Acclaim and critique continues for Knausgaard...
"There was something extraordinary about the experience of reading My Struggle. I was absorbed. Transfixed. I identified. I suffered. I struggled alongside Karl Ove. But why did I find this particular novel so mesmerizing?"
The first book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle appeared in Norway in September 2009. The next two books were published that same fall. Books 4 and 5 followed in the spring and early summer of 2010. Along with the rest of the Norwegian population, I was hooked from the start. (By now, Book 1 of My Struggle has sold over 500,000 copies in a nation of five million inhabitants.) The publication schedule was addictive. Every two or three months or so, I needed my Knausgaard fix. The long wait for Book 6 was excruciating. (The English-speaking world is still waiting.) When I finally held the gigantic tome in my hands in November 2011, it felt as if I were reading it intravenously.
There was something extraordinary about the experience of reading My Struggle. I was absorbed. Transfixed. I identified. I suffered. I struggled alongside Karl Ove. But why did I find this particular novel so mesmerizing? The story of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s life is hardly full of unusual events. The teenage Karl Ove drinks too much. He has trouble becoming a writer, let alone a good writer. He hides his feelings, tastes and opinions. His shyness thwarts his early attempts to connect with women. Over the years he marries and divorces, then marries again and has three children. When he is thirty, his estranged father dies. He looks at paintings. He writes. He wonders what writing is, and why he is the way he is. The ordinariness of his daily existence is breathtaking. He makes tea and butters sandwiches. He pushes a pram through the streets of Stockholm. He does a lot of housework. He butters some more sandwiches and rails against politically correct child-rearing practices in Sweden. Quite late in the story he tells us about school teaching in northern Norway, and about his frustrating twenties in Bergen, years of constant and mostly futile efforts to become a writer. In the last volume he devotes almost four hundred pages to an essay on Hitler’s childhood and youth, particularly dwelling on his unsuccessful attempt to become an artist.
What makes My Struggle mesmerizing, then, can’t be the events depicted, but rather the writing. And yet, for many critics, nothing is more plainly unartistic than Knausgaard’s style: “The problem with My Struggle,” William Deresiewicz insists, “is that nothing happens in the writing. The prose consists, for the most part, of a flat record of superficial detail, unenlivened by the touch of literary art: by simile or metaphor, syntactic complexity or linguistic compression, the development of symbols or elaboration of structures—by beauty, density or form.” As the passage reveals, Deresiewicz is a formalist at heart, meaning he is someone who takes for granted that literary beauty arises as an effect of a specific kind of literary form. His critical ideals appear to harken back to those established by “high” modernists such as T. S. Eliot and other critics who canonized the dense and challenging (and sublime) poetry of John Donne and other metaphysical poets. Like those modernists, and like many critics writing today, Deresiewicz devalues writing that does not employ striking rhetorical figures, impressive metaphors, deep symbols, and complex and elliptic syntax.