Review by New York Times Review
WHY would you read a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel? The short answer is that it is breathtakingly good, and so you cannot stop yourself, and would not want to. Book 1 of Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle" - published in English last year - begins with an arrestingly beautiful reflection on death which moves seamlessly into the life of a troubled child. (If you are in any uncertainty as to whether the book is for you, simply read this paragraph; if you find nothing there for you then you can set it aside in all tranquillity.) Just as Book 1 of "My Struggle" was about death and family, so too is this second volume, subtitled "A Man in Love." In it, the master theme of death remains hauntingly present, but it comes to be paired with another: birth and what precedes it. While "A Man in Love" tells of the rapture and intoxication of love, it also turns a cold and at times clinical eye on romantic ecstasy and the marital equation, relating in painstaking - at points agonizing - detail the fading of the first flush of love, the cooling and contracting of feeling. Whereas Book 1 was concerned with childhood and adolescence, with learning what death is and what living can be, Book 2 centers on what its narrator calls "the middle of life." He is careful to point out that while his age (mid-30s to 40) reflects a chronological or probabilistic midpoint, he means the midst of life as much as its midpoint. He is not only well advanced in life, he is surrounded and at times submerged by it, with a growing family: a wife and three small children, each wonderful, each with problems, each with demands. And he is, as we all are, in the midst of life's minutiae - from cigarette rolling to coffee drinking, diaper changing to dish washing. This wealth of hyper-realistic detail places us in the midst of a life, and gives relief to its moments of passion and despair, insight and confusion, anger and love. Not only this, however, it also presents to the reader the real struggle: how to take all this shifting, teeming minutiae and in it find, and give, meaning. There have not been very many multivolume multithousand-page novels about themselves. But there has been at least one - and a great one: Proust's "In Search of Lost Time." This precedent finds its place early on in "My Struggle" as an inspiration to the narrator. And, indeed, Knausgaard's work resembles Proust's in more ways than one. Early reviews of Proust's novel praised its writing and reflections and criticized its seeming lack of structure, its digressive meanderings, its interminable dinners. As if in silent homage to that technique, there is a dinner that begins on Page 119 of "A Man in Love," and on Page 280 the main course (lobster) is still being served. A subtle structure can be mistaken for none at all, a search for lost time taken for random reminiscence, and this subtlety of structure is something Knausgaard's work shares with Proust's. More immediately striking, however, is another parallel concerning the ways in which fiction is born of fact, and the question whether this is fiction at all. As in Proust's novel, the narrator of "My Struggle" has the same name as the author and seems to have lived much the same life, to have been preoccupied by much the same concerns and to be, as was Proust's narrator, in search of a subject for his story, which subject turns out to be that very search. Proust changed a great deal - invented or amalgamated places (like the "Combray" of the book's opening section), people (like the jealously held Albertine) and events (like the dipping of a madeleine in tea, presumably). Knausgaard, it appears, has not - and this has led to threats of legal action on the part of family members and a level of national and international attention such that a number of Norwegian companies have declared Knausgaard-free days during which debate is to be suspended in the name of some modicum of productivity. It is estimated that something approaching 1 in 10 Norwegians have read the book. Knausgaard has a tremendous essayistic talent, and Book 2, like Book 1, is rich in reflections on everything from the sociology of death to the psychopathology of everyday life. As with all great writers, the ideas or theories are woven into the story, dramatized, and this is as true of the question of what gives meaning as of any other question in the book. Reflecting on the history of conceptions of life and death, Knausgaard asks: "What was man on this earth other than an insect among other insects, a life-form among other life-forms, which might just as well take the form of algae in a lake or fungi on the forest floor, roe in a fish's stomach, rats in a nest or a cluster of mussels on a reef?" This lowering or leveling of human life is not simply a logical deduction, a search for rational balance, but an intensely emotional expression of fear, uncertainty and longing. If we see ourselves simply as one life form among others, born only to die, "why should we do one thing rather than another when there was no goal anyway, nor any direction in life, apart from to huddle together, live and then die?" At this point Knausgaard's reflection leads back to its starting place, which is the starting place of "My Struggle," as the narrator notes that "there were other perspectives on this same world," and asks, "Couldn't it be seen as a miracle of cool rivers and vast forests, whorled snail shells and deep potholes, veins and gray matter, deserted planets and expanding galaxies?" It could, he concludes, "because meaning is not something we are given, but which we give. Death makes life meaningless because everything we have ever striven for ceases when life does, and it makes life meaningful, too, because its presence makes the little we have of it indispensable, every moment precious." Death can indeed confer meaning this way - as can art. Near the end of Proust's novel, with what feels to the narrator like death on all sides, he says something exceedingly strange: "Real life, life finally discovered and explained, and thus the only life truly worth living, is literature." This statement makes sense only if literature is understood in a larger sense than words on a page, volumes on a shelf, but as the making and sharing of meaning. The real and immediate struggle not limited to literature is in giving such meaning - not only the attention and imagination demanded to see the miracles of cool rivers and whorled snail shells, of love found and love lost, death feared and death faced, but the limitless everyday mystery of all that is around, and within, us. Leland de la Durantaye is a professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 23, 2013]
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Raising a family, making art and the difficulty of reconciling the two drives the remarkable second installment of this six-volume novel-as-memoir.At the end of the first volume of this series, Knausgaard (Out of This World, 2005; A Time for Everything, 2009) recalled bumbling as an adolescent and burying his father as an adult. This time, he remembers falling in love and becoming a father himself. As the novel-memoir opens, he's at loose ends with his wife, Linda, and three children, whom he can't help but see as intrusions upon his efforts to write. From there, the story swings back to nine years earlier as he leaves Norway for Stockholm, where he meets Linda in 1999 at a writers' seminar, falls in love and starts a family. Knausgaard's strategy throughout the series is to build immersive effects by delivering highly detailed descriptions of his minor experiences and paths of thought; in this case, much of the heart of the book is taken up by Linda's pregnancy and their anticipation of their first child, from crib shopping to miscarriage scares to the actual birth itself. He presents all of it in plainspoken terms; the power and relief of the birth isn't drawn in triumphant rhetoric but in a sense of exhaustion. ("Two women began to tidy up around us as we watched this creature that was suddenly there.") Knausgaard doesn't always present himself as father-of-the-year material, sweating how much time he'll have to research and write his second novel and squabbling with his family and fussy neighbors in the search for some peace and quiet. "Relationships were there to eradicate individuality, to fetter freedom and suppress that which was pushing through," he whimpers. But his candor, if not his attitude, is admirablehe's not rationalizing his behavior but flatly, honestly representing it. A patient exploration of courtship and fatherhood stripped clean of politesse. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
