I came to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘A Death in the Family’ and ‘A Man in Love’, after reading his brilliant essay collection, ‘In the Land of the Cyclops’. For me the novels came in a definite second to the essays and I’ll stop at this point with his mammoth six volume ‘My Struggle’.
What these two memoirs/novels (which together comprise a collective), read like, is a novelist’s first draft, which from Knausgaard’s account of writing them, is more-or-less what they are. So there is some excellent writing, and not so excellent, with many cliché weeds spotting the literary lawn, mundanities jostling with profundities, and all up an apparently intentionally undisciplined wild and rambling gallimaufry of language and life, at which Knausgaard’s editors presumably either tore their hair out or shrugged their shoulders. On instruction, one presumes.
Seemingly distrustful of fiction’s careful and prissy ‘manipulations’, Knausgaard throws selectivity out of the window, thus allowing almost everything else to rush in, such as page after page of windy philosophising with no clear relation to theme and character, plus numerous tell-all incidents, mostly from adolescence, that although maybe interesting in their own right, have little purpose or place in his overall design. Knausgaard boldly wants to convey the taste and texture of a whole life lived, the good the bad the ugly the forgettable, and in this he largely succeeds, but one inescapable correlative is that everything becomes flattened out, so that events that do hold the most meaning and drama are leached of these to a disproportionate extent.
His two literary mentors, whom he cites, are Dostoevsky and Proust. Now Dostoevsky’s novels, like Knausgaard’s, are long and discursive, but this is a fictional feint, as the Russian writer choses his subsidiary stories and characters with great skill so that they always in some way reflect back on his main themes, as does his characters’ philosophising. Knausgaard might argue that this is the worn falsity of fiction, and does, and also doesn’t, but anyway seems to have forgotten or ignored the critical commonplace that high fiction’s ‘falsities’ serve to highlight how certain truths in life have more importance and value than others, which is actually the way we experience life, not necessarily from day-to-day, but in retrospect. And of course, Knausgaard himself is broadly selective, he can’t literally show everything. Nevertheless, in these overblown overwritten volumes, if about a third had hit the cutting room floor, the two really compelling stories he needs to tell, that of his father’s death and its aftermath, and that of the birth of his first child as a climax of his love, which occurring centrally in each novel balance one another beautifully, would shine out with far greater power and clarity. As would his overriding theme which is the conjunction of these: the corrosion of wonder in the world as we age.
To my mind Knausgaard never seems quite to grasp that, despite all his rationalisations and protestations, he is really writing fiction not memoir. Proust presents his long work, ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ as memoir, but makes no bones about the fact that he is really writing a novel. One result being that we have a succession of brilliantly constructed characters, such as Swann and Charlus and Madame Verdurin, whom Marcel closely ‘observes’ and so we watch them grow and develop, interact etc. In Knausgaard’s volumes, we only really have a clear grasp of one character, himself, presumably because he refuses to enter into fiction’s ‘false’ realisation of centres of consciousness aside from his own. These are people I know, so how can I possibly present them in that way? Well Proust does, and because Knausgaard doesn’t or refuses to, means that towards the end of one thousand plus pages we are tiring of what appears to be an overweening narcissism and solipsism. Even his beloved wife, Linda, shown in scattered first-hand impressions, and his best friend Geir (the same), seem minor figures in the drama of his interior life, which I doubt is actually the case (well, one hopes). Geir is allowed a full-length rave towards the end of ‘A Man in Love’, but still, it’s all about Knausgaard.
Time and again Knausgaard discusses the role of structure in art, only to seemingly ignore it in practice. It is interesting that, going back about a decade and inspiring much since, the two most hyped up literary ‘events’ have been ‘My Struggle’ and Elena Ferrante ‘s ‘Neapolitan Quartet’. Both works have been praised well above their worth with better less-celebrated novels published during this time. Because, in different ways, they are both ‘sensational’ ―Ferrante’s mysterious ‘anonymity’ and Knausgaard’s brave, scandalous ‘honesty’― and publishers can make much mileage out of these, and do so partly by praising the content. Here, to a certain extent, we readers are dupes of publishers’ carry-on, and not just readers. Many good writers also seem to have lost their collective judgements in the publicity adrenalin rush of literary celebrity. So amongst the pages of puff quotes that preface Knausgaard’s books we have, for example, this by Jonathan Lethem, a writer whom I admire: ‘A living hero who landed on greatness by abandoning every typical literary feint, an emperor whose nakedness surpasses royal finery’. Quite.
If you don’t have a day job, or kids, and are by nature patient and indulgent, read these volumes, read beyond the two that I have, read the lot, for there are many fine things to be found I’m sure. However, also consider, it could be more worth your while to wait for the liposuctioned omnibus edition that Knausgaard will no doubt be encouraged to essay down the track, or indeed, the Readers Digest condensed version where somebody else will be employed to do the necessary hard yards on his prose, work that he himself, presently, disdains.