages), Knausgard really captivated me: only now did I see (or I think so) the meaning of his entire cycle. This part is about the period just before the publication of the first part of the series and the fear of the author for all kinds of juridical actions by the people that occur in the series (especially his uncle). That made me realise what Knausgard was aiming at all that time: to find and test what kind of a person he was, a result of that inner contradiction between an enormous inferiority complex and the ambition to become a great writer. The original thing is that Knausgard puts everything on the table, also the banal and trivial such as shopping or smoking a cigarette or playing with the children, in short, the "real" life. Unlike other great writers, with him that real life does not limit itself to profound introspections, musings or endless literary sophisticated descriptions: even the smallness of things had to be in it, and it is also there. In short: the 'whole man Karl Ove Knausgard' and his world.
But then suddenly, after 400 pages, the book turns into a series of essays: a particularly thorough analysis of a very hermetic poem by Paul Celan about the Holocaust, a personal assessment of how shocking that Holocaust was, a very long analysis of "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler and an analysis of the evil in the person of Anders Breivik, the extreme right-wing young man who in 2011 killed 77 people in Norway. As you read this, you are constantly wondering what these essays are doing in the otherwise very personal account of the almost banal life of an upcoming Norwegian writer. Automatically you start making connections (the authoritarian father of Hitler and of Knausgard for example), etc. Repeatedly, Knausgard himself gives the message that you should not confuse the young Hitler, no matter how eccentric, with the later Hitler, and that evil isn’t necessary there from a young age, not in Hitler, not in Breivik, and thus, and there we are – also not in the young Knausgard, an issue that has been discussed several times during the course of the cycle. Is that the key to read the whole work? Possibly.
Yet a warning: this essay part may formally stand like a pincer on a pig in this cycle, it really forms a coherent whole. Meandering from one angle to another it is clearly a reflection on two specific issues: first, about what the “I”, the “you”, the “we” and the "them” is, in particular in the ideology (Nazism) that has gone the furthest in the demarcation of those concepts, both in language and in practice; and secondly about the separate reality that it is the “now”, as the only real life. And thus Knausgard makes connections with his own writing project: that attempt to gauge what his own self is, whether there is real evil in him, how small or big, good or bad he really is. So in that sense there is absolutely a link with the rest of his cycle. And besides: these essays are not superficial musings, but profound philosophical, psychological, literary and historical reflections that are absolutely in-depth; they testify of an enormous erudition and a power to think things through into their concreteness, their authenticity, their uniqueness (just to follow Knausgards own jargon). Definitely a great, albeit sometimes very difficult read, though I suspect that Knausgard also included this essayistic part to show that he is not just the writer of the banal and the trivial, which he is sometimes is regarded as.
And then there is the last, relatively short part (250 pages) that initially returns to the banality of daily life, but in which ultimately the struggle of Knausgard's wife with her manic depression is discussed. The latter is quite hard and shows once again how difficult it is for someone with a very strongly developed inner self to confront the reality of the “now”. In Knausgard's terms it is the eternal struggle of the individual between the boundless and the bounded. I will come back to this in my global review of the My Struggle cycle (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Rating for this part: 3.5 stars
Again a very peculiar reading experience, this sixth and last installment of the “My Struggle”-series. In the first 400 pages of this book (a monster of 1081 pages), Knausgard really captivated me: only now did I see (or I think so) the meaning of his entire cycle. This part is about the period just before the publication of the first part of the series and the fear of the author for all kinds of juridical actions by the people that occur in the series (especially his uncle). That made me realise what Knausgard was aiming at all that time: to find and test what kind of a person he was, a result of that inner contradiction between an enormous inferiority complex and the ambition to become a great writer. The original thing is that Knausgard puts everything on the table, also the banal and trivial such as shopping or smoking a cigarette or playing with the children, in short, the "real" life. Unlike other great writers, with him that real life does not limit itself to profound introspections, musings or endless literary sophisticated descriptions: even the smallness of things had to be in it, and it is also there. In short: the 'whole man Karl Ove Knausgard' and his world.
But then suddenly, after 400 pages, the book turns into a series of essays: a particularly thorough analysis of a very hermetic poem by Paul Celan about the Holocaust, a personal assessment of how shocking that Holocaust was, a very long analysis of "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler and an analysis of the evil in the person of Anders Breivik, the extreme right-wing young man who in 2011 killed 77 people in Norway. As you read this, you are constantly wondering what these essays are doing in the otherwise very personal account of the almost banal life of an upcoming Norwegian writer. Automatically you start making connections (the authoritarian father of Hitler and of Knausgard for example), etc. Repeatedly, Knausgard himself gives the message that you should not confuse the young Hitler, no matter how eccentric, with the later Hitler, and that evil isn’t necessary there from a young age, not in Hitler, not in Breivik, and thus, and there we are – also not in the young Knausgard, an issue that has been discussed several times during the course of the cycle. Is that the key to read the whole work? Possibly.
Yet a warning: this essay part may formally stand like a pincer on a pig in this cycle, it really forms a coherent whole. Meandering from one angle to another it is clearly a reflection on two specific issues: first, about what the “I”, the “you”, the “we” and the "them” is, in particular in the ideology (Nazism) that has gone the furthest in the demarcation of those concepts, both in language and in practice; and secondly about the separate reality that it is the “now”, as the only real life. And thus Knausgard makes connections with his own writing project: that attempt to gauge what his own self is, whether there is real evil in him, how small or big, good or bad he really is. So in that sense there is absolutely a link with the rest of his cycle. And besides: these essays are not superficial musings, but profound philosophical, psychological, literary and historical reflections that are absolutely in-depth; they testify of an enormous erudition and a power to think things through into their concreteness, their authenticity, their uniqueness (just to follow Knausgards own jargon). Definitely a great, albeit sometimes very difficult read, though I suspect that Knausgard also included this essayistic part to show that he is not just the writer of the banal and the trivial, which he is sometimes is regarded as.
And then there is the last, relatively short part (250 pages) that initially returns to the banality of daily life, but in which ultimately the struggle of Knausgard's wife with her manic depression is discussed. The latter is quite hard and shows once again how difficult it is for someone with a very strongly developed inner self to confront the reality of the “now”. In Knausgard's terms it is the eternal struggle of the individual between the boundless and the bounded. I will come back to this in my global review of the My Struggle cycle (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Rating for this part: 3.5 stars
Read
January 24, 2019I've just spent the last three weeks reading 3792 pages about myself ; an experience new to me and not particularly pleasant. I'm now out of the book but still stuck in my own head. That may not be all as bad as it may sound.
October 24, 2022
Hard to argue with this...
Thomas Bernhard, for instance, what he wrote and achieved was completely out of my reach. Jon Fosse the same. But not a writer like Jonathan Franzen. Him I could match, and probably even surpass.
The ending of the novel:
I am so happy about Linda, and I am so happy about our children. I will never forgive myself for what I have exposed them to, but I did it and I will have to live with it. Now it is 07.07, and the novel is finally finished. In two hours Linda will be coming here, I will hug her and tell her I have finished, and I will never do anything like this to her and our children again.
February 2008-September 2011
7 years later, it's 13.45 on 5th September 2018, and I would have to admit to a similar, albeit slight, sense of relief after finally reaching the end of the 3,966 page epic that is My Struggle, this final volume alone clocking in at 1,168 pages.
But that said, Min Kamp is one of the most important literary works of the 21st Century to date. The only book of comparable length I have read is Proust's la recherche du temps perdu, which clocks in at 4,200 pages in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright translation, and the comparison an obvious one.
It's also been a long wait for the English translation - Knausgaard took only 3.5 years to write the entire series, but we've waited 7 years for the English version of book 6. His usual translator, Don Bartlett has assistance here from Martin Aitken, who translated the first half of this volume: the most notable style difference being that Aitken incorporates a number of Swedish / Norwegian words, in part reflecting I think the original where Knausgaard slips between the two languages when addressing his children, but is does still seem distinctive versus the earlier works and the other half of this volume: Ocks kram! said John. Me cuddle too.
Book 6 brings the story of Knausgaard's life up to date. It books nearly complete, and, looking back to the start of the project, it spans the time up until the writing and completion of the book we are reading. This makes for a more stimulating read than some of the earlier books. In those books Knausgaard was adept at writing as he would have experienced and viewed the world at the time he was describing, without any ironic distance: book 4 he regards. looking back, as a success precisely because it is full of the terrible banality and vigour of youth, it is a comedy of immaturity, but that didn't make for a very stimulating read (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Here, the writer and the character are one and the same, a 40-something world-class novelist and literary theorist, and the book has much more intellectual heft.
The first volume was written in a black period for Knausgaard , a cathartic work and a very introspective one: Why had I written such things? I had been so despairing. I had been shut away inside myself, alone with my frustration, a dark and monstrous demon, which at some point had grown enormous, and as if there was no way out. Ever-decreasing circles. Greater and greater darkness. Not the existential kind of darkness that was all about life and death, overarching happiness or overarching grief, but the smaller kind, the shadow on the soul, the ordinary man’s private little hell, so inconsequential as to barely deserve mention, while at the same time engulfing everything.
But as this novel opens, he is confronting the reality that he has written a book, one that while a novel is a novel-without-fiction (as Javier Cercas would term it), about real people, some very close to him: Four hundred and fifty pages, a story about my life centred around two events, the first being my mother and father splitting up, the second being my father’s death. The first three days after he was found. Names, places, events were all authentic. It wasn’t until was about to send the manuscript to the people mentioned in it that I began to understand the consequences of what I had done.
And the reaction is worse than he had feared. His uncle Gunnar, his father's brother, who plays a key role in the first book, is particular incensed: There was an email from Gunnar. The subject line said: Verbal rape. Gunnar aggressively challenges many of the facts in the book, not just his interpretation, and threatens to take legal action, obliging his publishers to instruct solicitors and to consider whether names need to be changed, passages omitted, the story even changed. At one point, Knausgaard wonders if perhaps, as Gunnar suggests, the work is fictional, but: If I accepted that perspective I would be obliterating myself … not once had I considered myself to be exploiting dad and grandma, the events I was describing were too overwhelming for that, and what I was delving into was too important. Although he does accept that he may have been harsh on his father, something he ultimately deals with by the (slightly odd in my view) approach of removing his father's name from the book.
The first third of Part 6 (c450 pages, i.e. a long novel in itself) covers very little elapsed time, as Knausgaard and his publishers work on how to present the novels, as well as dealing with the legal and reputation issues arising. A book a month for a year. We could set up some kind of deal so people can subscribe and get the whole lot. What do you reckon? … When he [called] it was to tell me they couldn’t make it work with twelve separate publications, there were too many practical problems and the figures wouldn’t add up. He suggested six instead. Three in the autumn, three the following spring.
Six books that weren’t independent of each other, that didn’t seem good to me. I needed to divide them differently so that each became a stand-alone book in its own right, which was to say I had to end up with six novels that could also be read as a single, continuous narrative. Doing it that way, the first book came to four hundred pages, the second to five hundred and fifty, and the third to three hundred. After that I ran out of material. If I was going to do it that way, I would have to write three new books in ten months. Which wasn’t implausible, I’d been doing about ten pages a day for the last six months as it was, in the region of fifty pages a week given the fact that I wasn’t allowed to work weekends.
'Wasn't allowed' is very telling - referring to an agreement with his wife (but obviously reluctant on his behalf) that weekends are family time. He admits later in the book that his desire is to eliminate as much complexity as possible from his life - and family life is of course chaotic.
Interspersed with the publishing shenanigans are the signature Knausgaard descriptions of life, here focused on the day-to-day details of living with three young children. For example, in the following he describes the next novel he was contemplating, one called (with another obvious nod to Nazi Germany) The Third Realm: ‘The body, the blood’,’ biology’,’ the atom bomb’. And Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things had been appearing in my notes ever since the mid-90s. But it was a novel. It was. A world described through the material and the mechanical, sand, stone, shells, atoms, planets. No psychology, no feelings. A story that was different from ours, though similar. It was to be a dystopia, a novel about the final days, told by a man alone in a house, in the midst of a dry, warm landscape in late summer. And I had an ending ready, I had told it to Linda, who had lit up, it was sublime, amazing. It was!
‘OK, do you want your baths now?’ I said, returning the book to the shelf. The girls slid down from their chairs and skipped off to the bathroom.’ Yes!’ cried John, and toddled after them.
He defends his no-detail-too-small-to-include approach in the novel: This was perhaps the greatest difficulty in writing autobiographically, finding out how material was relevant. In real life, of course, everything was relevant and in principle equal, since it was all there in existence at the same time’ the great oil tankers at anchor in the Galtesund in the 70s, the plum tree outside my window, mum’s job at Kokkeplassen, dad’s facs out somewhere and saw him, the pond where we skated in winter, the smells inside the neighbours’ house, Dag Lothar’s mum that time she made milkshakes for us, the strange car that was parked one night down at Ubekilen, all the fish we had for dinner, the way the pine trees in next door’s garden swayed back and forth in the strong autumn winds, dad’s rage if I happened to dig my knee into the back of his seat in the car, the waffles we made every Tuesday, my great infatuation with Anne Lisbeth, the footballs mum and dad brought back for us from a trip to Germany, mine green with red hexagons, Yngve’s yellow with red hexagons, the way we stood one day and kicked them as high into the air as we could to see if they could reach the military helicopter that happened to come sweeping low over the playground.
But equally telling is a comment from his best friend: ‘You don’t have to say everything that comes into your mind, you know. Kids do that. Adults put their work through quality control first.’ And my favourite example of oversharing … he tells us his PIN number and why he chose it.
So on to the somewhat troublesome middle section of the volume - the most infamous in the whole novel - the long essay on Hitler's Mein Kampf. The justification he gives for this is both the common name of the books (although presumably this was not a coincidence?) but also his finding a Nazi pin in his late father's belongings then later a copy of Mein Kampf in his father's mother's
Because the first book of this novel shares its name, My Struggle, with Hitler’s book, and because Hitler’s book and the Nazi pin were unexplained mysteries in that story, or perhaps not mysteries, but more exactly fields of the past that manifested themselves in the present and which I felt unable to trace back to anything I knew in that past, I had decided to write a few pages about Hitler’s book.
Although Knausgaard is of course incapable of writing a few pages and instead we get:Four hundred pages about pre-war Vienna, Weimar between the wars, how times and psychology, art and politics are closely linked, and the formula for all things human, I-you-we-they-it. This is primarily a highly literary treatment, one that for example opens not with Hitler at all, but with a 60 page detailed deconstruction of a poem by Celan, itself prompted by the misspelling of his dad’s name on his tomb, which leads on to Ingeborg Bachmann’s writing concerning the decline of the name in literature. And the concept of names is key to his theories in this section, in particular what he describes as the absence of a 'you' in the theories of German Nazism. The discussion is wide-roaming, with chains of association that are sometimes hard to remember - from Nazi Germany we suddenly find ourselves discussing Da Vinci's anatomical drawings or Holderlin's theories of language.
Interspersed with this, Knausgaard also reconstructs Hitler's life up until his rise to power. He closely follows the account of Ian Kershaw’s biographies, but takes a deliberately different approach and one consistent with that he takes in his own autobiography. Knausgaard argues that when it comes to Hitler the way Kershaw portrays him, everything he does is either sinister or ridiculous, his accounts coloured by what we know Hitler would go on to do, whereas Knausgaard goes back to many of Kershaw's original sources and shows how differently he was perceived at the time, how few clues there actually were as to what he would become.
It is tempting in 2018 to say this section is prescient when we have an American president tinkering with the tools of fascism and a socialist UK leader treading dangerously close to anti-semitism. However, that would be a mis-reading, again with hindsight, as if anything Knausgaard's point is how remote the feelings of the 1930s are from our society today (i.e. 2011 for him).
At times I got rather bogged down in this part. The retold life story of Hitler and the detailed literary, linguistic and theological theories felt like two separate books, neither of which particularly belong in this novel. Although it must be said this Goodreads review - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... - provides a fascinating theory as to why this section is actually the key to the whole novel.
I also can't help feel that others (Sebald, Tokarczuk, Enard) have done this erudite faction style of writing rather better. I found myself pining for the Knausgaard of old, and it is fitting that the section ends with a signature combination: I sat down again, poured myself some tepid coffee from the vacuum jug and lit another cigarette, as if to say 'normal service is resumed.'
The final third of the volume takes us to publication day, but soon moves forward to the most difficult reader of all - his wife Linda who only reads the book after it is pubslished. He knows there is much that is hurtful in the book, but admits that their relationship was at such a low ebb that the only reason I could write about it was that I had reached a point where I no longer had anything to lose. It made no difference if Linda read this, she could do what she liked. If she wanted to leave me, she could. I didn’t give a damn. I woke up unhappy, spent the day unhappy and went to bed unhappy.
While her short-term reaction is to be upset, it seems manageable, but the true damage is done in the medium term. Linda, who has bipolar disorder, falls into a very deep depression, one ultimately requiring hospitalisation. This final section of the novel is brutally honest, highly personal and very moving as the young family comes to terms with the situation, and I can only say I hope Linda did have the chance to read it before publication.
Overall - for the novel as a whole - a triumph.
Thomas Bernhard, for instance, what he wrote and achieved was completely out of my reach. Jon Fosse the same. But not a writer like Jonathan Franzen. Him I could match, and probably even surpass.
The ending of the novel:
I am so happy about Linda, and I am so happy about our children. I will never forgive myself for what I have exposed them to, but I did it and I will have to live with it. Now it is 07.07, and the novel is finally finished. In two hours Linda will be coming here, I will hug her and tell her I have finished, and I will never do anything like this to her and our children again.
February 2008-September 2011
7 years later, it's 13.45 on 5th September 2018, and I would have to admit to a similar, albeit slight, sense of relief after finally reaching the end of the 3,966 page epic that is My Struggle, this final volume alone clocking in at 1,168 pages.
But that said, Min Kamp is one of the most important literary works of the 21st Century to date. The only book of comparable length I have read is Proust's la recherche du temps perdu, which clocks in at 4,200 pages in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright translation, and the comparison an obvious one.
It's also been a long wait for the English translation - Knausgaard took only 3.5 years to write the entire series, but we've waited 7 years for the English version of book 6. His usual translator, Don Bartlett has assistance here from Martin Aitken, who translated the first half of this volume: the most notable style difference being that Aitken incorporates a number of Swedish / Norwegian words, in part reflecting I think the original where Knausgaard slips between the two languages when addressing his children, but is does still seem distinctive versus the earlier works and the other half of this volume: Ocks kram! said John. Me cuddle too.
Book 6 brings the story of Knausgaard's life up to date. It books nearly complete, and, looking back to the start of the project, it spans the time up until the writing and completion of the book we are reading. This makes for a more stimulating read than some of the earlier books. In those books Knausgaard was adept at writing as he would have experienced and viewed the world at the time he was describing, without any ironic distance: book 4 he regards. looking back, as a success precisely because it is full of the terrible banality and vigour of youth, it is a comedy of immaturity, but that didn't make for a very stimulating read (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Here, the writer and the character are one and the same, a 40-something world-class novelist and literary theorist, and the book has much more intellectual heft.
The first volume was written in a black period for Knausgaard , a cathartic work and a very introspective one: Why had I written such things? I had been so despairing. I had been shut away inside myself, alone with my frustration, a dark and monstrous demon, which at some point had grown enormous, and as if there was no way out. Ever-decreasing circles. Greater and greater darkness. Not the existential kind of darkness that was all about life and death, overarching happiness or overarching grief, but the smaller kind, the shadow on the soul, the ordinary man’s private little hell, so inconsequential as to barely deserve mention, while at the same time engulfing everything.
But as this novel opens, he is confronting the reality that he has written a book, one that while a novel is a novel-without-fiction (as Javier Cercas would term it), about real people, some very close to him: Four hundred and fifty pages, a story about my life centred around two events, the first being my mother and father splitting up, the second being my father’s death. The first three days after he was found. Names, places, events were all authentic. It wasn’t until was about to send the manuscript to the people mentioned in it that I began to understand the consequences of what I had done.
And the reaction is worse than he had feared. His uncle Gunnar, his father's brother, who plays a key role in the first book, is particular incensed: There was an email from Gunnar. The subject line said: Verbal rape. Gunnar aggressively challenges many of the facts in the book, not just his interpretation, and threatens to take legal action, obliging his publishers to instruct solicitors and to consider whether names need to be changed, passages omitted, the story even changed. At one point, Knausgaard wonders if perhaps, as Gunnar suggests, the work is fictional, but: If I accepted that perspective I would be obliterating myself … not once had I considered myself to be exploiting dad and grandma, the events I was describing were too overwhelming for that, and what I was delving into was too important. Although he does accept that he may have been harsh on his father, something he ultimately deals with by the (slightly odd in my view) approach of removing his father's name from the book.
The first third of Part 6 (c450 pages, i.e. a long novel in itself) covers very little elapsed time, as Knausgaard and his publishers work on how to present the novels, as well as dealing with the legal and reputation issues arising. A book a month for a year. We could set up some kind of deal so people can subscribe and get the whole lot. What do you reckon? … When he [called] it was to tell me they couldn’t make it work with twelve separate publications, there were too many practical problems and the figures wouldn’t add up. He suggested six instead. Three in the autumn, three the following spring.
Six books that weren’t independent of each other, that didn’t seem good to me. I needed to divide them differently so that each became a stand-alone book in its own right, which was to say I had to end up with six novels that could also be read as a single, continuous narrative. Doing it that way, the first book came to four hundred pages, the second to five hundred and fifty, and the third to three hundred. After that I ran out of material. If I was going to do it that way, I would have to write three new books in ten months. Which wasn’t implausible, I’d been doing about ten pages a day for the last six months as it was, in the region of fifty pages a week given the fact that I wasn’t allowed to work weekends.
'Wasn't allowed' is very telling - referring to an agreement with his wife (but obviously reluctant on his behalf) that weekends are family time. He admits later in the book that his desire is to eliminate as much complexity as possible from his life - and family life is of course chaotic.
Interspersed with the publishing shenanigans are the signature Knausgaard descriptions of life, here focused on the day-to-day details of living with three young children. For example, in the following he describes the next novel he was contemplating, one called (with another obvious nod to Nazi Germany) The Third Realm: ‘The body, the blood’,’ biology’,’ the atom bomb’. And Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things had been appearing in my notes ever since the mid-90s. But it was a novel. It was. A world described through the material and the mechanical, sand, stone, shells, atoms, planets. No psychology, no feelings. A story that was different from ours, though similar. It was to be a dystopia, a novel about the final days, told by a man alone in a house, in the midst of a dry, warm landscape in late summer. And I had an ending ready, I had told it to Linda, who had lit up, it was sublime, amazing. It was!
‘OK, do you want your baths now?’ I said, returning the book to the shelf. The girls slid down from their chairs and skipped off to the bathroom.’ Yes!’ cried John, and toddled after them.
He defends his no-detail-too-small-to-include approach in the novel: This was perhaps the greatest difficulty in writing autobiographically, finding out how material was relevant. In real life, of course, everything was relevant and in principle equal, since it was all there in existence at the same time’ the great oil tankers at anchor in the Galtesund in the 70s, the plum tree outside my window, mum’s job at Kokkeplassen, dad’s facs out somewhere and saw him, the pond where we skated in winter, the smells inside the neighbours’ house, Dag Lothar’s mum that time she made milkshakes for us, the strange car that was parked one night down at Ubekilen, all the fish we had for dinner, the way the pine trees in next door’s garden swayed back and forth in the strong autumn winds, dad’s rage if I happened to dig my knee into the back of his seat in the car, the waffles we made every Tuesday, my great infatuation with Anne Lisbeth, the footballs mum and dad brought back for us from a trip to Germany, mine green with red hexagons, Yngve’s yellow with red hexagons, the way we stood one day and kicked them as high into the air as we could to see if they could reach the military helicopter that happened to come sweeping low over the playground.
But equally telling is a comment from his best friend: ‘You don’t have to say everything that comes into your mind, you know. Kids do that. Adults put their work through quality control first.’ And my favourite example of oversharing … he tells us his PIN number and why he chose it.
So on to the somewhat troublesome middle section of the volume - the most infamous in the whole novel - the long essay on Hitler's Mein Kampf. The justification he gives for this is both the common name of the books (although presumably this was not a coincidence?) but also his finding a Nazi pin in his late father's belongings then later a copy of Mein Kampf in his father's mother's
Because the first book of this novel shares its name, My Struggle, with Hitler’s book, and because Hitler’s book and the Nazi pin were unexplained mysteries in that story, or perhaps not mysteries, but more exactly fields of the past that manifested themselves in the present and which I felt unable to trace back to anything I knew in that past, I had decided to write a few pages about Hitler’s book.
Although Knausgaard is of course incapable of writing a few pages and instead we get:Four hundred pages about pre-war Vienna, Weimar between the wars, how times and psychology, art and politics are closely linked, and the formula for all things human, I-you-we-they-it. This is primarily a highly literary treatment, one that for example opens not with Hitler at all, but with a 60 page detailed deconstruction of a poem by Celan, itself prompted by the misspelling of his dad’s name on his tomb, which leads on to Ingeborg Bachmann’s writing concerning the decline of the name in literature. And the concept of names is key to his theories in this section, in particular what he describes as the absence of a 'you' in the theories of German Nazism. The discussion is wide-roaming, with chains of association that are sometimes hard to remember - from Nazi Germany we suddenly find ourselves discussing Da Vinci's anatomical drawings or Holderlin's theories of language.
Interspersed with this, Knausgaard also reconstructs Hitler's life up until his rise to power. He closely follows the account of Ian Kershaw’s biographies, but takes a deliberately different approach and one consistent with that he takes in his own autobiography. Knausgaard argues that when it comes to Hitler the way Kershaw portrays him, everything he does is either sinister or ridiculous, his accounts coloured by what we know Hitler would go on to do, whereas Knausgaard goes back to many of Kershaw's original sources and shows how differently he was perceived at the time, how few clues there actually were as to what he would become.
It is tempting in 2018 to say this section is prescient when we have an American president tinkering with the tools of fascism and a socialist UK leader treading dangerously close to anti-semitism. However, that would be a mis-reading, again with hindsight, as if anything Knausgaard's point is how remote the feelings of the 1930s are from our society today (i.e. 2011 for him).
At times I got rather bogged down in this part. The retold life story of Hitler and the detailed literary, linguistic and theological theories felt like two separate books, neither of which particularly belong in this novel. Although it must be said this Goodreads review - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... - provides a fascinating theory as to why this section is actually the key to the whole novel.
I also can't help feel that others (Sebald, Tokarczuk, Enard) have done this erudite faction style of writing rather better. I found myself pining for the Knausgaard of old, and it is fitting that the section ends with a signature combination: I sat down again, poured myself some tepid coffee from the vacuum jug and lit another cigarette, as if to say 'normal service is resumed.'
The final third of the volume takes us to publication day, but soon moves forward to the most difficult reader of all - his wife Linda who only reads the book after it is pubslished. He knows there is much that is hurtful in the book, but admits that their relationship was at such a low ebb that the only reason I could write about it was that I had reached a point where I no longer had anything to lose. It made no difference if Linda read this, she could do what she liked. If she wanted to leave me, she could. I didn’t give a damn. I woke up unhappy, spent the day unhappy and went to bed unhappy.
While her short-term reaction is to be upset, it seems manageable, but the true damage is done in the medium term. Linda, who has bipolar disorder, falls into a very deep depression, one ultimately requiring hospitalisation. This final section of the novel is brutally honest, highly personal and very moving as the young family comes to terms with the situation, and I can only say I hope Linda did have the chance to read it before publication.
Overall - for the novel as a whole - a triumph.
September 21, 2024
And so ends a journey completed inside a calendar year. I undertook this (frankly stupid) challenge with Ted, when he was threatening to read Knausgaard’s My Struggle series and kept talking about it. I got annoyed with one too many mentions of Karl Ove’s name, so my response was, naturally, to threaten to join him if he didn’t stop. Here we are.
There is an inevitable sense of accomplishment when you finish this book, and that occurs on two fronts. One, you have just finished a 6-volume “book” that is 3600 pages and is autofiction. Two, you have just finished a 1150-page book that is the final, insane hurdle of an interesting race. I don’t find myself to be up to the task of doing a look back to talk about all of the books here, but I will insert some tidbits as I talk about this last volume.
The journey is interesting, as the final volume makes of the series an ouroboros–you begin to see the ramifications of the publication of the first volumes. Knausgaard talks about the impact of the “experiment” on his family and friends, alongside some juicy lawsuits and litigation threats. Constant struggles (hey!) with his wife and children as he attempts to continue the task at hand and finish despite not wanting to whatsoever, despite being scared to death of what is coming.
Hey, by the way, all of this is chopped into two pieces of bread that make up the sandwich. What is in the middle? A 450-page essay (I mean that’s a book’s length, so call it whatever you want) about Hitler. At multiple points during this part, I had to stop completely for several days. I had not asked for a regurgitation of Mein Kampf, but whether I wanted to or not, that’s what I was fucking getting. But I came to see the reasons behind its inclusion toward the end, and I can appreciate it now.
Karl Ove is a difficult person for me to like as a friend. I have had this discussion with multiple people over the past several months, and I stand by it even more upon the completion of this journey. He is insecure, deeply reliant on the impression of others to propel forward, and often far too negligently lazy in order to see the consequences of his action on anyone in his sphere. He hates himself with a burning passion, and his moaning and regurgitation of pernicious social fears contribute to a sense of resentment and disgust in my stomach. And here comes the cliche: this is all deeply human, and we all share more with Karl Ove than we are willing to admit to even ourselves. And if you just disagreed with that statement or felt like saying that I am projecting, I invite you to explore again. You’d be surprised at what you will find in your own psyche. No, not everyone is like Karl Ove. We share tendencies on a lesser level, but he takes interpersonal negativity to its absolute zenith.
At his best, Karl Ove is writing. He is writing about writing and literature and the Old Testament and Northrop Frye and Fosse and Joyce and Homer and all of the rest. He is finding room within this door-stopper to crack a joke at Jonathan Franzen’s expense. And at his best, Karl Ove is finding it within himself to put his all out there (more truth than not, even if he is in charge of bending it how he wants). I can say whatever I want to say about him, but I know that I would not have an ounce of the courage he has shown in doing what he has done here. So, ultimately, bravo and kudos.
There is an inevitable sense of accomplishment when you finish this book, and that occurs on two fronts. One, you have just finished a 6-volume “book” that is 3600 pages and is autofiction. Two, you have just finished a 1150-page book that is the final, insane hurdle of an interesting race. I don’t find myself to be up to the task of doing a look back to talk about all of the books here, but I will insert some tidbits as I talk about this last volume.
The journey is interesting, as the final volume makes of the series an ouroboros–you begin to see the ramifications of the publication of the first volumes. Knausgaard talks about the impact of the “experiment” on his family and friends, alongside some juicy lawsuits and litigation threats. Constant struggles (hey!) with his wife and children as he attempts to continue the task at hand and finish despite not wanting to whatsoever, despite being scared to death of what is coming.
Hey, by the way, all of this is chopped into two pieces of bread that make up the sandwich. What is in the middle? A 450-page essay (I mean that’s a book’s length, so call it whatever you want) about Hitler. At multiple points during this part, I had to stop completely for several days. I had not asked for a regurgitation of Mein Kampf, but whether I wanted to or not, that’s what I was fucking getting. But I came to see the reasons behind its inclusion toward the end, and I can appreciate it now.
Karl Ove is a difficult person for me to like as a friend. I have had this discussion with multiple people over the past several months, and I stand by it even more upon the completion of this journey. He is insecure, deeply reliant on the impression of others to propel forward, and often far too negligently lazy in order to see the consequences of his action on anyone in his sphere. He hates himself with a burning passion, and his moaning and regurgitation of pernicious social fears contribute to a sense of resentment and disgust in my stomach. And here comes the cliche: this is all deeply human, and we all share more with Karl Ove than we are willing to admit to even ourselves. And if you just disagreed with that statement or felt like saying that I am projecting, I invite you to explore again. You’d be surprised at what you will find in your own psyche. No, not everyone is like Karl Ove. We share tendencies on a lesser level, but he takes interpersonal negativity to its absolute zenith.
At his best, Karl Ove is writing. He is writing about writing and literature and the Old Testament and Northrop Frye and Fosse and Joyce and Homer and all of the rest. He is finding room within this door-stopper to crack a joke at Jonathan Franzen’s expense. And at his best, Karl Ove is finding it within himself to put his all out there (more truth than not, even if he is in charge of bending it how he wants). I can say whatever I want to say about him, but I know that I would not have an ounce of the courage he has shown in doing what he has done here. So, ultimately, bravo and kudos.
August 24, 2014
FINALLY managed to slug my way through vol 6 of Knausgård's My Struggle. All 1130 pages of it. And I hate that it became a chore, because when it's good, it's really good, and the final 200 pages are among the best of the entire megadump, dealing with the reactions to the previous parts of the novel cast against his wife's mental illness... but at the same time, there's that 430-page essay on Hitler and the mechanics of deindividualisation stuck in the middle like a huge, self-important weight (yes, Knausgård oddly seems more self-indulgent when he writes about Hitler than when he spends 4000 pages writing about himself) dragging the book down.
He's done with it, I'm done with it. For all its ups and downs, it was definitely a ride.
Longer and in Swedish: http://dagensbok.com/2013/10/08/en-ar...
He's done with it, I'm done with it. For all its ups and downs, it was definitely a ride.
Longer and in Swedish: http://dagensbok.com/2013/10/08/en-ar...
December 10, 2025
85th book of 2024.
Karl Ove Knausgaard is a hypocrite and a liar. Volume Six becomes a metafiction and turns My Struggle into an ouroboros. It details, in part, the fallout surrounding the publication of the first few volumes. It also details Linda Boström Knausgaard’s mental breakdown, and includes a 500-page essay on ‘I-you-we-they-it’, otherwise exploring the dehumanisation of the Jews through a biography of Hitler’s early years, an analysis of Mein Kampf (he had to!), as well as Paul Celan, Holderlin, James Joyce, William Turner, Hermann Broch, Thomas Mann . . . among numerous other writers, artists, etc. It is the most demanding book. I started it two months ago, roundabout, left it for a month as I read The Magic Mountain then returned to it. Since Monday I’ve been ill, which is something that doesn’t happen often to me, so I’ve been miserable, perhaps insufferable for my girlfriend to be around me, but it has given me the opportunity to read some 400 pages and finish at long last. At the beginning of 2024 I finished Volume Two and now we are finished.
Alan and I have been discussing Knausgaard’s character throughout our journey, a journey which we embarked upon together. In Volume Three, Alan decided that Knausgaard must be telling the truth, or a lot of the truth, because his child self in that volume is so recognisable to his adult self. Too much so to be an invented self. In this volume, he starts complicating the whole matter. I think he does this on purpose. I mentally underlined many, many sentences and passages and thought to myself, Liar! Hypocrite! Knausgaard hates to be spoken about. Knausgaard criticises Kubizek, who wrote a book about being childhood friends with Hitler. So many years had passed by the time he wrote the book about him and young Hitler, so the conversations transcribed must be invented. Knausgaard baulks — no one remembers entire conversations from twenty years ago. And yet his own books are made of fully constructed and conversations from decades ago, sometimes more than twenty. In a way, certain elements reminded me of W.G. Sebald, who, like Knausgaard, sometimes seemed to be daring the reader. Go on, believe me. They seem to prove something and then in the same breath disprove it. The whole thing feels like a game or a trick. And yet, how addictive it is. I believe My Struggle is one of the great literary achievements of this century so far. I hardly doubt it for a second. For the past year, I have spoken about him to friends, colleagues, I have lived a life parallel to his. Knausgaard’s life has made me more aware and self-conscious of my own. I’ve started to think about myself in different contexts and ways. How am I perceived, and how do I perceive others? I’ve been more critical of myself: yes, I am at times selfish, miserable, more often than not, dour, melancholic. I joked in one volume, I forget which, that it was becoming uncomfortable how similar I am to Knausgaard, by my own perceptions. Knausgaard, in turn, seems, in this volume, to suggest he is very similar to Hitler. I joked further with Alan. I am partly German, Aryan, and once wanted to be an artist. Hitler and I even share the same birthday.
It’s no surprise that Knausgaard’s writing of Hitler is bold. He openly attacks the ‘definitive’ biography of Hitler by Kershaw, claiming it is biased and foolish. Its biggest flaw, he says, is that it spins everything Hitler did as evil. Even as a sixteen year old boy. There is a passage from Kershaw he quotes that describes Hitler as being a lazy, selfish layabout. How he sits writing short stories, reading, visiting the theatre. Knausgaard asks us (dares us!) to swap the name Hitler for Rilke and see if we have the same opinions. So, Knausgaard spends his time defending young Hitler, who, at fourteen years old, sixteen years old, a child, was not evil. The biography, for this reason, was fascinating. A completely fresh look at Hitler, not as a monster, but as a regular boy, who was abused and had high aspirations. A budding artist. Not, we may think, so dissimilar to Knausgaard himself, who lived in fear of his own father and dreamed of being an artist. The essay however, at around 500 pages, was taxing. The volume would get 4-stars, but its 5-star is a reflection of the overall feeling, not only of the volume itself but its position, its stance and the way in which it concludes the series.
The beginning and ending are top-form Knausgaard. The mundane is exploded into something more. Something both genuine and profound. The act of putting your children to bed, making coffee in the morning, finding an hour to write. Once again the reader is invited into the private world of a family, to eavesdrop, observe. The whole thing works because it exploits the nosiness of human nature. As when I finished Proust, I put the book down and felt something like relief, yes, a kind of weightlessness, perhaps even unreality. I could feel the book, all six volumes, sinking into me, finding the places they will reside. Everything we read is in us, most of the time dormant, but part of our makeup. Alan and I decided we probably wouldn’t want to be friends with Knausgaard. But a pint? To sit down with a tall glass of lager and talk to him about this and that? That is hard to refuse.
Karl Ove Knausgaard is a hypocrite and a liar. Volume Six becomes a metafiction and turns My Struggle into an ouroboros. It details, in part, the fallout surrounding the publication of the first few volumes. It also details Linda Boström Knausgaard’s mental breakdown, and includes a 500-page essay on ‘I-you-we-they-it’, otherwise exploring the dehumanisation of the Jews through a biography of Hitler’s early years, an analysis of Mein Kampf (he had to!), as well as Paul Celan, Holderlin, James Joyce, William Turner, Hermann Broch, Thomas Mann . . . among numerous other writers, artists, etc. It is the most demanding book. I started it two months ago, roundabout, left it for a month as I read The Magic Mountain then returned to it. Since Monday I’ve been ill, which is something that doesn’t happen often to me, so I’ve been miserable, perhaps insufferable for my girlfriend to be around me, but it has given me the opportunity to read some 400 pages and finish at long last. At the beginning of 2024 I finished Volume Two and now we are finished.
Alan and I have been discussing Knausgaard’s character throughout our journey, a journey which we embarked upon together. In Volume Three, Alan decided that Knausgaard must be telling the truth, or a lot of the truth, because his child self in that volume is so recognisable to his adult self. Too much so to be an invented self. In this volume, he starts complicating the whole matter. I think he does this on purpose. I mentally underlined many, many sentences and passages and thought to myself, Liar! Hypocrite! Knausgaard hates to be spoken about. Knausgaard criticises Kubizek, who wrote a book about being childhood friends with Hitler. So many years had passed by the time he wrote the book about him and young Hitler, so the conversations transcribed must be invented. Knausgaard baulks — no one remembers entire conversations from twenty years ago. And yet his own books are made of fully constructed and conversations from decades ago, sometimes more than twenty. In a way, certain elements reminded me of W.G. Sebald, who, like Knausgaard, sometimes seemed to be daring the reader. Go on, believe me. They seem to prove something and then in the same breath disprove it. The whole thing feels like a game or a trick. And yet, how addictive it is. I believe My Struggle is one of the great literary achievements of this century so far. I hardly doubt it for a second. For the past year, I have spoken about him to friends, colleagues, I have lived a life parallel to his. Knausgaard’s life has made me more aware and self-conscious of my own. I’ve started to think about myself in different contexts and ways. How am I perceived, and how do I perceive others? I’ve been more critical of myself: yes, I am at times selfish, miserable, more often than not, dour, melancholic. I joked in one volume, I forget which, that it was becoming uncomfortable how similar I am to Knausgaard, by my own perceptions. Knausgaard, in turn, seems, in this volume, to suggest he is very similar to Hitler. I joked further with Alan. I am partly German, Aryan, and once wanted to be an artist. Hitler and I even share the same birthday.
It’s no surprise that Knausgaard’s writing of Hitler is bold. He openly attacks the ‘definitive’ biography of Hitler by Kershaw, claiming it is biased and foolish. Its biggest flaw, he says, is that it spins everything Hitler did as evil. Even as a sixteen year old boy. There is a passage from Kershaw he quotes that describes Hitler as being a lazy, selfish layabout. How he sits writing short stories, reading, visiting the theatre. Knausgaard asks us (dares us!) to swap the name Hitler for Rilke and see if we have the same opinions. So, Knausgaard spends his time defending young Hitler, who, at fourteen years old, sixteen years old, a child, was not evil. The biography, for this reason, was fascinating. A completely fresh look at Hitler, not as a monster, but as a regular boy, who was abused and had high aspirations. A budding artist. Not, we may think, so dissimilar to Knausgaard himself, who lived in fear of his own father and dreamed of being an artist. The essay however, at around 500 pages, was taxing. The volume would get 4-stars, but its 5-star is a reflection of the overall feeling, not only of the volume itself but its position, its stance and the way in which it concludes the series.
The beginning and ending are top-form Knausgaard. The mundane is exploded into something more. Something both genuine and profound. The act of putting your children to bed, making coffee in the morning, finding an hour to write. Once again the reader is invited into the private world of a family, to eavesdrop, observe. The whole thing works because it exploits the nosiness of human nature. As when I finished Proust, I put the book down and felt something like relief, yes, a kind of weightlessness, perhaps even unreality. I could feel the book, all six volumes, sinking into me, finding the places they will reside. Everything we read is in us, most of the time dormant, but part of our makeup. Alan and I decided we probably wouldn’t want to be friends with Knausgaard. But a pint? To sit down with a tall glass of lager and talk to him about this and that? That is hard to refuse.
October 22, 2018
I'm free.
January 3, 2019
This final book of “My struggle” was supposed to be a culmination of the whole series. Instead for me it was pretty much anticlimax and the point when his struggle decisively felt like my own struggle with this book. I suppose, this could be counted as an achievement of this opus.
The purpose of this final instalment was to explain why he went alone with the project at the first place (to write a book about himself more or less from the birth to the age of 40) and to use it as a platform to deal with the anger expressed by some real people he wrote in the book about and share the reactions of others. So it is kind of a metafictional work. And initially i found the idea interesting. But the problem was it went much further and has fallen apart. Instead, i was reading 3 separate books packaged in a single volume: the first one was more or less as I summarised above; the second was 400 pages plus essay and the third was details of his wife’s depressive and manic episode, caused, at least to some extent, by this project and his lack of sensitivity to her mental fragility. So first part was Knausgaard as usual in a quite good form. But the rest of the book I found simply intolerable (apart from 50 pages closed reading of Celan’s poem and brief family holiday on Canaries). The essay in the middle is like a heavy brick thrown into a lively stream and blocking it for good.
What I liked about his work (especially book 2) is his ability to unexpectedly switch between a mundane detail and thinking about something else, more profound, like a memory or a book. It feels very relatable, in a way how our brain works. And I was happy to forgive the dullness of the prose and repetitiveness of his misusing for such moments. Though one have to be really patient with him. I liked also when he talked about the books he read. It would even affect his writing style. For a few pages he would write in a style Hamsun, or Joyce or whoever he would be talking about. I thought I would like to read his book reviews or essays about literature (That is before I came to face the essay here ). In this book he muses that a writer is afraid to be unoriginal. Well, in his case, there is nothing particular original or creative about either this book or any other books in the series, apart from these sparkling switches between the mundane and a thought. And when this disappears, only dullness stays.
The above would summarise my impression overall. Initially, I thought even not to write anything more about this book. But I invested almost 2 weeks reading it, and it seemed kind of defeatist just to give up. So below just more details which were the basis for my impression.
Part 1.
The first part was lively. He was called by his uncle a lier for the story he wrote in Book 1 about the death of his father and its aftermath. Knausgaard starts doubting himself whether he wrote the total truth and he does not remember some details. And we as readers are presented with his internal commotion and desire to reconcile his actions with social morality or reject the morality as it is. Though, it was presented like hyper honest struggle, I could not got rid off a feeling that it was am element of craftiness in it. He said in the book 1 that his grandma was drinking with his dad and after his death. His uncle opposed it. And for me it was crucial detail. As this the thing which you would not be able to forget. So was grandmother as he described her, desperate for a drink and out of herself completely loosing her mind or totally different? That is where for me the success and authenticity of this project lies. He should know the answer and he could clear it very quickly in this book, if he wishes to do so. But he avoids it. Of course, there is always the excuse this being a “novel”. But that left slightly uneasy impression on me.
For the rest, the writing is penetrated by the fragile mixture of vanity and insecurity which is his trademark. The new features in this book were his sudden affection with the lists. We’ve been treated to quite a few of them starting from the list of things to buy in supermarket. He also decides to repeat the ideas of basic literary theory of signals: what we buy tells who we are etc. Not sure why we need it here, but ok i guess. The strongest element was his conversations with his friend, Geir, who visited. Maybe he read Socrates while writing as they reminded me Socrates’s dialogues.
The writing is as usual of a varied quality. We’ve been treated for example with such a sentence: “The glassy bubbly liquid fizzing faintly settled itself in the transparent receptacle, some of the bubbles released from the surface leaping four, five centimetre in the air, visible in the light of the sun which made them sparkle. “ I believe this is referring to a glass of mineral water. I’ve forgotten exactly what it was but I strongly do not wish to come back to the book to confirm it. Also we encounter truisms like that: “It is through the feelings we connect to each other and it is the feelings which are good and bad, not the days.”
However, overall i found it the most pleasant part in Knausgaard's kind of way. And, if he would finish the project with it, I would be more than satisfied. But he had not not done so.
Part 2.
It starts not bad. He thinks about the nature of names and why they are important which leads him to Paul Celan and his poem Stretta ("Engführung”). He already used Celan in the book 5 while reading "Todesfuge" ("Fugue of Death") to a girl. But here, he subjects Stretta to a “lemon squeeze” reading trying to analyse it word by word. It takes him 50 pages. One need to have a patience, as his analysis could be too detailed and amateur, but readable nevertheless. And the poem is so beautiful that it focuses one’s attention.
But then, it seems Knausgaard falls the victim of Godwin's law. (or Godwin's rule of Hitler analogies is an Internet adage asserting that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1"; that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or his deeds, the point at which effectively the discussion or thread often ends.)) The definition is taken from Wiki. We do not have an internet discussion here, but we certainly have the case of the law.
He decides to read Mein Kampf and he takes us with him. But it is not his usual mention and impression - it goes on and on. He moves to Hitler’s youth, Weimar republic, Mein Kampf and other books about the period. And this part is awful on two main levels. Firstly, it is just too long, repetitive, badly structured. The excerpts from his sources, including Mein Kampf are too long, often take almost a page while his original ideas (which are actually not very original) take much less space. I felt really exhausted and angry that I am subjected to reading Mein Kampf in proxy while I assumed I read about Knausgard. And for the first 300 hundred pages I did not know why i was subjected to it. The musings about Hitler’s youth are intermingled with the long and not very good recounts of Bible stories and some sociology of dubious quality about the state of working class in Austria and in England (!). The England bit is presented based upon the works of Marx and Jack London visiting East London. Knausgard concludes that the condition of working class in England did not change materially between 1850 and 1910s. I seriously doubt it is correct. But it is almost beyond the point as it drowns in many other statements, excepts and repetitions. All of it lacks the coherence and the clarity of arguments.
Secondly, the content. He critises Ian Kershaw, the author of Hitler’s authoritative biography for the lack of empathy based upon a different reading of memories of a friend of Hitler’s youth. That would be fair enough I guess. It is his point of view. Right. But why? And it took me almost 400 pages to come across this:
“We are opposed, and rightly so, to everything he stood for. Hitler is our antithesis. But only in respect of what he did, not in terms of the person he was. In that, he was like us. Hitler’s youth resembles my own, his remote infatuation, his desperate desire to be someone, to rise above the self, his love for his mother, his hatred of his father, his use of art as a space of great emotions in which the I could be erased. His problems forming relationships with others, his elevation of women and his anxiety in their company, his chastity, his yearning for purity. When I watch him on film, he awakens the same feelings in me as my father once did. In that too there is likeness. He represented conservative middle-classness in so many respects, and this too I know, it is the voice, trembling with indignation, that says you are not good enough. He also represents the defiance of conservative middle-class values, the young lad sleeping until mid-morning, refusing to look for a job, wishing instead to write or paint, because he is something more and better than the others. He was the one who opened a we and said you are one of us, and he was the one who closed a we and said you are one of them. But above all he was the man who emerged from the bunker, with the world in flames and millions of people dead as a result of his volition, to greet a line of young boys, his hands shaking from sickness, and there, in a fleeting gleam of his eyes, revealed something warm and kind, his soul. He was a small person, but so are we all. He must not be judged for what he was, but for what he did. What he did, however, he did not do alone. It was done by a we, that we was put under pressure, it gave way and something collapsed.”
So Hitler must not be judged for what he was as Knausgard identifies with a lot of threats Hitler possessed in his youth. And that he went on and organised the humanity killing machine is just circumstances and he did not do it alone. Right. He ‘revealed something warm and kind. his soul.” Right!
And it goes on in other place:
“Nor was Hitler a fanatical militaristic theatre director enforcing his will on the people; the strings he played were genuine, the emotions he aroused were in everyone. Anyone who has seen footage of the rallies of Hitlers Germany knows what feelings they evoke, the sheer might of the uniformed, I less community the strength of the collective and oh how one long to be a part of such a we. Who would not wish to be a part of something’s greater that the self. Who would not wish to feel their life be meaningful? Who would not wish to have something to die for?”
I would not wish. I know that for sure. And many other people would not wish as well. I could understand the humanising Hitler this way. I understand that he has not done it alone. But i do not agree that everyone wants to be “part of something greater than himself” through hatred. And, more to the point, how is it relevant to the morality or the lack of it in terms of exposing one’s own life and one's family in a novel?
And another quote. He feels a part of Norwegian nation after Breivik’s terrorist act:
“How could I feel such strong sense of belonging? And yet the feelings were quite incontestable, and swept everything else aside during the time of the tragedy. Only afterwards did I realise that these must have been the same forces the enormous forces that reside within the we that came over the German people in 1930.” Really? So the feeling grieve for innocent victims of the right-wing fanatic is the same as the hatred of Jews and the impact of nation's humiliation, true or imagined? It is a pure solipsism in my view.
I could continue quoting form that huge pile of someone’s else writing, Knausgaard’s own confusing thoughts ranging from Hitler was deranged individual to Hitler was just the victim of circumstances. But reading it was like raking through the pile of garbage and now writing about it feels the same. Even if I do not agree with his argument, I would appreciate it more, if it would be clearly and elegantly set out. But it is not.
Part 3
I do not have much to say about this bit apart from reading it sometimes felt like watching at someone torturing a kitten. I am not surprised that Karl Ove and Linda separated since then. I do not think this part has added anything to what I’ve already known from the book 2. And it was a borderline misery memoir here.
Josipovici, an english modernist, which I’ve discovered this year, says: ‘The world is being swallowed up in superficiality. And the artists and intellectuals react to this by seeking profundity. When they grow tired of profundity they play ironically with superficiality. But they are wrong on both counts. They should not seek the depths and they should not seek the surfaces they should seek the truth. ‘ That what I was thinking reading Knausgaard before. But at the same time, I never could totally avoid a feeling angrily summarised by Daša Drndic: “absolutely intolerable unless the person reading them is inwardly riddled with holes, full of stale air, so the cultivation of perverse voyeuristic instincts serves to fill up that inner void” But it was not that much voyeurism from my side as persistent exhibitionism from the writer. I know it takes two to tango, but I felt sometimes exploited and left without choice unless to throw the book out of the window!
Overall, if you want to try him, I would recommend Book 1 and Book 2. The rest does not worth it, imho.
The purpose of this final instalment was to explain why he went alone with the project at the first place (to write a book about himself more or less from the birth to the age of 40) and to use it as a platform to deal with the anger expressed by some real people he wrote in the book about and share the reactions of others. So it is kind of a metafictional work. And initially i found the idea interesting. But the problem was it went much further and has fallen apart. Instead, i was reading 3 separate books packaged in a single volume: the first one was more or less as I summarised above; the second was 400 pages plus essay and the third was details of his wife’s depressive and manic episode, caused, at least to some extent, by this project and his lack of sensitivity to her mental fragility. So first part was Knausgaard as usual in a quite good form. But the rest of the book I found simply intolerable (apart from 50 pages closed reading of Celan’s poem and brief family holiday on Canaries). The essay in the middle is like a heavy brick thrown into a lively stream and blocking it for good.
What I liked about his work (especially book 2) is his ability to unexpectedly switch between a mundane detail and thinking about something else, more profound, like a memory or a book. It feels very relatable, in a way how our brain works. And I was happy to forgive the dullness of the prose and repetitiveness of his misusing for such moments. Though one have to be really patient with him. I liked also when he talked about the books he read. It would even affect his writing style. For a few pages he would write in a style Hamsun, or Joyce or whoever he would be talking about. I thought I would like to read his book reviews or essays about literature (That is before I came to face the essay here ). In this book he muses that a writer is afraid to be unoriginal. Well, in his case, there is nothing particular original or creative about either this book or any other books in the series, apart from these sparkling switches between the mundane and a thought. And when this disappears, only dullness stays.
The above would summarise my impression overall. Initially, I thought even not to write anything more about this book. But I invested almost 2 weeks reading it, and it seemed kind of defeatist just to give up. So below just more details which were the basis for my impression.
Part 1.
The first part was lively. He was called by his uncle a lier for the story he wrote in Book 1 about the death of his father and its aftermath. Knausgaard starts doubting himself whether he wrote the total truth and he does not remember some details. And we as readers are presented with his internal commotion and desire to reconcile his actions with social morality or reject the morality as it is. Though, it was presented like hyper honest struggle, I could not got rid off a feeling that it was am element of craftiness in it. He said in the book 1 that his grandma was drinking with his dad and after his death. His uncle opposed it. And for me it was crucial detail. As this the thing which you would not be able to forget. So was grandmother as he described her, desperate for a drink and out of herself completely loosing her mind or totally different? That is where for me the success and authenticity of this project lies. He should know the answer and he could clear it very quickly in this book, if he wishes to do so. But he avoids it. Of course, there is always the excuse this being a “novel”. But that left slightly uneasy impression on me.
For the rest, the writing is penetrated by the fragile mixture of vanity and insecurity which is his trademark. The new features in this book were his sudden affection with the lists. We’ve been treated to quite a few of them starting from the list of things to buy in supermarket. He also decides to repeat the ideas of basic literary theory of signals: what we buy tells who we are etc. Not sure why we need it here, but ok i guess. The strongest element was his conversations with his friend, Geir, who visited. Maybe he read Socrates while writing as they reminded me Socrates’s dialogues.
The writing is as usual of a varied quality. We’ve been treated for example with such a sentence: “The glassy bubbly liquid fizzing faintly settled itself in the transparent receptacle, some of the bubbles released from the surface leaping four, five centimetre in the air, visible in the light of the sun which made them sparkle. “ I believe this is referring to a glass of mineral water. I’ve forgotten exactly what it was but I strongly do not wish to come back to the book to confirm it. Also we encounter truisms like that: “It is through the feelings we connect to each other and it is the feelings which are good and bad, not the days.”
However, overall i found it the most pleasant part in Knausgaard's kind of way. And, if he would finish the project with it, I would be more than satisfied. But he had not not done so.
Part 2.
It starts not bad. He thinks about the nature of names and why they are important which leads him to Paul Celan and his poem Stretta ("Engführung”). He already used Celan in the book 5 while reading "Todesfuge" ("Fugue of Death") to a girl. But here, he subjects Stretta to a “lemon squeeze” reading trying to analyse it word by word. It takes him 50 pages. One need to have a patience, as his analysis could be too detailed and amateur, but readable nevertheless. And the poem is so beautiful that it focuses one’s attention.
But then, it seems Knausgaard falls the victim of Godwin's law. (or Godwin's rule of Hitler analogies is an Internet adage asserting that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1"; that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or his deeds, the point at which effectively the discussion or thread often ends.)) The definition is taken from Wiki. We do not have an internet discussion here, but we certainly have the case of the law.
He decides to read Mein Kampf and he takes us with him. But it is not his usual mention and impression - it goes on and on. He moves to Hitler’s youth, Weimar republic, Mein Kampf and other books about the period. And this part is awful on two main levels. Firstly, it is just too long, repetitive, badly structured. The excerpts from his sources, including Mein Kampf are too long, often take almost a page while his original ideas (which are actually not very original) take much less space. I felt really exhausted and angry that I am subjected to reading Mein Kampf in proxy while I assumed I read about Knausgard. And for the first 300 hundred pages I did not know why i was subjected to it. The musings about Hitler’s youth are intermingled with the long and not very good recounts of Bible stories and some sociology of dubious quality about the state of working class in Austria and in England (!). The England bit is presented based upon the works of Marx and Jack London visiting East London. Knausgard concludes that the condition of working class in England did not change materially between 1850 and 1910s. I seriously doubt it is correct. But it is almost beyond the point as it drowns in many other statements, excepts and repetitions. All of it lacks the coherence and the clarity of arguments.
Secondly, the content. He critises Ian Kershaw, the author of Hitler’s authoritative biography for the lack of empathy based upon a different reading of memories of a friend of Hitler’s youth. That would be fair enough I guess. It is his point of view. Right. But why? And it took me almost 400 pages to come across this:
“We are opposed, and rightly so, to everything he stood for. Hitler is our antithesis. But only in respect of what he did, not in terms of the person he was. In that, he was like us. Hitler’s youth resembles my own, his remote infatuation, his desperate desire to be someone, to rise above the self, his love for his mother, his hatred of his father, his use of art as a space of great emotions in which the I could be erased. His problems forming relationships with others, his elevation of women and his anxiety in their company, his chastity, his yearning for purity. When I watch him on film, he awakens the same feelings in me as my father once did. In that too there is likeness. He represented conservative middle-classness in so many respects, and this too I know, it is the voice, trembling with indignation, that says you are not good enough. He also represents the defiance of conservative middle-class values, the young lad sleeping until mid-morning, refusing to look for a job, wishing instead to write or paint, because he is something more and better than the others. He was the one who opened a we and said you are one of us, and he was the one who closed a we and said you are one of them. But above all he was the man who emerged from the bunker, with the world in flames and millions of people dead as a result of his volition, to greet a line of young boys, his hands shaking from sickness, and there, in a fleeting gleam of his eyes, revealed something warm and kind, his soul. He was a small person, but so are we all. He must not be judged for what he was, but for what he did. What he did, however, he did not do alone. It was done by a we, that we was put under pressure, it gave way and something collapsed.”
So Hitler must not be judged for what he was as Knausgard identifies with a lot of threats Hitler possessed in his youth. And that he went on and organised the humanity killing machine is just circumstances and he did not do it alone. Right. He ‘revealed something warm and kind. his soul.” Right!
And it goes on in other place:
“Nor was Hitler a fanatical militaristic theatre director enforcing his will on the people; the strings he played were genuine, the emotions he aroused were in everyone. Anyone who has seen footage of the rallies of Hitlers Germany knows what feelings they evoke, the sheer might of the uniformed, I less community the strength of the collective and oh how one long to be a part of such a we. Who would not wish to be a part of something’s greater that the self. Who would not wish to feel their life be meaningful? Who would not wish to have something to die for?”
I would not wish. I know that for sure. And many other people would not wish as well. I could understand the humanising Hitler this way. I understand that he has not done it alone. But i do not agree that everyone wants to be “part of something greater than himself” through hatred. And, more to the point, how is it relevant to the morality or the lack of it in terms of exposing one’s own life and one's family in a novel?
And another quote. He feels a part of Norwegian nation after Breivik’s terrorist act:
“How could I feel such strong sense of belonging? And yet the feelings were quite incontestable, and swept everything else aside during the time of the tragedy. Only afterwards did I realise that these must have been the same forces the enormous forces that reside within the we that came over the German people in 1930.” Really? So the feeling grieve for innocent victims of the right-wing fanatic is the same as the hatred of Jews and the impact of nation's humiliation, true or imagined? It is a pure solipsism in my view.
I could continue quoting form that huge pile of someone’s else writing, Knausgaard’s own confusing thoughts ranging from Hitler was deranged individual to Hitler was just the victim of circumstances. But reading it was like raking through the pile of garbage and now writing about it feels the same. Even if I do not agree with his argument, I would appreciate it more, if it would be clearly and elegantly set out. But it is not.
Part 3
I do not have much to say about this bit apart from reading it sometimes felt like watching at someone torturing a kitten. I am not surprised that Karl Ove and Linda separated since then. I do not think this part has added anything to what I’ve already known from the book 2. And it was a borderline misery memoir here.
Josipovici, an english modernist, which I’ve discovered this year, says: ‘The world is being swallowed up in superficiality. And the artists and intellectuals react to this by seeking profundity. When they grow tired of profundity they play ironically with superficiality. But they are wrong on both counts. They should not seek the depths and they should not seek the surfaces they should seek the truth. ‘ That what I was thinking reading Knausgaard before. But at the same time, I never could totally avoid a feeling angrily summarised by Daša Drndic: “absolutely intolerable unless the person reading them is inwardly riddled with holes, full of stale air, so the cultivation of perverse voyeuristic instincts serves to fill up that inner void” But it was not that much voyeurism from my side as persistent exhibitionism from the writer. I know it takes two to tango, but I felt sometimes exploited and left without choice unless to throw the book out of the window!
Overall, if you want to try him, I would recommend Book 1 and Book 2. The rest does not worth it, imho.
October 2, 2018
My rating has to be extended to the entire endeavor itself, the stones required for such a project. Do I at this moment feel manipulated? Possibly. If Hamlet is indeed about Bosnia and AIDS (as was once asserted in a brilliant Branagh satire) then Knausgård and his Min kamp is a meditation on Trump/Erdogan/Abe, Brexit and #MeToo.
There are astonishing readings of Paul Celan and Hitler here, much more on the latter than one would assume. This discursive turn arrives when one is accustomed to something different. The My Struggle project isn't Proust, though the author is most aware and lards matters with the stated appreciation thereof. There is also a questionable diary of his wife's mental illness: things went suddenly Through A Glass Darkly. (that analogy is interesting with Bergman's relationship to Linda)
I read most of this on a mountain in Tennessee, Sierra Nevada was at hand. Quite a bit. Do I want to plumb further, perhaps consider Anne Sexton and Kawabata in this light? Do the Kavanaugh hearings have a bearing on ontology? My wife and I discussed a host of aspects regarding the meta-confession. I feel the better for such. I just spent a month reading Karl Ove. Let's see what daylight brings.
There are astonishing readings of Paul Celan and Hitler here, much more on the latter than one would assume. This discursive turn arrives when one is accustomed to something different. The My Struggle project isn't Proust, though the author is most aware and lards matters with the stated appreciation thereof. There is also a questionable diary of his wife's mental illness: things went suddenly Through A Glass Darkly. (that analogy is interesting with Bergman's relationship to Linda)
I read most of this on a mountain in Tennessee, Sierra Nevada was at hand. Quite a bit. Do I want to plumb further, perhaps consider Anne Sexton and Kawabata in this light? Do the Kavanaugh hearings have a bearing on ontology? My wife and I discussed a host of aspects regarding the meta-confession. I feel the better for such. I just spent a month reading Karl Ove. Let's see what daylight brings.
June 6, 2019
I know Karl Ove Knausgaard better than I know anyone else. Better than my husband, child, parents, brother, friends or colleagues. Perhaps even better than my dog, because who knows, maybe she has thoughts going on inside her small spaniel head that I’ll never know. But Karl Ove has told me everything. I know how he feels about each and every family member, friends present and past. I know the order in which he likes to stack a dishwasher, and I know about (and share) his belief that driving is essentially a death game. I know the brand of detergent he uses to clean out the bath before his kids get in it every night and it has left me wondering if I am doing something wrong. I share his scorn for what has to be the Stokke Xplory stroller: “The buggy was the ridiculous type with a thin stalk-like rod going from the wheels which the basket-seat with the child rested on” (A Man in Love). I know about the time he took a dump out of a tree and I know each and every step he took one New Year’s Eve in the mid-1980s. I know about every girl he has felt a mild or strong attraction to and I know some things about Karl Ove that are so mortifying, I can’t bring myself to write them. I know how his first marriage ended and his second marriage began. I know the exact order in which he cleaned his grandmother’s putrid home after his father had died there, and the cleaning products he used. Strangely, I also know a lot about what he thinks about Hitler. I know all this because Knausgaard has told me, and anyone else who has the stamina, in over 3,600 pages of meticulously detailed text and now I’m not sure that I’ll ever be the same.
After reading the first book in the My Struggle series over the new year (A Death in the Family, previously reviewed), I needed the rest of the series, as Zadie Smith has said, like crack. What I hadn’t quite realised is how immersive the experience would be. I have spent six months snatching moments intended for something else to spend with Karl Ove, whether he was writing about his first years in Sweden (A Man in Love), his childhood and early teenage years in Tromøya (Boyhood Island), setting off at age 18 to the remote north of Norway to teach in a school (Dancing in the Dark), his years as a student, the publication of his first book and his first marriage in Bergen (Some Rain Must Fall) and finally, the impact of the publication of the preceding books (The End). While the subsequent books perhaps don’t quite match the level of detail found in Book One, as a reader Knausgaard is ever-present with you. From almost every experience, there is something to relate to, and because of his brutal honesty, we are constantly worried about how these books are going to affect those that appear in it when they end up in the world.
In this way, to read Knausgaard is to live your own life more intensely. For the last six months, whenever I have been stuck with my own thoughts, I begin to describe every mundane action in Karl Ove’s exacting detail, from getting my daughter ready for school in the morning to stacking the dishwasher at night. Particularly for parents of young children, reading Knausgaard becomes an inherently meta experience. Writing this review, I have stolen moments while ostensibly watching my daughter’s swimming lesson, while she played in Småland at IKEA, and composed parts of it in my head while doing laps in the outdoor pool. (While Knausgaard can drink, smoke and write me under the table, I can smugly say that his idea of a decent distance and speed at which to swim are decidedly, well, Scandinavian).
These books are about everything, but they are especially about family. Karl Ove’s father may be buried in Book One but his shadow hangs over the rest of the books, particularly Boyhood Island (Book Three), which is the story of Karl Ove’s childhood on the island of Tromøya. This book takes a different narrative approach to the others, in that is told almost completely chronologically, with none of the present day flash-forwards to contrast with the past events. He continues to describe his life in painstaking detail, but with a childish lens so that Knausgaard does not make the explicit link between his father’s emotional, verbal and physical abuse and anything that comes after. Of course Knausgaard’s father continues to loom large in this book, but it is also a nostalgic depiction of a time when children could be gone for hours without parents worrying, free to defecate out of trees, explore the local tip and drop rocks onto cars. (Heaven forbid that the young Karl Ove should lose a sock or eat two apples in one day though-- both crimes that his father went ballistic over).
Knausgaard’s mother is perhaps the only under-explored character in the books and this particularly notable in Book Three. She is there in the background of Karl Ove and Yngve’s childhood but her presence fades in the face of the boys’ terror of their father and his horrible treatment of them. Karl Ove says this quite directly: “She was always there, I know she was, but I just can’t remember it” (Boyhood Island). The mystery about his mother, Sissel, is that she tolerated her husband’s treatment of her sons and stayed with him for so many years. Even when they finally divorce, the parents seem quite neutral about it, accepting their separation as the natural progression of something that has run its course. This is not something that Karl Ove explores in depth, and while everyone else in Knausgaard’s life has been subjected to a warts-and-all (mostly warts in some cases) analysis, Sissel largely escapes this lens. She is consistently presented as loving and well-meaning, and Karl Ove defends her vigorously in the face of any criticism from Linda. In Book Six he writes that he had asked his mother not to read Book Three, fearing that she would be hurt by what she would find there. The most damning thing he writes about Sissel is in one of the book’s only breaks from chronological narrative, where he questions whether Sissel’s inaction amounted to enablement: “The question is whether she was not responsible for exposing us to him over so many years, a man we were afraid of, always, at all times. The question is whether it is enough to be a counterbalance to the darkness” (Boyhood Island).
Linda, by contrast, continues to be examined with a lens so critical that as readers, we wonder whether it’s ethical to be reading these books. After a passionate yet already tumultuous love affair that begins almost immediately upon his arrival in Sweden at the start of Book Two (and comes hot on the heels of his sudden and mysterious departure from first wife Tonje in Bergen), Karl Ove quickly begins to fall out of love, or at least into annoyance, with Linda. He knows that she suffers from bipolar disorder and was hospitalised for a year before they got together, but Karl Ove’s belief is that this is behind her and he does not ever really try to understand her limitations or how her illness may affect her. He finds her dreams and plans to be childish and is constantly resentful about her lack of attention to practical matters. In Linda’s mind she is doing most of the work that comes with having a large family but Karl Ove’s perspective is that he is doing all of the housework, most of the child-rearing and all of the bread-winning. He continues to maintain this perspective well into Book Six, where we can see disaster looming because the first book in the series is about to be published. Every person mentioned in the book has received an advance copy for approval, and yet Linda, who is the most negatively-portrayed character other than Karl Ove’s deceased father, is yet to sight the manuscript. It appears that he does not think her opinion is worth soliciting, that the books will be published regardless of what she thinks and that, like their children, she is too immature to have a say. Yet Linda is not unaware of this:
‘There’s so much contempt in you,’ she said. ‘I know you look down on me.’
‘Look down on you? I certainly do not!’ I said.
‘Yes, you do. You think I do too little. I whinge all the time. I’m not independent enough. You’re sick of this life of ours. And of me. You never tell me I’m beautiful anymore. Actually I don’t mean anything to you. I’m just someone you live with who happens to be the mother of your children.’ (The End)
It takes a major crisis for Karl Ove to realise what he has asked Linda to do. As the deadline for completing the final book is looming, Linda suffers a major depressive episode and is hospitalised. Karl Ove has to drop everything and devote himself to the children-- particularly Vanja, who is about to start school. He realises, too late, that Linda’s dreams are part of who she is and that by showing Linda (and the rest of the world) that those dreams are not shared with him, he is damaging her sense of self. Knausgaard does not explicitly address whether he believes the books led directly to Linda’s breakdown or not, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that they couldn’t have helped.
In the early books, Knausgaard’s descriptions of parenting are just as brutal as his depictions of Linda, and ring horribly true for anyone but the most unnaturally devoted parents. Let’s face it, our struggle to keep our own identity whilst being constantly present, emotionally and physically, for our children is a near-impossible task (and this is before you have added in other societal demands such as paid work, friendships, family relationships and so on). Karl Ove does not handle this struggle well, particularly in the early years of having children. He sees his children as a group of chore-creating creatures, whose daily requirements have to be got through with as little effort as possible. In the first book, he describes shaking his toddlers and shouting with rage. As the children become older and as the series progresses, however, there is a subtle shift in his attitude. The children begin to show their own personalities and Karl Ove begins to identify with them as people. He stops shouting and shaking, and tries to understand them. By Book Six, his children still take up all his time but he is much happier to spend his time in this way. By contrast, his writing becomes a drag, with looming deadlines and constant ramifications from the books that have already been published. Whereas earlier, Karl Ove gave no thought to the impact the books would have on his children, by the end of Book Six, he writes, “This book has hurt everyone around me, it has hurt me, and in a few years, when they are old enough to read it, it will hurt my children.” (Part Nine, The End). He also knows, and fears, that his earlier behaviour will have ramifications:
“The way I had behaved during the first three or four years of having children, when, much too often, I took out my frustrations on them, must have affected their self-esteem, the one thing in them you, as a parent, mustn’t fuck up. I had got out of this, it hardly ever happened any more, we never argued in front of them now and I never lost my temper, but I said a silent prayer almost every day that this hadn’t left any marks, that what I had done wasn’t beyond redress.”
Karl Ove has tried not to be his father and he does seem to be succeeding at this on a day-to-day level. How his children will react when they come to read the books is another matter. It will be very challenging for Vanja, Heidi, John and Anne to read how oppressive their father found their early years, but these books are also an amazing account of their father’s life that no-one else has. They will never have to wonder what their father was really like, what he really thought, what he really did. So many of us never know our parents as people, or have insight into their true thoughts. In this way, Karl Ove has given his children an incredible, if burdensome, gift. When they come to read the books, they will almost definitely need therapy, but they will never have to say that they didn’t know their father.
By the end of Book Six, we feel that we know everything. (We also know 450 pages of information about Hitler, which I could have done without.) No stone is left unturned. While in Books One and Two we are left wondering if we will ever know what happens with Tonje, at the end of Book Five, we find out. We do not understand why Karl Ove never calls his father by his name, but when we learn of the fuss wrought by his uncle Gunnar in Book Six, we finally understand (and in one of the most moving passages of the series, towards the very end of Book Six we do in fact find out his father’s name). As the publication of the books in Norway catches up to the time at which Karl Ove is writing, readers feel they know him too. A woman approaches Karl Ove at an airport in Norway:
‘How big Vanja and Heidi are!’ she said, and laughed.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘But I won’t pester you any more. Have a good journey home. I suppose you’re going to Malmö, aren’t you?’
I nodded.
‘Bye,’ I said with a smile.
Vanja looked up at me.
‘Do you know her, dad?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Never seen her before.’
‘But how did she know who we were?’ she said.
‘I’ve written a book about us.’ I said.
‘You’ve written a book about us?’ she said.
‘Yes,’
‘What’s in it?’
‘All sorts of strange things,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to read it when you’re bigger.’ (The End)
It must be such a strange life for Karl Ove Knausgaard now. He is recognised everywhere (he has a very recognisable face, and a very unusual name, even in Norway). Everyone who has read his books feels that they know him intimately, and yet he is a very private person who probably has nothing to say to any of us. His marriage to Linda has ended, but not before (astonishingly in the circumstances) they had a fourth child together. He says at the end of Book Six that he is no longer a writer, but he has to speak about his writing all the time.
It seems trite to say that these books are life-changing, but that is what they are. They hold up a mirror to our own lives, as if to say, “What are you doing? How are you doing it? Why?” at every moment of every day. Knausgaard’s struggle is no longer just his to bear. He has passed it on to his readers. And while not all of us, thankfully, are brave enough to do what Knausgaard has done, at least we should be brave enough to read him.
After reading the first book in the My Struggle series over the new year (A Death in the Family, previously reviewed), I needed the rest of the series, as Zadie Smith has said, like crack. What I hadn’t quite realised is how immersive the experience would be. I have spent six months snatching moments intended for something else to spend with Karl Ove, whether he was writing about his first years in Sweden (A Man in Love), his childhood and early teenage years in Tromøya (Boyhood Island), setting off at age 18 to the remote north of Norway to teach in a school (Dancing in the Dark), his years as a student, the publication of his first book and his first marriage in Bergen (Some Rain Must Fall) and finally, the impact of the publication of the preceding books (The End). While the subsequent books perhaps don’t quite match the level of detail found in Book One, as a reader Knausgaard is ever-present with you. From almost every experience, there is something to relate to, and because of his brutal honesty, we are constantly worried about how these books are going to affect those that appear in it when they end up in the world.
In this way, to read Knausgaard is to live your own life more intensely. For the last six months, whenever I have been stuck with my own thoughts, I begin to describe every mundane action in Karl Ove’s exacting detail, from getting my daughter ready for school in the morning to stacking the dishwasher at night. Particularly for parents of young children, reading Knausgaard becomes an inherently meta experience. Writing this review, I have stolen moments while ostensibly watching my daughter’s swimming lesson, while she played in Småland at IKEA, and composed parts of it in my head while doing laps in the outdoor pool. (While Knausgaard can drink, smoke and write me under the table, I can smugly say that his idea of a decent distance and speed at which to swim are decidedly, well, Scandinavian).
These books are about everything, but they are especially about family. Karl Ove’s father may be buried in Book One but his shadow hangs over the rest of the books, particularly Boyhood Island (Book Three), which is the story of Karl Ove’s childhood on the island of Tromøya. This book takes a different narrative approach to the others, in that is told almost completely chronologically, with none of the present day flash-forwards to contrast with the past events. He continues to describe his life in painstaking detail, but with a childish lens so that Knausgaard does not make the explicit link between his father’s emotional, verbal and physical abuse and anything that comes after. Of course Knausgaard’s father continues to loom large in this book, but it is also a nostalgic depiction of a time when children could be gone for hours without parents worrying, free to defecate out of trees, explore the local tip and drop rocks onto cars. (Heaven forbid that the young Karl Ove should lose a sock or eat two apples in one day though-- both crimes that his father went ballistic over).
Knausgaard’s mother is perhaps the only under-explored character in the books and this particularly notable in Book Three. She is there in the background of Karl Ove and Yngve’s childhood but her presence fades in the face of the boys’ terror of their father and his horrible treatment of them. Karl Ove says this quite directly: “She was always there, I know she was, but I just can’t remember it” (Boyhood Island). The mystery about his mother, Sissel, is that she tolerated her husband’s treatment of her sons and stayed with him for so many years. Even when they finally divorce, the parents seem quite neutral about it, accepting their separation as the natural progression of something that has run its course. This is not something that Karl Ove explores in depth, and while everyone else in Knausgaard’s life has been subjected to a warts-and-all (mostly warts in some cases) analysis, Sissel largely escapes this lens. She is consistently presented as loving and well-meaning, and Karl Ove defends her vigorously in the face of any criticism from Linda. In Book Six he writes that he had asked his mother not to read Book Three, fearing that she would be hurt by what she would find there. The most damning thing he writes about Sissel is in one of the book’s only breaks from chronological narrative, where he questions whether Sissel’s inaction amounted to enablement: “The question is whether she was not responsible for exposing us to him over so many years, a man we were afraid of, always, at all times. The question is whether it is enough to be a counterbalance to the darkness” (Boyhood Island).
Linda, by contrast, continues to be examined with a lens so critical that as readers, we wonder whether it’s ethical to be reading these books. After a passionate yet already tumultuous love affair that begins almost immediately upon his arrival in Sweden at the start of Book Two (and comes hot on the heels of his sudden and mysterious departure from first wife Tonje in Bergen), Karl Ove quickly begins to fall out of love, or at least into annoyance, with Linda. He knows that she suffers from bipolar disorder and was hospitalised for a year before they got together, but Karl Ove’s belief is that this is behind her and he does not ever really try to understand her limitations or how her illness may affect her. He finds her dreams and plans to be childish and is constantly resentful about her lack of attention to practical matters. In Linda’s mind she is doing most of the work that comes with having a large family but Karl Ove’s perspective is that he is doing all of the housework, most of the child-rearing and all of the bread-winning. He continues to maintain this perspective well into Book Six, where we can see disaster looming because the first book in the series is about to be published. Every person mentioned in the book has received an advance copy for approval, and yet Linda, who is the most negatively-portrayed character other than Karl Ove’s deceased father, is yet to sight the manuscript. It appears that he does not think her opinion is worth soliciting, that the books will be published regardless of what she thinks and that, like their children, she is too immature to have a say. Yet Linda is not unaware of this:
‘There’s so much contempt in you,’ she said. ‘I know you look down on me.’
‘Look down on you? I certainly do not!’ I said.
‘Yes, you do. You think I do too little. I whinge all the time. I’m not independent enough. You’re sick of this life of ours. And of me. You never tell me I’m beautiful anymore. Actually I don’t mean anything to you. I’m just someone you live with who happens to be the mother of your children.’ (The End)
It takes a major crisis for Karl Ove to realise what he has asked Linda to do. As the deadline for completing the final book is looming, Linda suffers a major depressive episode and is hospitalised. Karl Ove has to drop everything and devote himself to the children-- particularly Vanja, who is about to start school. He realises, too late, that Linda’s dreams are part of who she is and that by showing Linda (and the rest of the world) that those dreams are not shared with him, he is damaging her sense of self. Knausgaard does not explicitly address whether he believes the books led directly to Linda’s breakdown or not, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that they couldn’t have helped.
In the early books, Knausgaard’s descriptions of parenting are just as brutal as his depictions of Linda, and ring horribly true for anyone but the most unnaturally devoted parents. Let’s face it, our struggle to keep our own identity whilst being constantly present, emotionally and physically, for our children is a near-impossible task (and this is before you have added in other societal demands such as paid work, friendships, family relationships and so on). Karl Ove does not handle this struggle well, particularly in the early years of having children. He sees his children as a group of chore-creating creatures, whose daily requirements have to be got through with as little effort as possible. In the first book, he describes shaking his toddlers and shouting with rage. As the children become older and as the series progresses, however, there is a subtle shift in his attitude. The children begin to show their own personalities and Karl Ove begins to identify with them as people. He stops shouting and shaking, and tries to understand them. By Book Six, his children still take up all his time but he is much happier to spend his time in this way. By contrast, his writing becomes a drag, with looming deadlines and constant ramifications from the books that have already been published. Whereas earlier, Karl Ove gave no thought to the impact the books would have on his children, by the end of Book Six, he writes, “This book has hurt everyone around me, it has hurt me, and in a few years, when they are old enough to read it, it will hurt my children.” (Part Nine, The End). He also knows, and fears, that his earlier behaviour will have ramifications:
“The way I had behaved during the first three or four years of having children, when, much too often, I took out my frustrations on them, must have affected their self-esteem, the one thing in them you, as a parent, mustn’t fuck up. I had got out of this, it hardly ever happened any more, we never argued in front of them now and I never lost my temper, but I said a silent prayer almost every day that this hadn’t left any marks, that what I had done wasn’t beyond redress.”
Karl Ove has tried not to be his father and he does seem to be succeeding at this on a day-to-day level. How his children will react when they come to read the books is another matter. It will be very challenging for Vanja, Heidi, John and Anne to read how oppressive their father found their early years, but these books are also an amazing account of their father’s life that no-one else has. They will never have to wonder what their father was really like, what he really thought, what he really did. So many of us never know our parents as people, or have insight into their true thoughts. In this way, Karl Ove has given his children an incredible, if burdensome, gift. When they come to read the books, they will almost definitely need therapy, but they will never have to say that they didn’t know their father.
By the end of Book Six, we feel that we know everything. (We also know 450 pages of information about Hitler, which I could have done without.) No stone is left unturned. While in Books One and Two we are left wondering if we will ever know what happens with Tonje, at the end of Book Five, we find out. We do not understand why Karl Ove never calls his father by his name, but when we learn of the fuss wrought by his uncle Gunnar in Book Six, we finally understand (and in one of the most moving passages of the series, towards the very end of Book Six we do in fact find out his father’s name). As the publication of the books in Norway catches up to the time at which Karl Ove is writing, readers feel they know him too. A woman approaches Karl Ove at an airport in Norway:
‘How big Vanja and Heidi are!’ she said, and laughed.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘But I won’t pester you any more. Have a good journey home. I suppose you’re going to Malmö, aren’t you?’
I nodded.
‘Bye,’ I said with a smile.
Vanja looked up at me.
‘Do you know her, dad?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Never seen her before.’
‘But how did she know who we were?’ she said.
‘I’ve written a book about us.’ I said.
‘You’ve written a book about us?’ she said.
‘Yes,’
‘What’s in it?’
‘All sorts of strange things,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to read it when you’re bigger.’ (The End)
It must be such a strange life for Karl Ove Knausgaard now. He is recognised everywhere (he has a very recognisable face, and a very unusual name, even in Norway). Everyone who has read his books feels that they know him intimately, and yet he is a very private person who probably has nothing to say to any of us. His marriage to Linda has ended, but not before (astonishingly in the circumstances) they had a fourth child together. He says at the end of Book Six that he is no longer a writer, but he has to speak about his writing all the time.
It seems trite to say that these books are life-changing, but that is what they are. They hold up a mirror to our own lives, as if to say, “What are you doing? How are you doing it? Why?” at every moment of every day. Knausgaard’s struggle is no longer just his to bear. He has passed it on to his readers. And while not all of us, thankfully, are brave enough to do what Knausgaard has done, at least we should be brave enough to read him.
February 8, 2020
Dear Karl Ove,
I have my shit. We all do, I realize. Mine places me closer to ‘Linda’ than you in some respects, but none of that is really measurable based on matrices self-manifested by a fictional book (no matter how true much of it is). Still, I have my shit.
Said shit reared up toward the last-third of this cycle, and the results were horrific. Critically so. I spent a lot of time alone doing and having terrible things done to my brain and body during this period. I have my shit.
Here’s all I can say: thank you. I’ve never met you, never will, don’t pretend I know you because of reading almost 3700-pages of your life, and don’t confuse our commonalities for intimacy. What I thank you for, as absolutely ridiculous as this sounds, is for being with me through it. Funny: you were my constant through that which it seems I’m on the other side of for now. I could disappear into you when my brain allowed it, and that’s heavy sorcery. I had and have all sorts around wanting to help, but I leaned on you. This isn’t to assign true love for a proxy; that battalion of crazy hasn’t gotten me yet. No, this is just honesty. An honest thank you. I don’t know if there are enough of either of those qualities in the everyday world, and I owe you that at the very least.
Thank you again, Karl Ove,
Solidarity,
Yours,
J Cody Gorman
I have my shit. We all do, I realize. Mine places me closer to ‘Linda’ than you in some respects, but none of that is really measurable based on matrices self-manifested by a fictional book (no matter how true much of it is). Still, I have my shit.
Said shit reared up toward the last-third of this cycle, and the results were horrific. Critically so. I spent a lot of time alone doing and having terrible things done to my brain and body during this period. I have my shit.
Here’s all I can say: thank you. I’ve never met you, never will, don’t pretend I know you because of reading almost 3700-pages of your life, and don’t confuse our commonalities for intimacy. What I thank you for, as absolutely ridiculous as this sounds, is for being with me through it. Funny: you were my constant through that which it seems I’m on the other side of for now. I could disappear into you when my brain allowed it, and that’s heavy sorcery. I had and have all sorts around wanting to help, but I leaned on you. This isn’t to assign true love for a proxy; that battalion of crazy hasn’t gotten me yet. No, this is just honesty. An honest thank you. I don’t know if there are enough of either of those qualities in the everyday world, and I owe you that at the very least.
Thank you again, Karl Ove,
Solidarity,
Yours,
J Cody Gorman
November 12, 2023
O rătăcire cu sens, durând 6 volume & aproximativ 3500 de pagini, se încheie aici. Și simt că aș reîncepe oricând, curând, de la volumul 1.
N-am să mă screm acum de un comentariu literar sec sau omniscient-baroc-patetic.
Volumul 6 pare scris pentru prietenii-cunoscători ai lui Knausgård. Cei care s-au apropiat treptat de autor, agonizând împreună cu el de-a lungul celorlalte 5 cărți.
Ciclul “Lupta mea” nu-i pentru literatele rigide, nici pentru amorțiții-n veșnica amânare a unei confruntări oneste cu sine (cu sau fără urmări).
Este o învățătură despre felul cum sinceritatea autobiografică dusă până-n pragul fascinantei obscenități, și chiar dincolo de acest prag, poate da o extra-valoare unei scrieri. Vezi și la A. Camus - refuzul de a minți.
E un preț pe care mulți dintre voi, care sperați să scrieți cândva Opera aceea (din bube și mucegaiuri ieșită), nu veți fi niciodată gata să-l plătiți. Eu, de asemenea.
“Lupta mea” este, pentru mine, o oglindă. Nu mă frământă deloc câți o veți citi sau câți ați citit-o deja.
M-am obișnuit, acum multe cărți, să receptez empatic „universalitatea” unui text ce-și are rădăcinile în experiența personală a unui ins complet străin. Îl citesc pe KOK de parcă aș privi înăuntrul meu. Nu-s capabil să ating cu exactitate ce anume mă atrage la el - presupun că totul, inclusiv aceea că-i, pe alocuri, antipatic și mai este - tot așa, sporadic - de neînțeles, de nedeslușit, chiar și pentru el însuși.
K.O.K.: “Dacă voiam să scriu un roman, acesta trebuia să fie despre realitate, așa cum era ea, văzută prin ochii cuiva care îi este prizonier cu trupul, dar nu și cu mintea, care este prizoniera altcuiva, a marii dorințe de a se ridica deasupra zăpușelii opresive, pentru a ajunge sus, în aerul pur al măiestriei.”
N-am să mă screm acum de un comentariu literar sec sau omniscient-baroc-patetic.
Volumul 6 pare scris pentru prietenii-cunoscători ai lui Knausgård. Cei care s-au apropiat treptat de autor, agonizând împreună cu el de-a lungul celorlalte 5 cărți.
Ciclul “Lupta mea” nu-i pentru literatele rigide, nici pentru amorțiții-n veșnica amânare a unei confruntări oneste cu sine (cu sau fără urmări).
Este o învățătură despre felul cum sinceritatea autobiografică dusă până-n pragul fascinantei obscenități, și chiar dincolo de acest prag, poate da o extra-valoare unei scrieri. Vezi și la A. Camus - refuzul de a minți.
E un preț pe care mulți dintre voi, care sperați să scrieți cândva Opera aceea (din bube și mucegaiuri ieșită), nu veți fi niciodată gata să-l plătiți. Eu, de asemenea.
“Lupta mea” este, pentru mine, o oglindă. Nu mă frământă deloc câți o veți citi sau câți ați citit-o deja.
M-am obișnuit, acum multe cărți, să receptez empatic „universalitatea” unui text ce-și are rădăcinile în experiența personală a unui ins complet străin. Îl citesc pe KOK de parcă aș privi înăuntrul meu. Nu-s capabil să ating cu exactitate ce anume mă atrage la el - presupun că totul, inclusiv aceea că-i, pe alocuri, antipatic și mai este - tot așa, sporadic - de neînțeles, de nedeslușit, chiar și pentru el însuși.
K.O.K.: “Dacă voiam să scriu un roman, acesta trebuia să fie despre realitate, așa cum era ea, văzută prin ochii cuiva care îi este prizonier cu trupul, dar nu și cu mintea, care este prizoniera altcuiva, a marii dorințe de a se ridica deasupra zăpușelii opresive, pentru a ajunge sus, în aerul pur al măiestriei.”
Want to read
November 2, 2014Why I Will Not Read Min kamp 6: an Off-Topic Review to Mark the First Anniversary of Publishing Off-Topic
I will not read this book, and my reasons are entirely to do with the author's behavior. There, I've said it.
Why? Well, just to start with, he's repeatedly claimed that everything in it is true, but members of his family say they know he's lying and have witnesses to prove it. And it's hardly surprising that he's a liar who's sold his family's reputation to make a quick buck. In terms of character, he's spookily like Adolf Hitler, to the point of closely identifying with him. If you're still not satisfied, let me add that he drove his wife to a nervous breakdown by revealing all kinds of extremely personal details about her life in his horrible books.
How do I know? Easy. I am reliably informed that he's spent over a thousand pages here telling the whole world that this is just what happened. In fact, I gather that the above themes are in no way incidental, but the very essence of the story.
Sorry, but I am not reading this sociopathic Nazi monster.
I will not read this book, and my reasons are entirely to do with the author's behavior. There, I've said it.
Why? Well, just to start with, he's repeatedly claimed that everything in it is true, but members of his family say they know he's lying and have witnesses to prove it. And it's hardly surprising that he's a liar who's sold his family's reputation to make a quick buck. In terms of character, he's spookily like Adolf Hitler, to the point of closely identifying with him. If you're still not satisfied, let me add that he drove his wife to a nervous breakdown by revealing all kinds of extremely personal details about her life in his horrible books.
How do I know? Easy. I am reliably informed that he's spent over a thousand pages here telling the whole world that this is just what happened. In fact, I gather that the above themes are in no way incidental, but the very essence of the story.
Sorry, but I am not reading this sociopathic Nazi monster.
February 7, 2021
Dugo je trajalo citanje ovog zavrsnog dela ove autobiografije. Sredisnji deo gde se bavio Hitlerom, njegovim zivotom i posledicama njegovih dela je bio posebno tezak. Ovo delo otvara oci za mnoga desavanja u vremenu. Pokazuje i da zivot u Svedskoj nije bajka. Ima se puno za reci o svom tomovima njegove borbe, ali mislim da je bolje da vam preporucim da ih procitate.
November 15, 2015
"Vrouw" is het zesde en laatste deel van de even roemruchte als fascinerende autobiografische romancyclus "Mijn strijd". De eerste drie delen daarvan, "Vader", "Liefde" en vooral "Zoon" vond ik echt geweldig, delen vier en vijf ietsjes minder maar nog steeds heel goed. "Vrouw" is zonder meer het meest complexe deel, omdat het door zijn omvang (1075 bladzijden!) en ellenlange essayistische uitweidingen veel inzet van de lezer vraagt. Maar zelf vind ik dat die inzet enorm genereus wordt beloond: "Vrouw" is naar mijn smaak een imponerend kunstwerk, een schitterende artistieke zoektocht naar de allerindividueelste gedachten en emoties van een grillig en meerkantig individu, en bovendien werpt het een mooi verrijkend nieuw licht op de cyclus als geheel.
Fascinerend is om te beginnen hoe Karl Ove Knausgard in "Vrouw" terugkijkt op zijn eerdere boeken, met name op "Vader" en "Liefde". De aanleiding daartoe is de niet altijd heel erg instemmende reactie van dierbaren en familie op hoe zij of hun eigen dierbaren in deze boeken zijn geportretteerd. Knausgards vrouw Linda bijvoorbeeld schrikt zich wezenloos van het beeld dat Karl Ove in "Liefde" geeft van scenes uit hun gezinsleven: alle ook voor hem onbegrijpelijke en daardoor onuitgesproken kwellingen en frustraties van Karl Ove staan in het manuscript openlijk en genadeloos verwoord, alle wat in normale huwelijken onuitgesproken of verhuld blijft wordt hier blootgelegd, en daarvan schrikt zij zich wezenloos. Iets wat Karl Ove dan met bijna afgrondige pijn en zelftwijfel vervult, maar dat belet hem niet om in "Vrouw" uitgebreid te schrijven over die zelftwijfel EN over de uiterst pijnlijke manische en depressieve aandoeningen waarmee Linda te kampen heeft, en over zijn eigen gevoelens van ontoereikendheid bij die aandoeningen. Even enerverend is echter de clash van Karl Ove met zijn oom over het boek "Vader", waarin het leven en de liederlijke verloedering en dood van Karl Oves vader wel heel pregnant op papier staat, en de met haat en hopeloze liefde doordesemde angst voor die vader eveneens. Oom echter herkent zich niet in dat beeld, vindt dat dit portret een leugenachtige karikatuur is van Karl Oves vader (de betreurde broer van oom), en dreigt met rechtszaken. Welnu, Karl Ove weet ook deze pijnlijke situaties weer om te zetten in schitterende literatuur: het is werkelijk geweldig hoe hij alle twijfel en wanhoop die deze clashes bij hem oproepen voelbaar weet te maken, niet alleen door expliciete beschrijvingen van wat hij voelt en waarom, maar vooral met allerlei ogenschijnlijk wezenloze dialogen of sfeerbeschrijvingen waar werelden van gespannen angst en kwelling worden opgeroepen tussen de regels door. Bijvoorbeeld lange dialogen tussen Linda en hem, waarin juist alles wat NIET gezegd wordt essentieel is. Of ellenlange beschrijvingen van hoe Karl Ove koffie zet, vuilniszakken buitenzet, de wasmachine aanzet, een sigaret opsteekt, en ineens niet meer weet of hij de kinderen nou naar de creche heeft gebracht of niet: juist DIE leemte in zijn geheugen, en het fanatisme waarmee hij zich in deze scenes als het ware "vastklampt" aan het banale alledaagse leven, maken voelbaar hoezeer hij de controle over zichzelf verliest. Ik vind dat soort scenes echt prachtig: hier is niet een autobiografische kroniekschrijver aan het woord die alles expliciet wil beschrijven, maar een literator die naar de meest treffende artistieke vorm zoekt. En die daarmee recht wil doen aan de complexiteit, meerduidigheid en ook raadselachtigheid van de door hem beschreven fenomenen en emoties.
Dat blijkt ook uit de wijze waarop Karl Ove, in twijfel gebracht door de aantijgingen van zijn oom, terugkijkt op het boek "Vader". Ten eerste voegt hij nu in "Vrouw" nog weer extra facetten toe aan dit toch al veelkantige verhaal, en geeft hij daarmee nog meer rijkdom en diepte aan het beeld van die zijn vader was en wat hij voor hem heeft betekent. Maar bovendien zegt Karl Ove nu ook, nadrukkelijker dan hij in eerdere romandelen deed, dat het gaat om ZIJN beeld, en niet om een uitputtende weergave van feitelijkheden. Hij zegt bijvoorbeeld: "Het verhaal over hem, Kai Auge Knausgard, is het verhaal over mij, Karl Ove Knausgard. Dat heb ik nu verteld. Ik heb overdreven, ik heb er wat aan toegevoegd, ik heb wat weggelaten en ik heb een heleboel niet begrepen. Maar ik heb niet hem beschreven, ik heb mijn beeld van hem beschreven". Dus Karl Oves verhaal over zijn vader is een verhaal VAN Karl Ove dat voor een groot deel gaat OVER Karl Ove, en waarin veel is verwoord (vaak tussen de regels door) dat Karl Ove nog steeds niet begrijpt. Want zijn vader is nog steeds een raadsel voor hem, en hij nog steeds een raadsel voor zichzelf. En iets soortgelijks schrijft hij ook later over zijn vrouw Linda, na eerst uitvoerig te hebben geschreven over haar manische en depressieve perioden en over wat dit bij hem opriep. Want hij schrijft dan: "Het verhaal over de vorige zomer, dat ik net heb verteld, ziet er heel anders uit dan hoe het was, weet ik. Hoe dat komt? Omdat Linda een mens is en het wezenlijke aan haar zich niet laat beschrijven [...] Het schuilt in wat ze is. Over Heidi gebogen terwijl ze haar iets in haar oor fluistert en Heidi haar borrelende lach laat horen. Liggend op de bank met Vanja boven op zich, lachend om iets wat onze slimme dochter heeft gezegd. De tederheid in de blik waarmee ze John aankijkt. En haar hand in mijn nek, warm, haar absoluut naakte blik". Ook in het verhaal van Karl Ove over Linda speelt dus veel raadselachtigs, een heleboel wat Karl Over niet heeft begrepen. En, meer nog, wat en wie Linda is, als persoon op zich EN als persoon in het leven van Karl Ove, is volgens diezelfde Karl Ove niet te beschrijven. Dus ziet hij bewust af van een expliciete schets van wie of wat zij is, en schetst hij alleen een tafereel waarin het wezenlijke zich alleen toont (en verhult) via raadselachtige en ongrijbare glimpen.
Vaak wordt de "Mijn strijd" cyclus als een vrij rechtlijnige autobiografie opgevat, dus als een soort feitelijke kroniek van Knausgards leven en een feitelijke weergave van zijn belevenissen. Maar volgens mij wordt in "Vrouw", nog scherper dan in zijn andere boeken, duidelijk dat het Knausgard om iets anders gaat. "Mijn strijd" is geen weergave maar een zoektocht, geen kroniek maar een artistieke vormgeving, geen simpele autobiografie maar vooral een kunstwerk en (zoals elke roman) een ontdekkingsreis. De cyclus staat volgens mij namelijk in het teken van het unieke individu Karl Ove Knausgard, en dan vooral van het raadsel dat Karl Ove Knausgard is voor zichzelf en anderen. Een individu is deels herkenbaar, maar deels ook uniek, en die uniciteit onttrekt zich aan sociale conventies of algemene regels, en zelfs aan de taal. Maar precies die uniciteit, ZIJN uniciteit, is dan volgens mij wat Knausgard onderzoekt. En wel ALS uniciteit, dus als iets wat ontsnapt aan de conventies en de woorden. Dat schemert volgens mij door in de citaten hierboven, waarin Knausgard nadrukkelijk de aandacht richt op het onverwoordbare en onbegrepene. En in vele andere passages, waarin dit volgens mij eveneens gebeurt.
Maar het komt vooral naar voren in een onverwachte en onverwacht lange essayistische uitweiding van ongeveer 400 bladzijden lang die 'ineens' opduikt midden in het boek. Een stuk dat door zijn lengte en soms taaie onderdelen om veel geduld vraagt, en dat veel recensenten naar eigen zeggen diagonaal hebben gelezen, maar ik vond het prachtig. Allereerst door zijn structuur en inhoud: Knausgard begint met een analyse woord voor woord van een ongehoord cryptisch maar fascinerend gedicht van Celan, meandert dan naar een opmerkelijk erudiete en gedetailleerde beschouwing over "Mein Kampf" van Hitler en herinneringen van Hitlers jeugdvriend, spreekt ook over "Shoah" van Lanzmann en over werk van Joyce, Broch, Olav Duun, Hamsun , Foucault, Deleuze en anderen, zegt tussendoor ook nog een en ander over de absolutistische neigingen van Anders Breyvik, en verknoopt al deze essaysistiek dan weer met stemmingen die hij, Karl Ove Knausgard, op een specifiek moment in zijn leven heeft. Zeer opmerkelijk van vorm, dit essay, en nog opmerkelijker is dat zoiets middenin een autobiografische roman staat. Maar er staat wel veel moois en interessants in over m.n. Celan en diverse andere literaire figuren. En nog mooier is hoe hij VIA dit meanderende essay tot een beschouwing komt over de tegenstelling tussen het strikt individuele ik en de veralgemeniserende conventie die dit "ik" anonimiseert en in algemeenheden versmoort. Prachtig is hoe hij laat zien dat Celan met zijn stamelende en gefragmenteerde dichtregels aandacht vraagt op ongrijpbare en niet in taal te vatten raadsels, emoties, ervaringen. Maar nog prachtiger is hoe Knausgard tussen de regels door suggereert dat deze "poezie van de stilte", die tussen de regels door aandacht vraagt voor het vele dat aan taal en conventie ontsnapt, ook voor Knausgards eigen schrijven een inspiratiebron is. Net als Hamsuns fascinatie voor het extreme en irrrationele in de mens. Want Celan, Hamsun en anderen richten onze aandacht dan op "iets" wat niet te vatten is door veralgemeniserende conventies, en benadrukken daarmee het unieke van dit "iets". Dat daardoor wel ongrijpbaar blijft, maar precies door die ongrijpbaarheid wel zijn unieke individualiteit bewaart. En Hitler spookt (net als Breyvik) in dit essay rond als onoplosbaar probleem: vanwege het extreme en irrationele in ZIJN gemoed, vanwege de onmogelijkheid om exact aan te geven wanneer dit extreme nog hanteerbaar was (zoals voor Hamsun, die er vorm aan kon geven binnen zijn romans), en omdat het irrationele en extreme in Hitlers hoofd kon omslaan in de irrationele en extreme conventies van Nazi-Duitsland. Wat betekent dat de sociale conventies, die we broodnodig hebben maar die het individuele en afwijkende sowieso versimpelen, soms ook alles wat afwijkt met bruut geweld vermoorden. En dat betekent dat we alijd alert moeten zijn op de spanning tussen uniciteit en conventie, en moeten blijven zoeken naar manieren om die uniciteit te verwoorden, zij het dan als iets wat grotendeels aan die conventies ontsnapt.
Ik versimpel dit lange meanderende essay nu vreselijk, want als ik op alle subtiliteiten zou ingaan wordt het stuk te lang. Maar wat ik demonstreren wil is dit: Knausgard zet een lang en onconventioneel essay in elkaar, plaatst dat essay - wat ook weer een breuk met de conventies is- midden in een autobiografische roman, en via dat essay richt hij onze aandacht op de spanning tussen het strikt individuele (dat aan alle conventies en de taal ontsnapt) en de conventie (die ertoe neigt het individuele te veralgemeniseren of -zoals in het Nazisme maar soms ook in de wereld van alledag- zelfs geheel te versmoren). En die spanning staat dan centraal in "Vrouw", en in alle vorige boeken in de cyclus. Ik vind het dus echt schitterend hoe Knausgard die spanning beschrijft, en zo uitdrukking geeft aan het unieke en individuele karakter van zijn eigen ik. Vooral imponerend vind ik hoe hij de raadselachtige kanten van dat ik bewaart, en de originele -want: onconventionele- vorm waarin hij dat doet. Want hij breekt wel met HEEL veel conventies, onze Karl Ove. Over de even geniale als eigenzinnige Gombrowicz schrijft hij: "Had hij al die omstandigheden beschreven waaruit zijn gedachten en daarmee zijn ziel opstegen, en in de praktijk het hoogste (want zelfs zijn gedachten over het laagste behoren tot het hoogste in zijn dagboek) met het laagste verbonden, dat wil zeggen met de pluisjes in zijn navel, de wond op zijn gat, het bloed in zijn pis, het smeer in zijn oor, of gewoon een herftsdag beschreven door een van de parken van Buenos Aires flanerend met een boek van Bruno Schulz onder zijn arm, dan zou hij de grootste schrijver ter wereld zijn geweest". Prachtige uitspraak over Gombrowicz, vind ik, maar vooral ook een uiterst treffende beschrijving van de inzet van Knausgard zelf: hij immers verbindt bij uitstek het hoogste met het laagste door essayistische passages als deze in te bedden in ellenlange passages over koffiezetten, de afwas doen, poep opruimen in emmers, luiers verschonen, kinderen voeden, sigaretten opsteken. En dat maakt hem nog onconventioneler dan de notoire non-conformist Gombrowicz. Nog meer anti-conventioneel is wellicht de schaamteloosheid waarmee hij schrijft over intieme en verborgen roerselen van zichzelf, zijn familie en zijn dierbaren. Een extra conventiebreuk bovenop deze breuk is dat hij dan ook nog eens zegt dat al die intieme scenes over Linda, zijn vader en hemzelf geen objectieve weergaven zijn maar een subjectief en vervormd beeld. En misschien het meest onconventioneel van alles is dat de hele cyclus "Mijn Strijd", die door veel lezers wordt opgevat als gewone autobiografie, nu in "Vrouw" naar voren komt als een ongrijpbare hybride van onconventionele essayistiek, eigenzinnige romankunst en onzekere (bovendien deels gefictionaliseerde) herinnering.
Ik vond "Vrouw" kortom een spetterende afsluiting van een toch al prachtige romancyclus. De compromisloze intensiteit van Knausgard, die ik in de vorige boeken al zeer bewonderde, bewonder ik na "Vrouw" nog meer. Ik benijd Knausgard om zijn moed: bijvoorbeeld zijn moed om alle verzwegen en verborgen gedachten over zijn vrouw en zijn vader niet verborgen te houden, maar tot op het bot te onderzoeken. Ik benijd Knausgard om zijn schrijverskunst: bijvoorbeeld zijn vermogen om allerlei verhulde gedachten te articuleren ZONDER ze daarbij te versimpelen en minder raadselachtig of veelkantig te maken. Ook ik ben vast een continu veranderlijk uniek individu, dat niets van zichzelf begrijpt, alleen heb ik geen idee hoe die veranderlijke identiteit van mij er uitziet. Knausgard weet dat van zichzelf vast evenmin, maar hij heeft -anders dan ik- wel de moed en het talent dit bij zichzelf nader te onderzoeken. En dat vind ik prachtig om te zien.
Fascinerend is om te beginnen hoe Karl Ove Knausgard in "Vrouw" terugkijkt op zijn eerdere boeken, met name op "Vader" en "Liefde". De aanleiding daartoe is de niet altijd heel erg instemmende reactie van dierbaren en familie op hoe zij of hun eigen dierbaren in deze boeken zijn geportretteerd. Knausgards vrouw Linda bijvoorbeeld schrikt zich wezenloos van het beeld dat Karl Ove in "Liefde" geeft van scenes uit hun gezinsleven: alle ook voor hem onbegrijpelijke en daardoor onuitgesproken kwellingen en frustraties van Karl Ove staan in het manuscript openlijk en genadeloos verwoord, alle wat in normale huwelijken onuitgesproken of verhuld blijft wordt hier blootgelegd, en daarvan schrikt zij zich wezenloos. Iets wat Karl Ove dan met bijna afgrondige pijn en zelftwijfel vervult, maar dat belet hem niet om in "Vrouw" uitgebreid te schrijven over die zelftwijfel EN over de uiterst pijnlijke manische en depressieve aandoeningen waarmee Linda te kampen heeft, en over zijn eigen gevoelens van ontoereikendheid bij die aandoeningen. Even enerverend is echter de clash van Karl Ove met zijn oom over het boek "Vader", waarin het leven en de liederlijke verloedering en dood van Karl Oves vader wel heel pregnant op papier staat, en de met haat en hopeloze liefde doordesemde angst voor die vader eveneens. Oom echter herkent zich niet in dat beeld, vindt dat dit portret een leugenachtige karikatuur is van Karl Oves vader (de betreurde broer van oom), en dreigt met rechtszaken. Welnu, Karl Ove weet ook deze pijnlijke situaties weer om te zetten in schitterende literatuur: het is werkelijk geweldig hoe hij alle twijfel en wanhoop die deze clashes bij hem oproepen voelbaar weet te maken, niet alleen door expliciete beschrijvingen van wat hij voelt en waarom, maar vooral met allerlei ogenschijnlijk wezenloze dialogen of sfeerbeschrijvingen waar werelden van gespannen angst en kwelling worden opgeroepen tussen de regels door. Bijvoorbeeld lange dialogen tussen Linda en hem, waarin juist alles wat NIET gezegd wordt essentieel is. Of ellenlange beschrijvingen van hoe Karl Ove koffie zet, vuilniszakken buitenzet, de wasmachine aanzet, een sigaret opsteekt, en ineens niet meer weet of hij de kinderen nou naar de creche heeft gebracht of niet: juist DIE leemte in zijn geheugen, en het fanatisme waarmee hij zich in deze scenes als het ware "vastklampt" aan het banale alledaagse leven, maken voelbaar hoezeer hij de controle over zichzelf verliest. Ik vind dat soort scenes echt prachtig: hier is niet een autobiografische kroniekschrijver aan het woord die alles expliciet wil beschrijven, maar een literator die naar de meest treffende artistieke vorm zoekt. En die daarmee recht wil doen aan de complexiteit, meerduidigheid en ook raadselachtigheid van de door hem beschreven fenomenen en emoties.
Dat blijkt ook uit de wijze waarop Karl Ove, in twijfel gebracht door de aantijgingen van zijn oom, terugkijkt op het boek "Vader". Ten eerste voegt hij nu in "Vrouw" nog weer extra facetten toe aan dit toch al veelkantige verhaal, en geeft hij daarmee nog meer rijkdom en diepte aan het beeld van die zijn vader was en wat hij voor hem heeft betekent. Maar bovendien zegt Karl Ove nu ook, nadrukkelijker dan hij in eerdere romandelen deed, dat het gaat om ZIJN beeld, en niet om een uitputtende weergave van feitelijkheden. Hij zegt bijvoorbeeld: "Het verhaal over hem, Kai Auge Knausgard, is het verhaal over mij, Karl Ove Knausgard. Dat heb ik nu verteld. Ik heb overdreven, ik heb er wat aan toegevoegd, ik heb wat weggelaten en ik heb een heleboel niet begrepen. Maar ik heb niet hem beschreven, ik heb mijn beeld van hem beschreven". Dus Karl Oves verhaal over zijn vader is een verhaal VAN Karl Ove dat voor een groot deel gaat OVER Karl Ove, en waarin veel is verwoord (vaak tussen de regels door) dat Karl Ove nog steeds niet begrijpt. Want zijn vader is nog steeds een raadsel voor hem, en hij nog steeds een raadsel voor zichzelf. En iets soortgelijks schrijft hij ook later over zijn vrouw Linda, na eerst uitvoerig te hebben geschreven over haar manische en depressieve perioden en over wat dit bij hem opriep. Want hij schrijft dan: "Het verhaal over de vorige zomer, dat ik net heb verteld, ziet er heel anders uit dan hoe het was, weet ik. Hoe dat komt? Omdat Linda een mens is en het wezenlijke aan haar zich niet laat beschrijven [...] Het schuilt in wat ze is. Over Heidi gebogen terwijl ze haar iets in haar oor fluistert en Heidi haar borrelende lach laat horen. Liggend op de bank met Vanja boven op zich, lachend om iets wat onze slimme dochter heeft gezegd. De tederheid in de blik waarmee ze John aankijkt. En haar hand in mijn nek, warm, haar absoluut naakte blik". Ook in het verhaal van Karl Ove over Linda speelt dus veel raadselachtigs, een heleboel wat Karl Over niet heeft begrepen. En, meer nog, wat en wie Linda is, als persoon op zich EN als persoon in het leven van Karl Ove, is volgens diezelfde Karl Ove niet te beschrijven. Dus ziet hij bewust af van een expliciete schets van wie of wat zij is, en schetst hij alleen een tafereel waarin het wezenlijke zich alleen toont (en verhult) via raadselachtige en ongrijbare glimpen.
Vaak wordt de "Mijn strijd" cyclus als een vrij rechtlijnige autobiografie opgevat, dus als een soort feitelijke kroniek van Knausgards leven en een feitelijke weergave van zijn belevenissen. Maar volgens mij wordt in "Vrouw", nog scherper dan in zijn andere boeken, duidelijk dat het Knausgard om iets anders gaat. "Mijn strijd" is geen weergave maar een zoektocht, geen kroniek maar een artistieke vormgeving, geen simpele autobiografie maar vooral een kunstwerk en (zoals elke roman) een ontdekkingsreis. De cyclus staat volgens mij namelijk in het teken van het unieke individu Karl Ove Knausgard, en dan vooral van het raadsel dat Karl Ove Knausgard is voor zichzelf en anderen. Een individu is deels herkenbaar, maar deels ook uniek, en die uniciteit onttrekt zich aan sociale conventies of algemene regels, en zelfs aan de taal. Maar precies die uniciteit, ZIJN uniciteit, is dan volgens mij wat Knausgard onderzoekt. En wel ALS uniciteit, dus als iets wat ontsnapt aan de conventies en de woorden. Dat schemert volgens mij door in de citaten hierboven, waarin Knausgard nadrukkelijk de aandacht richt op het onverwoordbare en onbegrepene. En in vele andere passages, waarin dit volgens mij eveneens gebeurt.
Maar het komt vooral naar voren in een onverwachte en onverwacht lange essayistische uitweiding van ongeveer 400 bladzijden lang die 'ineens' opduikt midden in het boek. Een stuk dat door zijn lengte en soms taaie onderdelen om veel geduld vraagt, en dat veel recensenten naar eigen zeggen diagonaal hebben gelezen, maar ik vond het prachtig. Allereerst door zijn structuur en inhoud: Knausgard begint met een analyse woord voor woord van een ongehoord cryptisch maar fascinerend gedicht van Celan, meandert dan naar een opmerkelijk erudiete en gedetailleerde beschouwing over "Mein Kampf" van Hitler en herinneringen van Hitlers jeugdvriend, spreekt ook over "Shoah" van Lanzmann en over werk van Joyce, Broch, Olav Duun, Hamsun , Foucault, Deleuze en anderen, zegt tussendoor ook nog een en ander over de absolutistische neigingen van Anders Breyvik, en verknoopt al deze essaysistiek dan weer met stemmingen die hij, Karl Ove Knausgard, op een specifiek moment in zijn leven heeft. Zeer opmerkelijk van vorm, dit essay, en nog opmerkelijker is dat zoiets middenin een autobiografische roman staat. Maar er staat wel veel moois en interessants in over m.n. Celan en diverse andere literaire figuren. En nog mooier is hoe hij VIA dit meanderende essay tot een beschouwing komt over de tegenstelling tussen het strikt individuele ik en de veralgemeniserende conventie die dit "ik" anonimiseert en in algemeenheden versmoort. Prachtig is hoe hij laat zien dat Celan met zijn stamelende en gefragmenteerde dichtregels aandacht vraagt op ongrijpbare en niet in taal te vatten raadsels, emoties, ervaringen. Maar nog prachtiger is hoe Knausgard tussen de regels door suggereert dat deze "poezie van de stilte", die tussen de regels door aandacht vraagt voor het vele dat aan taal en conventie ontsnapt, ook voor Knausgards eigen schrijven een inspiratiebron is. Net als Hamsuns fascinatie voor het extreme en irrrationele in de mens. Want Celan, Hamsun en anderen richten onze aandacht dan op "iets" wat niet te vatten is door veralgemeniserende conventies, en benadrukken daarmee het unieke van dit "iets". Dat daardoor wel ongrijpbaar blijft, maar precies door die ongrijpbaarheid wel zijn unieke individualiteit bewaart. En Hitler spookt (net als Breyvik) in dit essay rond als onoplosbaar probleem: vanwege het extreme en irrationele in ZIJN gemoed, vanwege de onmogelijkheid om exact aan te geven wanneer dit extreme nog hanteerbaar was (zoals voor Hamsun, die er vorm aan kon geven binnen zijn romans), en omdat het irrationele en extreme in Hitlers hoofd kon omslaan in de irrationele en extreme conventies van Nazi-Duitsland. Wat betekent dat de sociale conventies, die we broodnodig hebben maar die het individuele en afwijkende sowieso versimpelen, soms ook alles wat afwijkt met bruut geweld vermoorden. En dat betekent dat we alijd alert moeten zijn op de spanning tussen uniciteit en conventie, en moeten blijven zoeken naar manieren om die uniciteit te verwoorden, zij het dan als iets wat grotendeels aan die conventies ontsnapt.
Ik versimpel dit lange meanderende essay nu vreselijk, want als ik op alle subtiliteiten zou ingaan wordt het stuk te lang. Maar wat ik demonstreren wil is dit: Knausgard zet een lang en onconventioneel essay in elkaar, plaatst dat essay - wat ook weer een breuk met de conventies is- midden in een autobiografische roman, en via dat essay richt hij onze aandacht op de spanning tussen het strikt individuele (dat aan alle conventies en de taal ontsnapt) en de conventie (die ertoe neigt het individuele te veralgemeniseren of -zoals in het Nazisme maar soms ook in de wereld van alledag- zelfs geheel te versmoren). En die spanning staat dan centraal in "Vrouw", en in alle vorige boeken in de cyclus. Ik vind het dus echt schitterend hoe Knausgard die spanning beschrijft, en zo uitdrukking geeft aan het unieke en individuele karakter van zijn eigen ik. Vooral imponerend vind ik hoe hij de raadselachtige kanten van dat ik bewaart, en de originele -want: onconventionele- vorm waarin hij dat doet. Want hij breekt wel met HEEL veel conventies, onze Karl Ove. Over de even geniale als eigenzinnige Gombrowicz schrijft hij: "Had hij al die omstandigheden beschreven waaruit zijn gedachten en daarmee zijn ziel opstegen, en in de praktijk het hoogste (want zelfs zijn gedachten over het laagste behoren tot het hoogste in zijn dagboek) met het laagste verbonden, dat wil zeggen met de pluisjes in zijn navel, de wond op zijn gat, het bloed in zijn pis, het smeer in zijn oor, of gewoon een herftsdag beschreven door een van de parken van Buenos Aires flanerend met een boek van Bruno Schulz onder zijn arm, dan zou hij de grootste schrijver ter wereld zijn geweest". Prachtige uitspraak over Gombrowicz, vind ik, maar vooral ook een uiterst treffende beschrijving van de inzet van Knausgard zelf: hij immers verbindt bij uitstek het hoogste met het laagste door essayistische passages als deze in te bedden in ellenlange passages over koffiezetten, de afwas doen, poep opruimen in emmers, luiers verschonen, kinderen voeden, sigaretten opsteken. En dat maakt hem nog onconventioneler dan de notoire non-conformist Gombrowicz. Nog meer anti-conventioneel is wellicht de schaamteloosheid waarmee hij schrijft over intieme en verborgen roerselen van zichzelf, zijn familie en zijn dierbaren. Een extra conventiebreuk bovenop deze breuk is dat hij dan ook nog eens zegt dat al die intieme scenes over Linda, zijn vader en hemzelf geen objectieve weergaven zijn maar een subjectief en vervormd beeld. En misschien het meest onconventioneel van alles is dat de hele cyclus "Mijn Strijd", die door veel lezers wordt opgevat als gewone autobiografie, nu in "Vrouw" naar voren komt als een ongrijpbare hybride van onconventionele essayistiek, eigenzinnige romankunst en onzekere (bovendien deels gefictionaliseerde) herinnering.
Ik vond "Vrouw" kortom een spetterende afsluiting van een toch al prachtige romancyclus. De compromisloze intensiteit van Knausgard, die ik in de vorige boeken al zeer bewonderde, bewonder ik na "Vrouw" nog meer. Ik benijd Knausgard om zijn moed: bijvoorbeeld zijn moed om alle verzwegen en verborgen gedachten over zijn vrouw en zijn vader niet verborgen te houden, maar tot op het bot te onderzoeken. Ik benijd Knausgard om zijn schrijverskunst: bijvoorbeeld zijn vermogen om allerlei verhulde gedachten te articuleren ZONDER ze daarbij te versimpelen en minder raadselachtig of veelkantig te maken. Ook ik ben vast een continu veranderlijk uniek individu, dat niets van zichzelf begrijpt, alleen heb ik geen idee hoe die veranderlijke identiteit van mij er uitziet. Knausgard weet dat van zichzelf vast evenmin, maar hij heeft -anders dan ik- wel de moed en het talent dit bij zichzelf nader te onderzoeken. En dat vind ik prachtig om te zien.
April 25, 2025
Uffff que larga se me hizo la saga. La comencé en el 2014 y recién hoy termino el sexto tomo. Una lectura va desplazando a otra, los libros se acumulan y el lector se pierde entre tanto para elegir.
“Fin”, el último de “Mi lucha” de Karl Ove Knausgard es diferente al resto. Si bien comienza, como los otros tomos con la descripción de su vida diaria lidiando entre los avatares de la vida familiar y las obligaciones como escritor reconocido, va mutando. El autor empieza a filosofar sobre la escritura y la autoficción; pasa a analizar a otros escritores del presente y el pasado; reflexiona sobre el “yo” y el “nosotros”.
A mitad de camino dedica un par de cientos de páginas a la vida de Hitler para señalar que su excepcionalidad y encarnación del mal sirve para distanciarnos y postular que, si bien lo abyecto está fuera de nosotros, somos en parte responsable de no reaccionar a tiempo. Muy interesante los análisis del noruego.
No están exentos los análisis de las relaciones padres-hijos, motor de la toda la obra. Nosotros no somos nuestros padres, somos simples seres humanos que tenemos nuestro tiempo propio, el ahora, y no debemos permitir que ellos nos condicionen. Aplausos.
La lectura pasa luego por más reflexiones literarias, análisis de temas bíblicos, etc para arremeter sobre el final, nuevamente, sobre su autobiografía. Allí llegamos a un desenlace, en donde manifiesta su felicidad y su amor por su esposa e hijos. Declara que ya no es escritor. No le creemos.
“Fin”, el último de “Mi lucha” de Karl Ove Knausgard es diferente al resto. Si bien comienza, como los otros tomos con la descripción de su vida diaria lidiando entre los avatares de la vida familiar y las obligaciones como escritor reconocido, va mutando. El autor empieza a filosofar sobre la escritura y la autoficción; pasa a analizar a otros escritores del presente y el pasado; reflexiona sobre el “yo” y el “nosotros”.
A mitad de camino dedica un par de cientos de páginas a la vida de Hitler para señalar que su excepcionalidad y encarnación del mal sirve para distanciarnos y postular que, si bien lo abyecto está fuera de nosotros, somos en parte responsable de no reaccionar a tiempo. Muy interesante los análisis del noruego.
No están exentos los análisis de las relaciones padres-hijos, motor de la toda la obra. Nosotros no somos nuestros padres, somos simples seres humanos que tenemos nuestro tiempo propio, el ahora, y no debemos permitir que ellos nos condicionen. Aplausos.
La lectura pasa luego por más reflexiones literarias, análisis de temas bíblicos, etc para arremeter sobre el final, nuevamente, sobre su autobiografía. Allí llegamos a un desenlace, en donde manifiesta su felicidad y su amor por su esposa e hijos. Declara que ya no es escritor. No le creemos.
December 12, 2020
Vratio sam se da pročitam šta sam napisao pre godinu dana, kada sam pročitao prvu knjigu, šta su mi bili prvi utisci, i koji su tada bili najjači, i sada su.
Jedini pisac čije knjige mogu dugo da čitam čak i uveče kad sam umoran, što je za mene gotovo nemoguće, uglavnom ne mogu da izdržim duže od 5 minuta od momenta kad legnem dok ne zaspim. Stil koji nije škrt, kao kod ostalih norveških pisaca koje sam čitao, ali nije ni previše nakićen. Poređenja i opisi originalni, ali ne pretenciozni i nejasni. I uvek prisutna senka oca i osećaj da smo ga izneverili šta god postigli i uradili u životu.
Na to sam se upecao u prvoj knjizi, i to je sve i sad tu.
Ono što tada nisam pomenuo, a što me je vuklo ka knjigama je Knausgorova savršena mešavina svakodnevnice i "ozbiljnih" razmišljanja, slikarstva, književnosti, filozofije, istorije, muzike...ovo nije samo imalo rezultat da sam iz knjige izvukao dvostruku vrednost, u smislu da sam pored interesantne biografije čitao i mini eseje (ili maksi u slučaju onog o Hitleru), već je dobilo i jednu treću dimenziju - da sam za ovih godinu dana imao utisak da imam nevidljivog prijatelja sa kojim mogu da razgovaram o svemu, o čemu inače nisam mogao sa ovim "vidljivim", da od njega saznam nešto novo, potvrdim neki svoj stav, preispitam stav, ili se raspravljam sa njim kako ja neku pesmu nisam tako shvatio, ili kako Marks nije "to" mislio.
Jedini pisac čije knjige mogu dugo da čitam čak i uveče kad sam umoran, što je za mene gotovo nemoguće, uglavnom ne mogu da izdržim duže od 5 minuta od momenta kad legnem dok ne zaspim. Stil koji nije škrt, kao kod ostalih norveških pisaca koje sam čitao, ali nije ni previše nakićen. Poređenja i opisi originalni, ali ne pretenciozni i nejasni. I uvek prisutna senka oca i osećaj da smo ga izneverili šta god postigli i uradili u životu.
Na to sam se upecao u prvoj knjizi, i to je sve i sad tu.
Ono što tada nisam pomenuo, a što me je vuklo ka knjigama je Knausgorova savršena mešavina svakodnevnice i "ozbiljnih" razmišljanja, slikarstva, književnosti, filozofije, istorije, muzike...ovo nije samo imalo rezultat da sam iz knjige izvukao dvostruku vrednost, u smislu da sam pored interesantne biografije čitao i mini eseje (ili maksi u slučaju onog o Hitleru), već je dobilo i jednu treću dimenziju - da sam za ovih godinu dana imao utisak da imam nevidljivog prijatelja sa kojim mogu da razgovaram o svemu, o čemu inače nisam mogao sa ovim "vidljivim", da od njega saznam nešto novo, potvrdim neki svoj stav, preispitam stav, ili se raspravljam sa njim kako ja neku pesmu nisam tako shvatio, ili kako Marks nije "to" mislio.
December 10, 2018
"There is something all of us experience, which is the same for all human beings, I replied, but which nonetheless is seldom conveyed apart from in the private sphere."
- Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle 6 (the End)
It feels weird to be done with this book (this book 6 specificalyl, but the larger book too: vol 1-6). It seems once you've crossed over into the Karl Ove Knausgård line, into his private sphere, you almost expect to ALWAYS be there. This year I've finished another series of his books (his Seasons Encyclopedia) while waiting for Book 6 to come out. I'm not a completist, but he's become someone like Vollmann or DeLillo or Roth who I will keep reading, keep chasing until one of us dies and there are no more words left.
It is hard to put a finger on why. There are better prose writers. Proust writes better. But Knausgård's success with me and with other readers points (and our willingness to read 3600 pages of narrative about his worries, obscessions, family troubles, drinking habits, home life, kids, etc., shows that something about his experiment worked. He hit a nerve with something. If you've spent any time reading biography or memoirs or ficiton you can't NOT understand that all memoir is ficiton and all ficiton is memoir. Knausgård however isn't trying to defend his memoir as true or his fiction as fiction. He's saying that while the facts might be wrong in parts, names changed, the story is emotionally true. The books is how his past, his father's death, his experience as a Father and a Son resonated with him personally. He is saying that if he has to shade something or highlight something else to make it READ as he experienced it, he's fine with that.
But why? The middle 400 pages or middle 1/3 of the last book and the title gives it away. In this section Knausgård includes a huge section on Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' along with other texts in order to show that in the modern age, or ability to NOT see the other (he often uses the they) is exactly what allowed (or one of the major contributions that allowed) the Holocaust to happen. If we could SEE the other better, not just how they want to be seen, and not just at good moments, but in darkness and pain and suffering; we could avoid repeating the atrocity of the Holocaust again. We needed to occasioanlly jump beyond the social and cultural; merge the I and the you. A stretch? Perhaps. Knausgård even referred to this essay in the book:
"The Mein Kampf essay became more important when I spoke about it, in particular, it sounded good, four hundred pages about prewar Vienna, Weimar between the wars, how times and psychology, art and politics are closely linked, and the formula for all things human, I-you-we-they-it, this was easy to talk about and had an aura of significance in that context" (971).
Anyway, I enjoyed it. Spent a week reading it. The book has flags justing out all over as I tried to make sense of not just Book 6, but the whole project and what it meant exactly to me. I don't think I "enjoyed" it as much as Proust. I don't think it will, long-term, be as important as Proust, but in this sphere we live now.
Anyway, I liked it. It exhusted me. I'm happy to be back to the drama and the challenges of my family. I'll leave Knausgård to deal with his. I'll deal with mine. Perhaps, I'll find it easier to cross the boundary in the future after Knausgård's big experiment here. And perhaps, that does make this ART and might even make it important.
- Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle 6 (the End)
It feels weird to be done with this book (this book 6 specificalyl, but the larger book too: vol 1-6). It seems once you've crossed over into the Karl Ove Knausgård line, into his private sphere, you almost expect to ALWAYS be there. This year I've finished another series of his books (his Seasons Encyclopedia) while waiting for Book 6 to come out. I'm not a completist, but he's become someone like Vollmann or DeLillo or Roth who I will keep reading, keep chasing until one of us dies and there are no more words left.
It is hard to put a finger on why. There are better prose writers. Proust writes better. But Knausgård's success with me and with other readers points (and our willingness to read 3600 pages of narrative about his worries, obscessions, family troubles, drinking habits, home life, kids, etc., shows that something about his experiment worked. He hit a nerve with something. If you've spent any time reading biography or memoirs or ficiton you can't NOT understand that all memoir is ficiton and all ficiton is memoir. Knausgård however isn't trying to defend his memoir as true or his fiction as fiction. He's saying that while the facts might be wrong in parts, names changed, the story is emotionally true. The books is how his past, his father's death, his experience as a Father and a Son resonated with him personally. He is saying that if he has to shade something or highlight something else to make it READ as he experienced it, he's fine with that.
But why? The middle 400 pages or middle 1/3 of the last book and the title gives it away. In this section Knausgård includes a huge section on Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' along with other texts in order to show that in the modern age, or ability to NOT see the other (he often uses the they) is exactly what allowed (or one of the major contributions that allowed) the Holocaust to happen. If we could SEE the other better, not just how they want to be seen, and not just at good moments, but in darkness and pain and suffering; we could avoid repeating the atrocity of the Holocaust again. We needed to occasioanlly jump beyond the social and cultural; merge the I and the you. A stretch? Perhaps. Knausgård even referred to this essay in the book:
"The Mein Kampf essay became more important when I spoke about it, in particular, it sounded good, four hundred pages about prewar Vienna, Weimar between the wars, how times and psychology, art and politics are closely linked, and the formula for all things human, I-you-we-they-it, this was easy to talk about and had an aura of significance in that context" (971).
Anyway, I enjoyed it. Spent a week reading it. The book has flags justing out all over as I tried to make sense of not just Book 6, but the whole project and what it meant exactly to me. I don't think I "enjoyed" it as much as Proust. I don't think it will, long-term, be as important as Proust, but in this sphere we live now.
Anyway, I liked it. It exhusted me. I'm happy to be back to the drama and the challenges of my family. I'll leave Knausgård to deal with his. I'll deal with mine. Perhaps, I'll find it easier to cross the boundary in the future after Knausgård's big experiment here. And perhaps, that does make this ART and might even make it important.
May 19, 2020
U trenutku nakon završetka čitanja hiljadustraničnog završnog čina ove mamutske, jedinstvene i po svemu posebne edicije stiglo mi je facebook obaveštenje o tome da se obeležava dve decenije od izlaska Binaural-a, šestog albuma Pearl Jam-a, objektivno govoreći ni po čemu spektakularne ploče, mada odlične, ali za mene izrazito važne. Beše to njihov prvi album sa kojim sam se susreo onako kako treba, baš u trenutku kad je izašao (prethodne albume slušao sam naravno sa zakašnjenjem bivajući premlad da ih ukačim). Iščitao sam domaće i inostrane recenzije, behu uglavnom blagonaklone mada umereno euforične, kupio bugarsku verziju pirata i slušao je mesecima, neprestano. Tih album, poluumirujući, hipnotišuć, i iz mog ugla trodelni; uvodne tri numere koje kotrljaju i režu onako kako to uvod zahteva, centralni deo od Light years do Insignificance koji je potpuno remek delo, i završnih sedam numera koje je teško opisati, izlomljene, čudne i beskonačno neobjašnjive. Binaural je u suštini zaokružio prvi život tog benda, onaj najlepši, onaj koji je stvorio većinu važnog, upakovan u šest ploča koje su definisale deceniju poslednje mračne i autentične gitarske i garažne generacije koja je nakon toga nestala. Slušam ga opet. Divan je. Predivan.
Nekoliko sati nakon završetka čitanja hiljadustraničnog završnog čina ove mamutske, jedinstvene i po svemu posebne edicije koja je demistifikovala književnost, ogolila njene zidove, forme, stvaralačka pravila, obesmislila snagu stilskih figura, prenesenih značenja, alternativnih svetova, skrivenih biografskih motiva, koja je svakog čitaoca umesto bega od stvarnosti naterala da uđe direktno u nju, u samo srce iste, pa još dublje, dokle uopšte može da se ide, pa malo preko toga, verovatno svakog na svoj način, a oca troje dece sa sličnim dnevnim ritmom kao i sam pisac posebno blisko, zapravo nemam šta da kažem.
Stojim razoružan i ćutim. I ćutim dok Binaural ulazi u onu izlomljenu fazu koja kreće od Off the girl.
Ovo je svakako najvažnija i najbolja knjiga koju možete pročitati ove godine. Čak ni ne zahteva upoznavanje sa ranijim tomovima. Uradite li to, ispunićete godišnje kvote saznajnih procesa u toliko kategorija, od valjane književnosti Handkea, Gombroviča i večno prisutnog Hamsuna, savršene esejistike koja razobličava Hitlerovu knjigu istog naslova, i čitav koncept nacizma, homerove antike, preko savršene filozofske studije, zaključno sa nekontrolisanim izlivima porodične ljubavi duboko autentičnog, skromnog i tihog oca i muža na kraju.
Spektakularan završetak edicije.
Nekoliko sati nakon završetka čitanja hiljadustraničnog završnog čina ove mamutske, jedinstvene i po svemu posebne edicije koja je demistifikovala književnost, ogolila njene zidove, forme, stvaralačka pravila, obesmislila snagu stilskih figura, prenesenih značenja, alternativnih svetova, skrivenih biografskih motiva, koja je svakog čitaoca umesto bega od stvarnosti naterala da uđe direktno u nju, u samo srce iste, pa još dublje, dokle uopšte može da se ide, pa malo preko toga, verovatno svakog na svoj način, a oca troje dece sa sličnim dnevnim ritmom kao i sam pisac posebno blisko, zapravo nemam šta da kažem.
Stojim razoružan i ćutim. I ćutim dok Binaural ulazi u onu izlomljenu fazu koja kreće od Off the girl.
Ovo je svakako najvažnija i najbolja knjiga koju možete pročitati ove godine. Čak ni ne zahteva upoznavanje sa ranijim tomovima. Uradite li to, ispunićete godišnje kvote saznajnih procesa u toliko kategorija, od valjane književnosti Handkea, Gombroviča i večno prisutnog Hamsuna, savršene esejistike koja razobličava Hitlerovu knjigu istog naslova, i čitav koncept nacizma, homerove antike, preko savršene filozofske studije, zaključno sa nekontrolisanim izlivima porodične ljubavi duboko autentičnog, skromnog i tihog oca i muža na kraju.
Spektakularan završetak edicije.
January 3, 2024
Als ik kijk naar de Goodreads-statistiek van deze 6-delige Noorse autobiografische serie is de overkoepelende titel Mijn strijd goed gekozen. Het lijkt er sterk op dat veel lezers een innerlijke strijd voeren bij de beslissing om door te gaan naar het volgende deel of af te haken.
Mijn-strijdcijfers
Een blik op de cijfers uit Goodreads leert me dat Vader/deel 1 door ruim 33.000 personen werd gelezen en het laatste deel slechts door 10% van de lezers van deel 1 (uitgaand van een lineaire leesrichting van 1 naar 6).
Vader (4,1) - 33.396 lezers
Liefde (4,3) - 16.076 lezers
Zoon (4,2) - 10.212 lezers
Nacht (4,2) - 8.372 lezers
Schrijver (4,4) - 6.814 lezers
Vrouw (4,1) - 3.761 lezers
tussen haakjes gemiddelde rating en lezers = totaal aantal ratings.
Vastloper
Nieuwsgierig gemaakt door een lovende recensie van het boekenpanel in De Wereld Draait Door begon ik aan deel 1 van de serie. De belofte van de vijf boekwinkeliers werd volledig waargemaakt. Een rauw en indrukwekkend boek vond ik het.
Het tweede deel waarin Knausgard zijn eerste en laatste liefde deelt vond ik mooi en grappig maar hier en daar ook wat saai: iets teveel scènes met kinderwagens, luiers en kinderverjaardagen.
Van het 3e deel kan ik me niets meer herinneren. Alleen dat ik voortijdig ben uitgestapt en het oranje boek heb verkocht, op de jaarlijkse rommelmarkt in het straatje waar ik woonde.
Van 3 naar 6
Waarom heb ik de draad in 2020 weer opgepakt? En waarom met deel 6 en niet met 4? Ik was al afgehaakt en niet van plan om nog meer delen te lezen. Totdat ik las wat Goodreaders Arne-Jan, Chris, Tonny en niet te vergeten Sini van deel 6 hadden gevonden.
Wat ik van deel 6 vond
Vrouw, het laatste en omvangrijkste deel uit de serie vond ik soms wat te breed uitwaaierend en het essay over Hitler en Mein kampf wat lomp tussengevoegd. Maar omdat Knausgard in de laatste 200 pagina's alle losse eindjes aan elkaar knoopt en het verhaal ook een onverwachte wending krijgt sla ik het dikste deel uit de cyclus toch met bewondering en verbazing dicht.
...En ga ik de gemiste delen (3,4 en 5) nog inhalen? Het zou maar zo kunnen. Ik houd Marktplaats in 2021 nauwlettend in de gaten.
Deel 5 staat te wachten
Op 21 januari 2021 ontving ik via de post een tweedehands gebonden exemplaar van Nacht/deel 5. Ik verwacht dat ik daarna deel 4 -het minst realistische deel verklapt Knausgard op pagina 907 van deel 6- nog ga lezen.
Mijn-strijdcijfers
Een blik op de cijfers uit Goodreads leert me dat Vader/deel 1 door ruim 33.000 personen werd gelezen en het laatste deel slechts door 10% van de lezers van deel 1 (uitgaand van een lineaire leesrichting van 1 naar 6).
Vader (4,1) - 33.396 lezers
Liefde (4,3) - 16.076 lezers
Zoon (4,2) - 10.212 lezers
Nacht (4,2) - 8.372 lezers
Schrijver (4,4) - 6.814 lezers
Vrouw (4,1) - 3.761 lezers
tussen haakjes gemiddelde rating en lezers = totaal aantal ratings.
Vastloper
Nieuwsgierig gemaakt door een lovende recensie van het boekenpanel in De Wereld Draait Door begon ik aan deel 1 van de serie. De belofte van de vijf boekwinkeliers werd volledig waargemaakt. Een rauw en indrukwekkend boek vond ik het.
Het tweede deel waarin Knausgard zijn eerste en laatste liefde deelt vond ik mooi en grappig maar hier en daar ook wat saai: iets teveel scènes met kinderwagens, luiers en kinderverjaardagen.
Van het 3e deel kan ik me niets meer herinneren. Alleen dat ik voortijdig ben uitgestapt en het oranje boek heb verkocht, op de jaarlijkse rommelmarkt in het straatje waar ik woonde.
Van 3 naar 6
Waarom heb ik de draad in 2020 weer opgepakt? En waarom met deel 6 en niet met 4? Ik was al afgehaakt en niet van plan om nog meer delen te lezen. Totdat ik las wat Goodreaders Arne-Jan, Chris, Tonny en niet te vergeten Sini van deel 6 hadden gevonden.
Wat ik van deel 6 vond
Vrouw, het laatste en omvangrijkste deel uit de serie vond ik soms wat te breed uitwaaierend en het essay over Hitler en Mein kampf wat lomp tussengevoegd. Maar omdat Knausgard in de laatste 200 pagina's alle losse eindjes aan elkaar knoopt en het verhaal ook een onverwachte wending krijgt sla ik het dikste deel uit de cyclus toch met bewondering en verbazing dicht.
...En ga ik de gemiste delen (3,4 en 5) nog inhalen? Het zou maar zo kunnen. Ik houd Marktplaats in 2021 nauwlettend in de gaten.
Deel 5 staat te wachten
Op 21 januari 2021 ontving ik via de post een tweedehands gebonden exemplaar van Nacht/deel 5. Ik verwacht dat ik daarna deel 4 -het minst realistische deel verklapt Knausgard op pagina 907 van deel 6- nog ga lezen.
August 31, 2021
Και ήρθε το τέλος του Τέλους. 1.200 σελίδες αυτό το έκτο βιβλίο. Τι να πω... Είμαι Καρλουβίτσα. Κατάφερε ο Καρλ Ούβε και με έβαλε στη ζωή του, στο μυαλό του. Κι εγώ τον έβαλα στην καρδιά μου. Ήταν ένα μεγάλο και ενδιαφέρον ταξίδι.
Θεωρώ πως για να διαβαστεί αυτό το βιβλίο θα πρέπει να έχουν διαβαστεί και τα προηγούμενα πέντε αλλιώς δεν θα μπορέσει να καταλάβει ο αναγνώστης αρκετά πράγματα. Ένα μεγάλο μέρος του βιβλίου μιλά για τον Χίτλερ και την αυτοβιογραφία του. Έμαθα πολλά, ίσως με κούρασε εκείνο το κομμάτι σε κάποιες στιγμές, όμως άξιζε τον κόπο.
Τώρα τι θα κάνω; Τι θα διαβάσω; Μου λείπει ήδη.
Θεωρώ πως για να διαβαστεί αυτό το βιβλίο θα πρέπει να έχουν διαβαστεί και τα προηγούμενα πέντε αλλιώς δεν θα μπορέσει να καταλάβει ο αναγνώστης αρκετά πράγματα. Ένα μεγάλο μέρος του βιβλίου μιλά για τον Χίτλερ και την αυτοβιογραφία του. Έμαθα πολλά, ίσως με κούρασε εκείνο το κομμάτι σε κάποιες στιγμές, όμως άξιζε τον κόπο.
Τώρα τι θα κάνω; Τι θα διαβάσω; Μου λείπει ήδη.
June 3, 2025
Well, he did it; somehow he made a 1,250-page novel work, even with a 450-page essay in the middle.
It seems clear to me that Knausgaard was forced into this sitation by his six-book contract with his publisher; in an ideal eight-book sequence, 'Book 6' should have focused on Gunnar and the reception of the first book (4oo pages), 'Book 7' should have focused on Linda et al. and their reception of the later books (400 pages), and 'Book 8' should have been the capstone essay on Celan/Hitler (450 pages). But, as I said, it does somehow work; I wonder if Knausgaard had Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve in mind, as he’s a big fan of Proust -- the same idea of combining a novel with a related (and quite lengthy) literary essay.
In this theoretical eight-book sequence, 'Book 6' and 'Book 7' are on par with the high quality of Books 1 and 2, finding beauty in the quotidian, etc.; his descriptions of family life included some curiously ‘meta’ experiences, in my case -- there was a point last month where I was making breakfast for my three small children while reading a description of Knausgaard making breakfast for his three small children (!).
I also found the spiraling meta-meta-meta timeline of the end of the book to be mildly amusing, e.g. where Knausgaard includes an account of a stop on his book tour for Book 6 in the book itself (this is probably a first for world literature?) and catches us up on the pre-publication process until on the final page he actually writes “I am now finished writing the novel” . . . lol.
It was also interesting to learn more about the genesis and reception of the earlier novels; for example, the somehow unsurprising fact that he wrote Book 5 in eight weeks (?!); similar to Faulkner writing As I Lay Dying in a few weeks in the evenings, after working at his full-time job all day, I guess some artists are just different than the rest of us.
Generally speaking, the first thing that struck me is that I take Knausgaard a bit more seriously now; I had thought of him as somewhat of a savant who had halfway-innocently stumbled upon the next step in fiction without 100% understanding why/how he had done it, but really I had just been tricked by his self-presentation of “gosh, I'm just a humble self-doubting writer experiencing the world and talking about things naively, I'm so incompetent and unworthy of your attention, but I guess I'll try to pull something together,” where actually this is (as evidenced by Book 6) clearly untrue, given his deep familiarity with all recent European literature as well as the strength of the Hitler essay.
Also the impressiveness of Book 6 really drove home to me the absurdity of various reviewers who have dismissed My Struggle as ‘airport reading,’ as too ‘easy to read,’ and so on; I don't know of any tactful way to put this, but if you think that Knausgaard has published lazy, easy prose that anyone can write, then you are confused about how writing works, and you have also failed to see how carefully crafted his writing is. Yes, it's very limpid and very easy to read; it is also very, very good. Combining “easy to read” and “very, very good” is almost impossible, which is at least partially why so many authors use self-conscious literary language. Anyone can see that Joyce is a good writer, it's obvious from one sentence; I'll grant that it's not quite as immediately obvious with Knausgaard how good the prose is, sure, but it should definitely be clear to any reader after a few chapters. Also, Knausgaard is perfectly capable of writing standard literary poetic prose (see A Time for Everything), but has simply chosen not to in this case. Proust and Joyce and Gaddis are very good writers; Le Guin and Lagerkvist and Knausgaard are also very good writers, despite writing in a more unassuming style.
* * *
So, okay, this Hitler essay . . . honestly it was hard for me to believe that this topic -- a very, very played-out topic that I’ve probably read too many books about -- could possibly be made fresh or interesting in any way. Also it was hilarious trying to explain it to my wife, who has been hearing me talk about Min Kamp for a couple weeks per year over the course of, actually, our entire marriage by this point: "So the Norwegian guy” -- she also calls him 'Car Love Knapsack' -- “is writing an essay about Hitler now? I thought that was supposed to be a novel about his life?"
So I have to explain that, well, yes, 3,000 pages into an autobiographical novel, in the midst of a painstaking 150-page description of grocery shopping with his kids and his friend Geir, Knausgaard abruptly segues into a 450-page analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the context of totalitarianism/art/culture in early twentieth-century Germany, and that this essay is not only incredibly engrossing, but I literally wish he would go on writing about the topic for longer. It is hard to believe.
Unfortunately, while the Hitler essay itself is very good, the preceding Celan analysis and interstitial bits of theology and philosophy are awkward and amateurish. I was particularly unimpressed by basically everything he said about Hamlet, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, the Romantic “I,” the Utøya massacre, Christianity, etc. These bits reminded me of James Wood trying to write a novel (behold, the worst novel ever written by a great literary critic); Knausgaard is very talented and he can obviously write great nonfiction as long as he sticks to something that he knows well, but he does not know most of these topics well. Somehow these belles lettres sections ‘worked’ in Books 1 and 2, I suppose because in brief 5-10 page interludes they really add something to the narrative (i.e. his meditations on death in Book 1, his analysis of Swedish culture in Book 2), but not so much here.
While the essay is quite good overall, in these instances I was reminded of nothing more than an eager undergraduate talking to you at a party at 3 a.m. who is very very focused on imparting some random halfway-specious chains of reasoning -- “but see, it's like angels in the Old Testament! And it's like where Heidegger said this thing once about language! And you know, death in Joyce! it's all connected!” -- and you’re just nodding along, saying “oh yeah, totally,” while also trying to quickly finish your beer so you can escape.
I was also incredibly irritated by Knausgaard stating, repeatedly, that Heidegger was a committed Nazi, which just shows that he hasn’t really done the reading; Heidegger, who was somewhat naïve politically, briefly joined the Nazi party in 1933-34 with the aim of helping to shape it into something far better than it was (a noble goal, certainly) and realized very quickly -- far more quickly than many of his peers -- that the party was not redeemable, at which point he consistently (and as carefully as possible without getting arrested) attacked Nazi principles in his lectures up through the 1940s. Knausgaard is surprised that Celan visited Heidegger after WW2, but in fact this is not at all surprising, because, again, Heidegger was not a Nazi.
Thankfully, however, with the Hitler essay itself, you could tell that in this case Knausgaard had actual expertise and had done the reading, there wasn’t an “eager undergraduate playing with concepts” vibe but rather this was a serious essay, a book-length essay that could easily be published as a successful monograph. It is difficult for me to put it into words without my usual awkward adverb-laden superlatives or whatever, but I can’t remember being so captivated and impressed by a piece of nonfiction writing probably since reading DFW’s essays back in 2005.
Also, even though I knew that it was coming, I seriously felt like the cop in the interview room at the end of The Usual Suspects, looking from wall to wall and realizing that Keyser Soze has been sneakily leading me up to this point all along. It was right there in the title of the book, even! It turns out that Min Kamp was not, in fact, an accidental or ill-advised borrowing of the title of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (as the early reviewers argued). Rather, Knausgaard has been very intentionally writing the precise opposite of Hitler’s book all along.
What is Mein Kampf? Well, as Knausgaard explains, “the book takes the form of a bildungsroman, in which we follow the author from birth, through the first character-shaping years of childhood, through his teenage years and into adulthood” (!), in which we learn that the author hated his domineering and cruel father (!), idolized his mother (!), was trapped in a petit-bourgeois mindset and yet strove to escape it through art (!), had problems forming relationships with others (!), exalted and elevated women and had anxiety in their company (!) . . . in other words, to say the least, as Knausgaard writes on page 888, “Hitler’s youth resembles my own.”
However, what are the shortcomings of Hitler’s book, besides the obvious? Well, the fact that he “makes himself one with his politics, makes himself one with his role . . . invariably, the personal experiences he describes are hooked up to the political, and if the book has any biographical axis at all, it is considered from such a remote distance that everything personal and private, relating only to him, to his own person and character, the idiosyncratic, vanishes from sight.”
Ultimately, the horrors of Nazism were “made possible by a shift in the language, displayed in its purest form in Mein Kampf, which” – and here Knausgaard borrows from his Celan analysis – “contains no ‘you,' only an 'I,' and a 'we,' which is what makes possible to turn 'they' into 'it.' In 'you' was decency. In 'it' was evil."
And to this, what does Knausgaard’s Min Kamp say, repeatedly and earnestly? “I am you." Knausgaard emphasizes that “the yearning for reality, for the authentic, and for nature is not dangerous. The dangerous force of Nazism was the exact opposite, remoteness to the world and the regimentation of the human that all ideological thinking creates."
And so, again, what does Min Kamp express, repeatedly? Precisely the opposite of Mein Kampf, i.e., the truth of art, where we “stand up close to each individual, so close as to hear each name as it is whispered, to look into each pair of eyes, where the soul of every human is revealed, unique and inalienable, and listen attentively to the story of a day in the life of each and every one of them, a day in the company of loved ones, families, and friends . . ." DING DING DING.
In other words, this shaggy 4,000-page autobiographical novel, where a Norwegian man writes beautifully and sincerely about his friends, his kids, his writing career, his hopes, his fears, has, all along, been a conscious artistic refutation of the style and content of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Hitler focuses on the abstract, remote ‘I,’ the social ‘we,’ he turns ‘you’ into ‘they’ and ‘it’; Knausgaard does the exact opposite. Mein Kampf has two lines describing “the happiest year” of Hitler’s childhood; Min Kamp has 500 pages describing the happiest year of Knausgaard’s childhood.
(And yes, it’s fair to say that it does seem, at some level, a little inappropriate for Knausgaard to place his own autobiography in the context of Hitler and the Shoah, like it’s almost a step too far, but I think that he mostly makes the case for this not being absurd.)
Entirely apart from his autobiographical inversion of Hitler’s text, Knausgaard also writes a powerful (if not completely original) analysis of the very everydayness of Nazism itself: "what happened was not inhuman at all, but human, and that this is what makes it so terrible and so closely bound up with our own selves . . . if we view Hitler as a 'bad' person, with categorically negative characteristics even as a child and a young man, all pointing toward subsequently escalating 'evil,' then Hitler is of 'the other,' and surely not of us . . . only his innocence can bring his guilt into relief."
Knausgaard also describes, in some of his strongest passages, the appeal that Nazism had for the German people in 1933 and 1934, arguments that echo Orwell’s review of Mein Kampf, probably my favorite essay by him, which concludes, much in line with Knausgaard’s analysis:
Anyway I’m mostly just bummed out that the journey is over, no more Min Kamp. You’ve been taken on this epic journey through Knausgaard’s life, but then suddenly he's let you off the train. Bits and pieces of his post-2011 life have been mentioned in the news, of course, such as his recent divorce, which is an unfortunate addendum to his account at the end of Book 6; also his book Spring serves as a quasi-appendix to Book 6, but somehow the reader is left wanting more. As crazy as this might sound, if Knausgaard were to publish another 15,000 pages of Min Kamp, releasing one book per year for the next thirty years, I would read all of it with zero hesitation.
It seems clear to me that Knausgaard was forced into this sitation by his six-book contract with his publisher; in an ideal eight-book sequence, 'Book 6' should have focused on Gunnar and the reception of the first book (4oo pages), 'Book 7' should have focused on Linda et al. and their reception of the later books (400 pages), and 'Book 8' should have been the capstone essay on Celan/Hitler (450 pages). But, as I said, it does somehow work; I wonder if Knausgaard had Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve in mind, as he’s a big fan of Proust -- the same idea of combining a novel with a related (and quite lengthy) literary essay.
In this theoretical eight-book sequence, 'Book 6' and 'Book 7' are on par with the high quality of Books 1 and 2, finding beauty in the quotidian, etc.; his descriptions of family life included some curiously ‘meta’ experiences, in my case -- there was a point last month where I was making breakfast for my three small children while reading a description of Knausgaard making breakfast for his three small children (!).
I also found the spiraling meta-meta-meta timeline of the end of the book to be mildly amusing, e.g. where Knausgaard includes an account of a stop on his book tour for Book 6 in the book itself (this is probably a first for world literature?) and catches us up on the pre-publication process until on the final page he actually writes “I am now finished writing the novel” . . . lol.
It was also interesting to learn more about the genesis and reception of the earlier novels; for example, the somehow unsurprising fact that he wrote Book 5 in eight weeks (?!); similar to Faulkner writing As I Lay Dying in a few weeks in the evenings, after working at his full-time job all day, I guess some artists are just different than the rest of us.
Generally speaking, the first thing that struck me is that I take Knausgaard a bit more seriously now; I had thought of him as somewhat of a savant who had halfway-innocently stumbled upon the next step in fiction without 100% understanding why/how he had done it, but really I had just been tricked by his self-presentation of “gosh, I'm just a humble self-doubting writer experiencing the world and talking about things naively, I'm so incompetent and unworthy of your attention, but I guess I'll try to pull something together,” where actually this is (as evidenced by Book 6) clearly untrue, given his deep familiarity with all recent European literature as well as the strength of the Hitler essay.
Also the impressiveness of Book 6 really drove home to me the absurdity of various reviewers who have dismissed My Struggle as ‘airport reading,’ as too ‘easy to read,’ and so on; I don't know of any tactful way to put this, but if you think that Knausgaard has published lazy, easy prose that anyone can write, then you are confused about how writing works, and you have also failed to see how carefully crafted his writing is. Yes, it's very limpid and very easy to read; it is also very, very good. Combining “easy to read” and “very, very good” is almost impossible, which is at least partially why so many authors use self-conscious literary language. Anyone can see that Joyce is a good writer, it's obvious from one sentence; I'll grant that it's not quite as immediately obvious with Knausgaard how good the prose is, sure, but it should definitely be clear to any reader after a few chapters. Also, Knausgaard is perfectly capable of writing standard literary poetic prose (see A Time for Everything), but has simply chosen not to in this case. Proust and Joyce and Gaddis are very good writers; Le Guin and Lagerkvist and Knausgaard are also very good writers, despite writing in a more unassuming style.
* * *
So, okay, this Hitler essay . . . honestly it was hard for me to believe that this topic -- a very, very played-out topic that I’ve probably read too many books about -- could possibly be made fresh or interesting in any way. Also it was hilarious trying to explain it to my wife, who has been hearing me talk about Min Kamp for a couple weeks per year over the course of, actually, our entire marriage by this point: "So the Norwegian guy” -- she also calls him 'Car Love Knapsack' -- “is writing an essay about Hitler now? I thought that was supposed to be a novel about his life?"
So I have to explain that, well, yes, 3,000 pages into an autobiographical novel, in the midst of a painstaking 150-page description of grocery shopping with his kids and his friend Geir, Knausgaard abruptly segues into a 450-page analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the context of totalitarianism/art/culture in early twentieth-century Germany, and that this essay is not only incredibly engrossing, but I literally wish he would go on writing about the topic for longer. It is hard to believe.
Unfortunately, while the Hitler essay itself is very good, the preceding Celan analysis and interstitial bits of theology and philosophy are awkward and amateurish. I was particularly unimpressed by basically everything he said about Hamlet, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, the Romantic “I,” the Utøya massacre, Christianity, etc. These bits reminded me of James Wood trying to write a novel (behold, the worst novel ever written by a great literary critic); Knausgaard is very talented and he can obviously write great nonfiction as long as he sticks to something that he knows well, but he does not know most of these topics well. Somehow these belles lettres sections ‘worked’ in Books 1 and 2, I suppose because in brief 5-10 page interludes they really add something to the narrative (i.e. his meditations on death in Book 1, his analysis of Swedish culture in Book 2), but not so much here.
While the essay is quite good overall, in these instances I was reminded of nothing more than an eager undergraduate talking to you at a party at 3 a.m. who is very very focused on imparting some random halfway-specious chains of reasoning -- “but see, it's like angels in the Old Testament! And it's like where Heidegger said this thing once about language! And you know, death in Joyce! it's all connected!” -- and you’re just nodding along, saying “oh yeah, totally,” while also trying to quickly finish your beer so you can escape.
I was also incredibly irritated by Knausgaard stating, repeatedly, that Heidegger was a committed Nazi, which just shows that he hasn’t really done the reading; Heidegger, who was somewhat naïve politically, briefly joined the Nazi party in 1933-34 with the aim of helping to shape it into something far better than it was (a noble goal, certainly) and realized very quickly -- far more quickly than many of his peers -- that the party was not redeemable, at which point he consistently (and as carefully as possible without getting arrested) attacked Nazi principles in his lectures up through the 1940s. Knausgaard is surprised that Celan visited Heidegger after WW2, but in fact this is not at all surprising, because, again, Heidegger was not a Nazi.
Thankfully, however, with the Hitler essay itself, you could tell that in this case Knausgaard had actual expertise and had done the reading, there wasn’t an “eager undergraduate playing with concepts” vibe but rather this was a serious essay, a book-length essay that could easily be published as a successful monograph. It is difficult for me to put it into words without my usual awkward adverb-laden superlatives or whatever, but I can’t remember being so captivated and impressed by a piece of nonfiction writing probably since reading DFW’s essays back in 2005.
Also, even though I knew that it was coming, I seriously felt like the cop in the interview room at the end of The Usual Suspects, looking from wall to wall and realizing that Keyser Soze has been sneakily leading me up to this point all along. It was right there in the title of the book, even! It turns out that Min Kamp was not, in fact, an accidental or ill-advised borrowing of the title of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (as the early reviewers argued). Rather, Knausgaard has been very intentionally writing the precise opposite of Hitler’s book all along.
What is Mein Kampf? Well, as Knausgaard explains, “the book takes the form of a bildungsroman, in which we follow the author from birth, through the first character-shaping years of childhood, through his teenage years and into adulthood” (!), in which we learn that the author hated his domineering and cruel father (!), idolized his mother (!), was trapped in a petit-bourgeois mindset and yet strove to escape it through art (!), had problems forming relationships with others (!), exalted and elevated women and had anxiety in their company (!) . . . in other words, to say the least, as Knausgaard writes on page 888, “Hitler’s youth resembles my own.”
However, what are the shortcomings of Hitler’s book, besides the obvious? Well, the fact that he “makes himself one with his politics, makes himself one with his role . . . invariably, the personal experiences he describes are hooked up to the political, and if the book has any biographical axis at all, it is considered from such a remote distance that everything personal and private, relating only to him, to his own person and character, the idiosyncratic, vanishes from sight.”
Ultimately, the horrors of Nazism were “made possible by a shift in the language, displayed in its purest form in Mein Kampf, which” – and here Knausgaard borrows from his Celan analysis – “contains no ‘you,' only an 'I,' and a 'we,' which is what makes possible to turn 'they' into 'it.' In 'you' was decency. In 'it' was evil."
And to this, what does Knausgaard’s Min Kamp say, repeatedly and earnestly? “I am you." Knausgaard emphasizes that “the yearning for reality, for the authentic, and for nature is not dangerous. The dangerous force of Nazism was the exact opposite, remoteness to the world and the regimentation of the human that all ideological thinking creates."
And so, again, what does Min Kamp express, repeatedly? Precisely the opposite of Mein Kampf, i.e., the truth of art, where we “stand up close to each individual, so close as to hear each name as it is whispered, to look into each pair of eyes, where the soul of every human is revealed, unique and inalienable, and listen attentively to the story of a day in the life of each and every one of them, a day in the company of loved ones, families, and friends . . ." DING DING DING.
In other words, this shaggy 4,000-page autobiographical novel, where a Norwegian man writes beautifully and sincerely about his friends, his kids, his writing career, his hopes, his fears, has, all along, been a conscious artistic refutation of the style and content of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Hitler focuses on the abstract, remote ‘I,’ the social ‘we,’ he turns ‘you’ into ‘they’ and ‘it’; Knausgaard does the exact opposite. Mein Kampf has two lines describing “the happiest year” of Hitler’s childhood; Min Kamp has 500 pages describing the happiest year of Knausgaard’s childhood.
(And yes, it’s fair to say that it does seem, at some level, a little inappropriate for Knausgaard to place his own autobiography in the context of Hitler and the Shoah, like it’s almost a step too far, but I think that he mostly makes the case for this not being absurd.)
Entirely apart from his autobiographical inversion of Hitler’s text, Knausgaard also writes a powerful (if not completely original) analysis of the very everydayness of Nazism itself: "what happened was not inhuman at all, but human, and that this is what makes it so terrible and so closely bound up with our own selves . . . if we view Hitler as a 'bad' person, with categorically negative characteristics even as a child and a young man, all pointing toward subsequently escalating 'evil,' then Hitler is of 'the other,' and surely not of us . . . only his innocence can bring his guilt into relief."
Knausgaard also describes, in some of his strongest passages, the appeal that Nazism had for the German people in 1933 and 1934, arguments that echo Orwell’s review of Mein Kampf, probably my favorite essay by him, which concludes, much in line with Knausgaard’s analysis:
Hitler has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,’’ Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
Anyway I’m mostly just bummed out that the journey is over, no more Min Kamp. You’ve been taken on this epic journey through Knausgaard’s life, but then suddenly he's let you off the train. Bits and pieces of his post-2011 life have been mentioned in the news, of course, such as his recent divorce, which is an unfortunate addendum to his account at the end of Book 6; also his book Spring serves as a quasi-appendix to Book 6, but somehow the reader is left wanting more. As crazy as this might sound, if Knausgaard were to publish another 15,000 pages of Min Kamp, releasing one book per year for the next thirty years, I would read all of it with zero hesitation.
April 1, 2020
(1) Eccolo, il capitolo finale. Allo stesso tempo tremendamente affascinante e assolutamente respingente.
(2) Seguito ideale del secondo volume. Si apre a ridosso della pubblicazione del primo volume fino alla pubblicazione di questo. Knausgård e sua moglie Linda abitano al sesto piano di un appartamento nel centro di Malmö. Con loro i tre figli piccoli, Vanja, Heidi e John. Ogni giorno Karl Ove tenta di preservare il tempo per la scrittura mentre fa doverosamente colazione con i figli, li accompagna alla scuola materna, fa shopping. Sappiamo di ogni pannolino cambiato, ogni sigaretta fumata sul balcone, ogni tazza di caffè versata, della spesa al supermercato descritta in ogni sua minuscola fase, compreso il codice della carta di credito.
(3) È il momento in cui Knausgård ha inviato il manoscritto del suo primo libro a tutti coloro che ha citato e inizia a temere le loro reazioni. Alcune saranno furiose, in particolare quella dello zio Gunnar che vuole portarlo in tribunale e bloccare la pubblicazione del libro, al punto da mandarlo in crisi, travolto dal nervosismo e dalla vergogna. Cresce in lui il dubbio che la sua memoria sia inaffidabile, che se Gunnar è così certo che le cose siano andate diversamente, forse ha ragione. Nel frattempo i momenti estatici del suo rapporto con Linda hanno lasciato il posto all’irritazione per il disequilibrio nella divisione dei doveri familiari. Linda stessa dovrà leggere quello che ha scritto su di lei nel secondo volume, e non sarà così semplice.
(4) Molto ha a che fare con la colpa, con la morale, con l’identità umana e letteraria. Con la relazione tra letteratura e realtà, tra verità e soggettivo. Knausgård è spesso incapace di affrontare i problemi che lo travolgono e questo lo fa arrabbiare con se stesso. Si sente sempre inferiore agli altri e ha l'impressione di annoiarli. Nell’attesa di avere delle risposte dalle persone a cui ha inviato i suoi manoscritti controlla ossessivamente la posta elettronica. E quando arriva una mail ha paura di leggerla, cammina per casa o va a fumare in veranda. I giornali scrivono di lui che non ha amici, che beve fino a perdere il controllo, che grida contro i figli. Sono tutte cose che lui ha scritto, ma che pubblicate in un articolo hanno un sapore diverso rispetto alla sfera intima del romanzo, e lo fanno star male.
(5) Papà non era più nelle vicinanze, ma la paura della sua ira era stata trasferita su tutti gli altri: avevo vent’anni ed ero terrorizzato all’idea che altre persone potessero arrabbiarsi con me. Non scomparve mai. Quando tagliai i ponti e mi trasferii a Stoccolma, all’età di trentotto anni, quella paura era ancora dentro di me. Linda, che avevo conosciuto in quel periodo e con cui avevo messo al mondo dei figli, aveva un bel temperamento e spesso scattava in modo irrazionale, le sue esplosioni mi soggiogavano completamente riempiendomi di terrore perché alzava la voce per un nonnulla, e tutto quello a cui riuscivo a pensare era di fare in modo che le passasse. Anche all’età di quarant’anni, seduto in veranda una mattina d’agosto del 2009, temevo che qualcuno si arrabbiasse con me. Dato che ero io a fornirne il movente, ero così terrorizzato, disperato e pieno di dolore che non capivo come sarei riuscito a sopravvivere.
(6) Poi, a caso ma non del tutto, c’è una digressione sostanziale di 400 pagine che narra gli anni formativi di Hitler, la scrittura del Mein Kampf, la natura dell'antisemitismo nazista e l’Olocausto. È una parte forzata, sovradimensionata, estenuante.
Lessi degli ultimi giorni di Hitler, dell’atmosfera folle che si respirava laggiù, sottoterra, dove viveva con i suoi attendenti e le persone a lui più care, mentre la città sopra di loro, distrutta dai bombardamenti russi, era avvolta nelle fiamme che sembravano levarsi dall’inferno. Una volta Hitler era salito in superficie per passare in rassegna alcuni soldati della Gioventù hitleriana, avevo visto il filmato che era stato girato per l’occasione, Hitler è malato, cerca di controllare il tremolio della mano mentre passa da un ragazzo all’altro, doveva soffrire di Parkinson. Eppure, nei suoi occhi brilla un guizzo, qualcosa di inaspettatamente caloroso.
Com’era possibile?
(7) Contiene disquisizioni più o meno interessanti da saggio di critica letteraria su Hölderlin, Dostoevskij, la funzione dei nomi propri nei romanzi di Thomas Mann, Proust, Kafka, L’Ulisse di Joyce, in cui la storia risiede nei personaggi, a differenza di quanto avveniva prima. La mancanza di mediazione nello sguardo dei personaggi di Faulkner. L’elemento sociale in Rilke. Le poesie di Paul Celan. l’Antico testamento. L’interpretazione dell’Olocausto di Adorno e Horkheimer nella Dialettica dell’Illuminismo. Didone costruisce Cartagine di Turner. L’Eneide. Omero. Gli studi anatomici del Medioevo. Leonardo. Marx ed Engels. I diari di Gombrowicz. Handke. Il sublime.
(8) Da quelle parti parecchia gente si chiama Geir.
(9) La mia vita era terribile, era così che la percepivo, vivevo un’esistenza terribile e non ero abbastanza forte, non avevo il fegato per abbandonarla e per viverne una nuova. Spesso pensavo di andarmene, ogni tanto più volte al giorno, ma non potevo, non era possibile, non sopportavo il pensiero delle conseguenze che quella scelta avrebbe avuto per Linda e la sua vita, perché se c’era qualcosa che temeva era proprio quello, che io me ne andassi o morissi. Avevo anche paura della sua rabbia. E avevo paura di quella di sua madre. Non ero in grado di affrontare le enormi accuse che avrei ricevuto, il tradimento che con quel gesto compivo ai danni di Linda e dei nostri figli. Fu questo che mi portò a scrivere un romanzo dove me ne fregavo di tutto e raccontavo semplicemente come stavano le cose. Soltanto quando il libro fu pronto per essere pubblicato mi resi conto di quello che avevo fatto e così rividi il manoscritto cancellando il peggio. Non su Linda, ma sulle persone che le ruotavano intorno. E così inclusi la nostra storia d’amore, perché era grazie a quella che mi trovavo dove ero. Come era possibile che due persone che si amavano in modo così forte e chiaro, i cui cuori ardevano l’uno per l’altra, piombassero in un tale buio, in una tale miseria? (…) Linda offese mia madre, offese mio fratello e offese i miei amici e sapeva essere così sgradevole nei loro confronti che mi sentivo lacerare dentro dai conflitti di lealtà. Ma la vera follia era che l’immagine che aveva di quanto avveniva era l’esatto opposto di quella reale, e noi vivevamo partendo da quello.
(10) Come fai a sapere che danno ti è stato fatto e che danno stai facendo?
Dopo 4000 pagine totali(zzanti) posso dire che Knausgård è tra gli autori che hanno contribuito a formare l’idea di letteratura che ho oggi. Fine è una specie di resa dei conti, sia a livello pratico - le conseguenze della pubblicazione, la depressione di Linda - sia a livello letterario. È un progetto che impressiona per il senso di libertà mentale. Autofiction estrema e spigolosa. A tratti splendido, a tratti una mattonata. Lascia un senso di vertigine. Se l’idea di opera d’arte totale ha un senso, credo potrebbe trovarsi da queste parti.
[78/100]
(2) Seguito ideale del secondo volume. Si apre a ridosso della pubblicazione del primo volume fino alla pubblicazione di questo. Knausgård e sua moglie Linda abitano al sesto piano di un appartamento nel centro di Malmö. Con loro i tre figli piccoli, Vanja, Heidi e John. Ogni giorno Karl Ove tenta di preservare il tempo per la scrittura mentre fa doverosamente colazione con i figli, li accompagna alla scuola materna, fa shopping. Sappiamo di ogni pannolino cambiato, ogni sigaretta fumata sul balcone, ogni tazza di caffè versata, della spesa al supermercato descritta in ogni sua minuscola fase, compreso il codice della carta di credito.
(3) È il momento in cui Knausgård ha inviato il manoscritto del suo primo libro a tutti coloro che ha citato e inizia a temere le loro reazioni. Alcune saranno furiose, in particolare quella dello zio Gunnar che vuole portarlo in tribunale e bloccare la pubblicazione del libro, al punto da mandarlo in crisi, travolto dal nervosismo e dalla vergogna. Cresce in lui il dubbio che la sua memoria sia inaffidabile, che se Gunnar è così certo che le cose siano andate diversamente, forse ha ragione. Nel frattempo i momenti estatici del suo rapporto con Linda hanno lasciato il posto all’irritazione per il disequilibrio nella divisione dei doveri familiari. Linda stessa dovrà leggere quello che ha scritto su di lei nel secondo volume, e non sarà così semplice.
(4) Molto ha a che fare con la colpa, con la morale, con l’identità umana e letteraria. Con la relazione tra letteratura e realtà, tra verità e soggettivo. Knausgård è spesso incapace di affrontare i problemi che lo travolgono e questo lo fa arrabbiare con se stesso. Si sente sempre inferiore agli altri e ha l'impressione di annoiarli. Nell’attesa di avere delle risposte dalle persone a cui ha inviato i suoi manoscritti controlla ossessivamente la posta elettronica. E quando arriva una mail ha paura di leggerla, cammina per casa o va a fumare in veranda. I giornali scrivono di lui che non ha amici, che beve fino a perdere il controllo, che grida contro i figli. Sono tutte cose che lui ha scritto, ma che pubblicate in un articolo hanno un sapore diverso rispetto alla sfera intima del romanzo, e lo fanno star male.
(5) Papà non era più nelle vicinanze, ma la paura della sua ira era stata trasferita su tutti gli altri: avevo vent’anni ed ero terrorizzato all’idea che altre persone potessero arrabbiarsi con me. Non scomparve mai. Quando tagliai i ponti e mi trasferii a Stoccolma, all’età di trentotto anni, quella paura era ancora dentro di me. Linda, che avevo conosciuto in quel periodo e con cui avevo messo al mondo dei figli, aveva un bel temperamento e spesso scattava in modo irrazionale, le sue esplosioni mi soggiogavano completamente riempiendomi di terrore perché alzava la voce per un nonnulla, e tutto quello a cui riuscivo a pensare era di fare in modo che le passasse. Anche all’età di quarant’anni, seduto in veranda una mattina d’agosto del 2009, temevo che qualcuno si arrabbiasse con me. Dato che ero io a fornirne il movente, ero così terrorizzato, disperato e pieno di dolore che non capivo come sarei riuscito a sopravvivere.
(6) Poi, a caso ma non del tutto, c’è una digressione sostanziale di 400 pagine che narra gli anni formativi di Hitler, la scrittura del Mein Kampf, la natura dell'antisemitismo nazista e l’Olocausto. È una parte forzata, sovradimensionata, estenuante.
Lessi degli ultimi giorni di Hitler, dell’atmosfera folle che si respirava laggiù, sottoterra, dove viveva con i suoi attendenti e le persone a lui più care, mentre la città sopra di loro, distrutta dai bombardamenti russi, era avvolta nelle fiamme che sembravano levarsi dall’inferno. Una volta Hitler era salito in superficie per passare in rassegna alcuni soldati della Gioventù hitleriana, avevo visto il filmato che era stato girato per l’occasione, Hitler è malato, cerca di controllare il tremolio della mano mentre passa da un ragazzo all’altro, doveva soffrire di Parkinson. Eppure, nei suoi occhi brilla un guizzo, qualcosa di inaspettatamente caloroso.
Com’era possibile?
(7) Contiene disquisizioni più o meno interessanti da saggio di critica letteraria su Hölderlin, Dostoevskij, la funzione dei nomi propri nei romanzi di Thomas Mann, Proust, Kafka, L’Ulisse di Joyce, in cui la storia risiede nei personaggi, a differenza di quanto avveniva prima. La mancanza di mediazione nello sguardo dei personaggi di Faulkner. L’elemento sociale in Rilke. Le poesie di Paul Celan. l’Antico testamento. L’interpretazione dell’Olocausto di Adorno e Horkheimer nella Dialettica dell’Illuminismo. Didone costruisce Cartagine di Turner. L’Eneide. Omero. Gli studi anatomici del Medioevo. Leonardo. Marx ed Engels. I diari di Gombrowicz. Handke. Il sublime.
(8) Da quelle parti parecchia gente si chiama Geir.
(9) La mia vita era terribile, era così che la percepivo, vivevo un’esistenza terribile e non ero abbastanza forte, non avevo il fegato per abbandonarla e per viverne una nuova. Spesso pensavo di andarmene, ogni tanto più volte al giorno, ma non potevo, non era possibile, non sopportavo il pensiero delle conseguenze che quella scelta avrebbe avuto per Linda e la sua vita, perché se c’era qualcosa che temeva era proprio quello, che io me ne andassi o morissi. Avevo anche paura della sua rabbia. E avevo paura di quella di sua madre. Non ero in grado di affrontare le enormi accuse che avrei ricevuto, il tradimento che con quel gesto compivo ai danni di Linda e dei nostri figli. Fu questo che mi portò a scrivere un romanzo dove me ne fregavo di tutto e raccontavo semplicemente come stavano le cose. Soltanto quando il libro fu pronto per essere pubblicato mi resi conto di quello che avevo fatto e così rividi il manoscritto cancellando il peggio. Non su Linda, ma sulle persone che le ruotavano intorno. E così inclusi la nostra storia d’amore, perché era grazie a quella che mi trovavo dove ero. Come era possibile che due persone che si amavano in modo così forte e chiaro, i cui cuori ardevano l’uno per l’altra, piombassero in un tale buio, in una tale miseria? (…) Linda offese mia madre, offese mio fratello e offese i miei amici e sapeva essere così sgradevole nei loro confronti che mi sentivo lacerare dentro dai conflitti di lealtà. Ma la vera follia era che l’immagine che aveva di quanto avveniva era l’esatto opposto di quella reale, e noi vivevamo partendo da quello.
(10) Come fai a sapere che danno ti è stato fatto e che danno stai facendo?
Dopo 4000 pagine totali(zzanti) posso dire che Knausgård è tra gli autori che hanno contribuito a formare l’idea di letteratura che ho oggi. Fine è una specie di resa dei conti, sia a livello pratico - le conseguenze della pubblicazione, la depressione di Linda - sia a livello letterario. È un progetto che impressiona per il senso di libertà mentale. Autofiction estrema e spigolosa. A tratti splendido, a tratti una mattonata. Lascia un senso di vertigine. Se l’idea di opera d’arte totale ha un senso, credo potrebbe trovarsi da queste parti.
[78/100]
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