It's not often that I'm tempted by modern fiction, but something about Karl Ove Knausgaard's auto-biographical tome, My Struggle, attracted my attention. And now, after several weeks, I've finished the first volume.
This is a book teeming with intensity and yet dominated by the banal. In that sense, I can't remember reading a book quite like it. Knausgaard records his daily experience - his struggle - with unusual detail. But it's not the sort of detail to which we've grown accustom: Knausgaard's preoccupation is with the order of things, and with the emotion, the history which these things manifest. All of this stands in contrast, I think, with simply describing things, with using adjective upon adjective to approximate their essence.
My Struggle is hulking novel that reaches for everything - for death, for alcohol, for parenting, love, and despair. But then, it's a book that captures, really, only a handful of events. It takes Knausgaard more than two hundred pages, for instance, to chart the days culminating in his father's funeral. And even then, he doesn't quite make it. Instead, he weaves a narrative empty of flourish and fanfare: what he's created is a tapestry of things, and in these things, banal though they may be, he identifies meaning.
I found myself moved by Knausgaard's book, particularly the second half, where the rhythm of things expands our sense for what a novel can be: behind all the things, Knausgaard seems to argue, beyond all the objects and their associations, lurks a vision of what life is, of what it is to live, daily, under skies indifferent to mood and attitude. This is a novel of us, of people.
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