I read this book, mostly aloud,
sometimes listening to it aloud, in the Bartlett translation, partly from paper
copies, partly for the Kindle edition.
First question: what does this book
have to do with Hitler’s Mein Kampf? The titles are even
more alike in Norwegian. The two books have a general resemblance in
that both portray the author’s struggle, but Hitler’s struggle is mainly
expressed through politics and doctrine whereas Knausgård’s is mainly in
literature and personal relations. Mein Kamp devotes
part of its first chapter to Hitler’s childhood and includes serious conflicts
with his father. But his father died suddenly of a heart attack when
he was 13. Politics crops up only occasionally in My
Struggle in connection with characters' allegiance to one or another
of the political movements of contemporary Norway.
Second, is this a
novel? Or does it matter? And if so, or if not,
why? Knausgård asserts that everything in it is true. He
adds that he does not have a particularly good memory, that this rush of
material appeared only when he set out to write something about his father; it
just came out, and we read it unedited except for some details in the first
part that were changed in the routine way of publishing, or under pressure,
among other things, from lawsuits. He asserts that, though it is not
made up, it is a novel. It is constructed
like a novel. That is, his report on his struggle is highly
selective and reordered and written in the conventional style of contemporary
realistic fiction. He does not narrate the whole of his life, he does not
present it in chronological order, and he omits substantial parts of his
life. The same could be said of most memoirs. For example
he mentions but omits any stories about his second marriage. He
begins with an occasion when his father humiliated him as an eight-year old,
continues to his life around the time the birth of his first child by his
second wife, then portrays incidents in his early teen-aged years, then in his
middle childhood years, and so on to the last volume, which is set in his 18th year. All
along he freely interpolates flashbacks.
Besides, there is no such thing as
memory that records the past in the sense that a surveillance camera preserves
the actions that take place before it year after year making a tape that some
one might edit.
Memory, and some contemporary lab
research supports this, seems to me like a large garden. Only the
plants we, consciously or unconsciously, tend flourish there. In
tending them we alter them. Stories or images are either modified or
forgotten. For example, all find ourselves with childhood memories
of events we are unsure we experienced-; we may only have heard about them from
others sufficiently to construct our own images. We live in a building
made of memories, and as we live in it we constantly reconstruct
it. So, if you stay in an Italian hotel said to have been a nunnery
in 1200, the concierge may be able to point to you that a particular feature
was built in 1400 or the spot where something happened in 1568, but we have no
such concierge, or no reliable one at any rate. Perhaps there are
some exceptions in what Proust called involuntary memories.
Such is the process from which Knausgård’s manuscript
poured fourth. Such is the building he reconstructed with the
reliability and unreliability of our own. It would be interesting to
review evidence like the memories of other witnesses as they appear in he
lawsuits.
Calling it a memoir or a novel, then,
really is only a question of labeling. We have been offered a
credible tale either way.
Some say that this book has no
plot. In the step-leading-to-step sense that an Agatha Christie or
the Count of Monte Cristo has a plot, that’s true, but in the
wide sense of plot, in the sense Moby Dick has the plot of
Ahab’s struggle for vengeance on the whale, or that Ana Karenina has
the plot of how Anna is to deal with her marriage, or A
la recherche du temps perdue has the plot of
Marcel’s struggle to recapture the past -; in that wide sense, it has a
plot. That is why it is called My Struggle. The
struggle is to escape the oppression of his abusive father. In the
course of his life this struggle takes various forms, among others: as a child
to get out of the house and play with friends or go to school, later (not in
the sequence of presentation in the book) to get laid, or to understand and
even get on with his father, or to become a sort of literary rock star,
later to be a good father. The struggle wrings shame out of the story. Awareness
of shame surfaces only occasionally in the 3600 pages, but it hangs always in
the background. It arises from the author’s breach of Scandinavian
reticence, from his father's constant shaming him as a child, and from the
sometimes disgusting details of his father's later life and
death. Knausgård has spoken of this novel as purging him, and it
seems that it is shame from which he is purged, or would be.
Don’t get the impression, however,
that this is a dower or oppressive read. It is
not. Liveliness and anticipation animate it with a feeling of
Knausgård’s openness to experience and willingness to take things
on. It jibes in that way with his personal impression, which is
extraordinarily open, frank, and present.
There are several fully realized
characters, mostly associated with family. His father, his mother,
his brother, his grandparents, his second wife, even his oldest child, who is
about four the last time we see her. Characterization is partly
through description of action, partly through dialogue, and partly through
attribution of taste. Clothes are as meticulously and frequently
described as in stereotypical chick lit, and preferences for rock bands and
soccer clubs often appear. But this is not a-show-don’t-tell novel,
for the most important part of characterization is the protagonists’
description of people. In the case of characters who appear at
widely different times, the protagonist's descriptions of them
change. But this is not an author teasing us with an “unreliable
narrator”; rather it realistically reflects how we see people differently as we
mature.
The protagonist analyses characters
in the sense of thoughtfully describing them, but avoids analysis in the
psychodynamic sense. We may suppose that Knausgård’s desperation
comes from his treatment at the hands of his father, but he seldom makes that
sort of supposition.
Here, for example, he is describing
his children in order of age, youngest first:
“Their character traits, which slowly
began to reveal themselves after only a few weeks, have never changed either,
and so different are they inside each of them that it is difficult to imagine
the conditions we provide for them, through our behavior and ways of being,
have any decisive significance. John has a mild, friendly temperament,
loves his sisters, planes, trains, and buses. Heidi is an extrovert
and talks to everyone she meets, she’s obsessed with shoes and clothes, wants
to wear only dresses, and is at ease with her little body, such as when she
stood naked in front of the swimming pool mirror and said to Linda, “Mommy,
look what a nice bottom I’ve got!” She hates being reprimanded; if
you raise your voice to her she turns away and starts crying. Vanja,
on the other hand, gives as good as she gets, has quite a temper, a strong
will, is sensitive, and gets on easily with people. She has a good
memory, knows by heart most of the books we read to her as well as lines in the
films we see. She has a sense of humor and is always making us laugh
when we […]”
Excerpt From: Karl Ove Knausgård
& Don Bartlett. “My Struggle: Book 2.” iBookshttps://itun.es/us/0e-1L.l
The excerpt above is a fair sample of
his prose as it appears in this translation. It’s good, but
unremarkable. It is seldom awkward, and seldom thrilling. On rare
occasions he waxes philosophical, for instance a discussion of Heidegger or the
reflections on death that open the book.
The detail is sometimes
tedious. He devotes c. 150 pages to his 14-year-old efforts to secretly
(from his father and others) acquire a couple of cases of beer and get drunk at
a party. It’s pretty boring at times. He devotes about
100 pages to himself, his wife, and children at a preschool
party. His account is spot on, but, again, boring at times despite
it’s exactness. If he described his whole life up until his late
30's in such detail, he would still be writing.
Yet in the long run, and it is long,
the detail is what engages us. In the long run you find yourself
thinking about Knausgård as a friend, some one you know as your own
memories, some one with whom you can compare your life in a way that fictional
characters can seldom support.
My Struggle is
some times compared to A
la recherche du temps perdu. There are many
differences. Whereas Karl Ove’s prose is plain but effective;
Marcel’s is ornate, sometimes obscure, and often thrilling; whereas Marcel is
trying to recapture his childhood; Karl Ove is trying to escape
his. Whereas Karl Ove treats his family with carful realism, Marcel
tends to idealize his; whereas Karl Ove worries about being trapped, Marcel
suffers excruciating separation anxiety; whereas Karl Ove is forthcoming about
characters, Marcel tends to make successive discoveries, often disreputable,
like a detective; whereas Karl Ove’s world is narrowly middle class or
occasionally working class, Marcel is preoccupied with High Society; whereas
Marcel is trying to recaptured the past, Karl Ove, although he notices and
sometimes reflects on the passage of time, lives in the present; whereas A
la recherche du temps perdue ends with Marcel
looking anxiously back, My Struggle ends with Karl Ove
entering adulthood eagerly looking forward.
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