How Writing ‘My Struggle’ Undid Knausgaard
I know more about the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard than I do about my parents, my children, my friends, and possibly my husband. I know how he lost his virginity, what he buys at the supermarket, how he makes his coffee, what kind of cigarettes he smokes and how many, the quality of his bowel movements. I know how he shapes the narrative of his life: his initial difficulty writing novels, his relationship with his parents, his two marriages. I know that he loves his children but feels emasculated pushing a stroller. I know there are youthful crimes he still feels ashamed of. I know the pin for his bank card.
I know all this, as do Knausgaard’s readers around the world, because he has written about it in My Struggle, the massive autobiographical novel that has been the most unlikely international literary sensation of the past decade. Brutally candid in its banality and sordidness, forsaking conventional strategies of narration and characterization for a heady rush of words on the page, this great disruption of contemporary fiction has sought nothing less than to break the form of the novel. Its 3,600-some pages, at once weirdly self-deprecating and breathtakingly egoistic, began to appear in English, at the rate of a volume a year, in 2012, culminating this fall with the translation of Book Six. The fascination of this Brobdingnagian paean to the self, which follows the outline and essence of Knausgaard’s life but fictionalizes scenes and dialogue, lies in watching him fight his way to the creation of himself as a writer—the most important of the “struggles” contained within it.
Somehow he manages to keep us rooting for his success, even as his disgraces accumulate with the volumes. Karl Ove, as he depicts himself—the narrator is explicitly identified with the author—is not an appealing character. As a child, he finds amusement in dropping rocks onto cars driving on the highway. At one point he and a friend set fire to the woods. Starting around age 16, he habitually binge-drinks until he blacks out, frequently waking up surrounded by blood, vomit, or both. His sole interest in girls and women lies in how far they will let him go. After Tonje, his first wife, is suddenly admitted to the hospital, he leaves her alone there so he can keep a previous engagement with his editor. When the inspiration for Book One strikes, he moves into his office for six weeks, leaving his second wife, Linda, with their newborn baby.
This portrayal is, of course, deliberate. The spiritual confession is among the models for , though it is truly a. “I may live that life wrong, but it certainly makes it more interesting to write about than if I lived it right.” His uncensored honesty also makes that life more interesting to read about. Part of the propulsive energy of these books is their train-wreck quality: You can’t look away.
