“What Is the Struggle in ‘My Struggle’?,” by Joshua Rothman.
This week sees the publication of the third volume of “My Struggle,” the thirty-six-hundred-page autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the Norwegian novelist. (James Wood reviewed the first volume, in 2012.) It’s hard to overstate the strangeness of the book’s success. The six volumes of “My Struggle” chronicle, in hypnotic detail, episodes from Knausgaard’s life. There is no plot to speak of, unless you consider real life a plot. And yet, in Norway, one book has sold for every nine adults; as translations have proliferated, readers all over the world have fallen in love with Knausgaard. Part of the appeal is that he has left many of the names and details unchanged; you can do a Google images search and see many of the characters you read about. But the appeal isn’t just gossipy. Perhaps because he is so candid and open, Knausgaard has made his memories into common property. He encourages readers to look inside and find their inner Karl Oves. Or the reverse: he holds a mirror up to his life; you look, and see yourself.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to recognize yourself in “My Struggle.” The first is to notice where your own thoughts and experiences coincide with Knausgaard’s—to find, as many readers have, that he has written the diary that you would’ve written, were you a Norwegian man born in 1968. (Reading the first volume, I was delighted to find that Karl Ove and I liked the same bands—New Order, Talk Talk, Talking Heads—and that we have the same elaborate theory about why they’re good.) The second is to discern, in the rhythms and textures of the book, the rhythms and textures of your own life. This second kind of recognition is the secret to “My Struggle” ’s popularity. Set aside the particular events that Knausgaard describes: doesn’t your life feel like his?
Writers have portrayed consciousness in all sorts of ways: as what William James called “an alternation of flights and perchings” (“Mrs. Dalloway”), as a river-like flow, carrying thoughts and perceptions in its current (“Ulysses”), as the creation of an unseen, inner artwork (“In Search of Lost Time”). Knausgaard has found his own way of understanding it: as a struggle. It’s the struggling that gives life its texture—constant, absorbing, and unending, the same whether you’re nine, nineteen, or thirty-nine. Like many struggles, this one is simultaneously tormenting and rewarding, heroic and pathetic, dynamic and static, purposeful and a waste of time. The main thing is that you can’t stop struggling. You’re a creature of struggle. You desperately want to win each battle but you never want the war to end.
There’s a very concrete struggle at the center of the book: the struggle between Knausgaard and his father. “I was so frightened of him that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close,” Knausgaard writes, in the just-translated third volume. “His footsteps on the stairs—was he coming to see me? … The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth. The lips that parted involuntarily. And then his voice … . His fury struck like a wave, it washed through the rooms, lashed at me, lashed and lashed and lashed at me, and then it retreated.” Much in the first three volumes, at least nominally speaking, has been about the experience of being this father’s son. When he’s a kid, Karl Ove thinks constantly about how to avoid his father’s anger or how to retaliate against it, or forgive it; as an adult, he struggles to write about it.
But Knausgaard’s book is more abstract than that; it’s about more than the experience of a son. That’s because, in exploring that experience, Knausgaard has ended up exploring all experience. If being a writer is like being a swimmer, and life is like the ocean through which you swim, then Knausgaard’s book starts out being about the waves but ends up being about the stroke. His father’s anger is one of those waves, and Knausgaard, early on, learned to see the wave coming, to brace himself, to swim up its face and, hopefully, to dive beneath before it swept him up. (If not—if he was knocked backward and pulled under—he learned the skill of patience: “Everything passed.”) You find that Knausgaard approaches all events in the same way. He traces the same pattern of serial, wave-like growth and recession in every context: love, friendship, sex, music, writing, art, intellectual life, spirituality. And he faces these waves in the same way each time, preparing for each experience, scaling it, sometimes diving beneath and into it, sometimes being swept up and thrown away from it—in every case finding himself, afterward, waiting for the next wave. He is fascinated by the inexhaustibility of the passions, which are themselves wave-like, always returning, drawn out by the gravity of an inner moon.
Reading “My Struggle,” you’re pulled inside these rhythms; at the same time, you’re surprised by the subjects out of which they emerge. It makes sense for big, important experiences to be understood in this way: the consummation of a romance, the death of a father, the birth of a child, writing a book. It makes less sense for lesser experiences. And yet Knausgaard finds this same rhythm everywhere: in a long drive to see his grandparents; in a swimming lesson; in grocery shopping; in playing guitar; in making tea; in cleaning a bathroom. In this volume, called “Boyhood,” he talks this way not just about childhood crushes—you understand how immersive those are—but about searching a dump for p*rno magazines; going to the store to buy new soccer clothes; and walking down a forest path, to the gas station, to buy candy. These are events he anticipates, fears, and relishes, and in which he understands himself as performing well or badly. He takes them seriously. But it’s not that these events matter—they don’t. It’s that this is life, and life is a struggle; to live is to care. “Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life,” he writes, at the end of the second volume.
