Comments on A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas

 

This novel is about people whose self-definition has been fragmented and rotted generation by generation by a totalitarian state. Perhaps a reader who had been immersed in the Soviet control of Eastern Europe would know this from the first page, but to a Western reader it at first appears a book about a neurotic guy with romantic and self-image problems. For us, the social depth of the origin of those problems gradually emerges over the first couple of hundred pages. 

 In December 1954, on the last day before winter break, as I recall, a sizable delegation of grim looking men showed up at our school. They arrived in huge black automobiles. They all wore dark hats. From our classroom window we saw the hats disappear in the doorway downstairs. All teaching ceased. We had to sit in silence. Footsteps echoed in the corridors, never just one but several pairs of footsteps, and then silence again. Some people were being led somewhere. Not a peep out of anybody hissed our most hated instructor, Klement, when somebody would stir to change position. The door opened. The janitor called out someone barely whispering the name. Footfalls. Then the waiting: will he come back? After a short while the student would come back, looking pale, and sidle into his seat, followed by our curious stares, and the door would close again. Trembling lips and ears rubbed red told us that something must have happened. Something was going on. But the most unlikely people were taken out; I saw no pattern, so I could draw no conclusion. 

 

 It is not an easy read at 705 pages. For the first 591 the nameless narrator recounts and ruminates on his life. At the time of the narrative he is in his late 30’s or so but lengthy flashbacks explore his childhood and adolescence. He is also writing a novel that seems to be set in the 19th century and interrupts the narrative here and there. The next 90 pages are a first-person narrative by a friend of his. A single, final chapter is a kind rough draft of the end of the protagonist's life, mostly in first person. The present-time story is of an unnamed Hungarian who is explicitly bisexual. He is living in East Berlin. The wall is still up. He works in an unclear function in a theatrical production where he is in a love triangle with an East German man and a prominent actress. "Love triangle" usually really means an acute angle with the protagonist at the apex, but this is a full-fledged triangle where each of the people involved is in love with each of the others because being in love with the other is part of being in love with the one and, well or badly, whether they love themselves. The narrative tension focuses mostly on the probability of his affair with the man breaking up. 

 The sentence structure differs in the different sections. Of course, this is a translation and I can only infer that something similar is true in Hungarian. The long first section contains frequent stretches of dialogue. Here’s one from a flashback to his adolescence: 

 

"But may I ask you how you found out about their plans, then?" 

"That's my business, don't you think?" 

"So that means you have your own little plans, right?" 

"Right." "And of course that's where you want to go." 

"Why not? I haven't decided yet." 

"Because you don't want to miss out on anything, right?" 

"I'm not going to tell you, so don't get your hopes up." 

"I'm not interested." 

"So much the better." 

"I'm an idiot for coming here." 

There was a moment's silence then very quietly and hesitantly, she said, 

"Want me to tell you?" 

"I couldn't care less. Keep it to yourself."

 It also includes vivid descriptions of action. The narrator pays lots of attention to physical detail of many kinds; in particular there are several erotic scenes, closely described but not very sexy. 

 I held his face in my hands, and he held my face in his, the gestures were identical, yet our intentions seemed to be at odds; it's possible that I didn't even mention my shame, didn't say it out loud, afraid that if I went further and said the word, I would have to be truly ashamed, because he would respond the only way he knew, with cold reserve and suggestive irony, with his perennial, exasperatingly beautiful smile, then my own embarrassment would spoil something that must not be spoiled at any cost, I could deprive my hand of the warmth of his face, of its movements, of the stumble’s crackle under my fingers, which I especially liked, though on our first night it had still elicited resistance from me, caused by the dread of the familiarly unfamiliar, the resistance that was also an attraction enticing me to cross the border between smoothness and coarseness on the face of a man, with my mouth to touch another mouth that was also ringed with stubble, to feel the same kind of strength from it that I was imparting to it, as if receiving back not his strength but my own "Why it's my father's mouth!" someone shouted in my voice on our first night when he leaned over to kiss me on the lips, and I could hear the scraping and blending of whiskers on our chins, the stubble on our father’s chins touching the smooth skin of our forgotten childhood selves! 

 A description of someone assisting the birth of piglets is almost unbearably vivid. 

 But long paragraphs, sometimes two or three pages long, of reflective thought by the protagonist, dominate the first 600 pages. These paragraphs lean heavily on what my highschool English teacher would have called comma faults and on semicolons where standard English practice would have periods. Phrases and ideas are often rephrased and repeated; a point is made three times where a more direct voice would have made it once. Em dashes often enclose tangential thoughts. The style of this narrator is not a mannerism of the author; rather it embodies the narrator’s fragmented state of mind and fragmented self. 

 Now if some unauthorized strangers were to rummage through my things and go over my papers. ... Well, this stranger, this secret agent would appear after my death to make out a report about me based on the papers found among my affects had often cropped up in my dreams; although he was faceless and of intermediate age, I found his immaculate shirt front, stiff collar, polka dotted necktie adorned with a glittering diamond pin, and especially his rather shiny frockcoat all the more characteristic and significant; with long, bony fingers he rummaged expertly through my papers, occasionally lifting a page close to his eyes, giving me the impression that he was near-sighted, though I didn't see him wearing eyeglasses; the pursuit reused a sentence here and there, and I noted with satisfaction that he derived completely different meanings from the ones I had hoped my sentences would imply; no wonder I had managed to fool even someone like him; after all, I made sure that my fleeting ideas, fragmentary thoughts, and hasty descriptions were jotted down so that my papers remained well within the bounds of middle-class propriety, counting also on the possibility that my dear old Frau Huebner[his landlady], taking advantage of my absence driven by simple curiosity, would likewise look through the pages piled on my desk; thus I became an unauthorized stranger to my own life, because of seeing myself as a criminal, a miserable misfit, I still wanted to remain a perfect gentleman in the eyes of the world, I myself became that shiny frock coat, and starched shirt front, and the tie pin, the irreproachably inane form of bourgeois respectability; secretly, and proud of my own slyness, I figured that if I used a private code when recording my accumulated experiences, then, since I possess the key, I'd always be able to open the lock of the code; but as might be expected, the lock turned out to be fool proof, and by the time I finally came around to open it, my hands trembling with anxiety, I simply could not find the keyhole. 

The section narrated by his friend is mostly in crisp sentences; the first quotation above is an example. The final chapter is in the form of a rough draft, the end of a life never resolved. Many flashbacks, not necessarily in chronological order, render painfully present the narrator’s childhood and adolescence. 

 Maybe it's fortunate, or unfortunate, that to this day I cannot decide what is better, knowledge or ignorance; no matter how much I tried to live their [his parents’] lies and find my place in the system of falsehoods, contributing to the smooth operation of the system's fine mechanism with effective lies of my own, and even if I could not see what it set it all in motion or what was covered up by what, still, over time I did gain some insight into the layers of deception;… 

 His father was an important prosecutor in the Hungarian government, and political power shifts eventually drive him to suicide. His parents, grandparents, and their friends live in a state of constant evasiveness joined by powerful bonds. His father and his mother are each involved in love affairs that are enmeshed in arbitrary and dangerous government structures. He is aware of them and his awareness contributes to his confusion about himself, his sexuality, and, even who his father is. As an adolescent, the narrator has intense and erotically charged emotional relationship with a group of friends, both boys and girls, which involve the sort of triangles described above. This part of book is Freudian in the sense that all the characters’ involvement with others and with themselves have an erotic pressure. 

All these people are deeply affected by the oppressive government. For instance the death of Stalin is a major event in all their lives. A friend of the narrator is shot and dies in his arms during the abortive Hungarian revolution in 1956. Fragments of the novel the protagonist is writing appear from time to time and are in effect another level of narrative, like flashback, something that occupies his mind. The novel is based on similar triangular relationship and the hero’s despair over resolving it, which leads to a murder. His account of his motivation is also Freudian in the sense that his acts are over determined. For many actions and thoughts more than one adequate motive is documented. Nádas often asserts that what really controls people’s emotions and actions is ‘the body,’ but it is not clear to me how the ‘the body’ is different from other sources of motivation. 

The protagonist is an unreliable narrator, not in the sense that we should not trust him – he is often painfully frank —, but in the sense that he does not trust himself. His dubiousness embodies the constant pressure of that society to manifest appearances not central to the self. The characters who suffer this are bitterly forced to be this or that, so that they can never commit themselves to a core self. This dubiousness is at the heart of the fragmentation. He does not endorse himself. He never believes in himself. So no core ever flourishes. 

 

The title evokes À la recherche du temps perdu. The constant state of inquisitive flirtation with a group of friends in flashbacks to his adolescence specifically suggests À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, but with no Elstir to guide them. Long passages when the protagonist and his lover, while not imprisoned, are cloistered in the lover’s apartment, including his scrutinizing his sleeping partner, suggests La Prisonnière. But whereas for Proust rediscovering the past, though it may be painful, is integrative, and forward looking, for our unnamed protagonist it is disintegration, a horror that destroys him.

Comments on My Struggle

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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 18^th 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.