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My
Struggle:
Book
One by Karl Knausgaard An interview with TJ Clark:
Picasso and Truth
Timothy  James  Clark,  often  known
Towards the end of the shattering first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s memoir My
as  TJ  Clark,  is  an  art  historian…
Struggle (published in the UK, by Harvill, as A Death in the Family), he cuts from a scene of
[cont]
particularly sepulchral intensity to a flashback describing his days interviewing writers for a
student newspaper. On one such occasion, while interviewing the author Kjartan Fløgstad,
he forgets his notepad and is forced to try to recreate the interview from memory.  But it’s Red Button Publishing
impossible. Even with the questions to hand his memories of the conversation are “too Karen  Ings  has  worked  as  an

vague, too imprecise”. Having called up Fløgstad for some ‘follow-up questions’ he editor  in  trade  publishing  for

manages to cobble together a version that seems faithful enough, and submits it to the sixteen…  [cont]
author for review. The response reads as an ironically prescient in-joke:

Daphne Hampson on
“I
opened
it.
Held
the
printout
of
the
interview.
It
was
covered
with
red
marks
and
red
comments
in
the
margin.
“I
Kierkegaard
never
said
this”,
I
saw,
“Imprecise”,
I
saw,
“No,
no,
no”,
I
saw,
“???”,
I
saw.
“Where
did
you
get
that
from?”
I
saw.”
Daphne  Hampson  holds  doctorates
in  history  from  Oxford,  in  theology
Knausgaard’s six-volume tell-all has become a literary sensation in Norway, partly due to the lavish acclaim it has
from  Harvard,…  [cont]
drawn from more bookish quarters, but mainly due to the juicy controversy stemming from its warts-and-all
portrayal of Knausgaard’s family. This, the first volume to be translated into English, centres on his enigmatic father, See all Articles
who walked out on the family and later barricaded himself in his mother’s house and systematically drank himself to
death. Knausgaard pulls no punches in laying bare the desperate squalor in which his father spent his final days,
and the very public fallout with surviving members of the family over Knausgaard’s version of events has made the
Book Reviews
book an unlikely bestseller.

Stop Here
Prescience aside, the anecdote demonstrates the fundamental impossibility of Knausgaard’s project. If he cannot
In  the  September  1874  Atlantic
recount a single conversation without scandalizing his interlocutor with flagrant distortions and misrepresentations,
Monthly  George  Parsons  Lathrop
what can his memoir ever be but the most arrant of fictions? Even the passage itself is a double negative, a self-
wrote  in  his…  [cont]
cancelling invalidation. As a remembered anecdote that Knausgaard uses to demonstrate the impossibility of really
remembering anything, it negates its own purported premises, even as it undermines those of the entire
undertaking. This awareness of his alienation from the past underpins Knausgaard’s approach to his subject Diving for Pearls: A Thinking
matter. He may be able to dredge up disparate fragments, images, even the odd madeleine-prompted moment of Journey with Hannah Arendt
uncanny convergence, but as Thomas Bernhard’s narrator puts it in Extinction, for the most part the past – even Recently  an  author  and  scholar,
yesterday, even the last second - is nothing but a gaping void. Memory is to a greater or lesser degree fictional, and Kathleen  B.  Jones,  gave  me  her
that is before one even confronts the problematics of writing, of subjugating experience to the outrages of narrative book.…  [cont]

form and the corrupting medium of language.  Knausgaard reflects:

Wreckage of Reason II: Back To

“You
know
too
little
and
it
doesn’t
exist.
You
know
too
much
and
it
doesn’t
exist.
Writing
is
drawing
the
essence
of
The Drawing Board
what
we
know
out
of
the
shadows.
That
is
what
writing
is
about.
Not
what
happens
there,
not
what
actions
are
Wreckage  of  Reason  II:  Back  to  the
played
out
there,
but
the
there
itself.
There,
that
is
writing’s
location
and
aim.
But
how
to
get
there?”
(p.
190)
Drawing  Board,  edited  by  Nava…
[cont]
Even self-knowledge becomes unreliable once it is detached from intuition, and has been assimilated into a
personal narrative. Truth isn’t a question of content but of sense and feeling; an event; a verb not a noun. For See all Book Reviews
Knausgaard, writing is a lie deployed in the service of exhuming and recapturing this fugitive truth. But writing
muddies the water with its own manipulations and falsehoods, from the weight of usage and association to the
gestures of ritual and convention, the charade of literary voice. Knausgaard thus chooses a way of ‘taking us there’
through his writing that is risky, oblique and at times disconcerting. Distrusting the tyranny of the adjective, he
bases his style around flatness and matter-of-fact detail. For the most part he lets significations arise out of form
and structure, the internally generated resonances and associations carried by objects themselves, rather than
laying them on a plate for us through the line-by-line expressiveness of literary prose. Rather than channeling
experience, Knausgaard’s dispassionate delivery more often than not serves to accentuate our distance from it:

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5/27/2015 My Struggle: Book One by Karl Knausgaard « Book Review « ReadySteadyBook - for literature...
“On
the
way
downstairs
a
huge
surge
of
tears
overcame
me.
This
time
there
was
no
question
of
trying
to
hide
it.
My
whole
chest
trembled
and
shook,
I
couldn’t
draw
breath,
deep
sobs
rolled
through
me,
and
my
face
contorted,
I
was
completely
out
of
control.
“Ooooooooh,”
I
said.
“Ooooooooh.”

The subject matter sits uncomfortably with the anti-emotive, matter-of-fact style. The symptoms are simply
presented in a non-hierarchical list (‘My whole chest…’), free of any of the inflective legwork we expect prose to do
in order to enhance the sense of that to which it refers. Part of the uncanny effect of Knausgaard’s approach to his
subject manner is this resistance to almost any kind of literary voice, rejecting its heightened sensibility on a line-
by-line level and instead opting for a cumulative effect based on form rather than style. His prose rejects one of the
central mechanisms of traditional literary aesthetics: enhancing and evoking subject matter through imitation. Like
when Keats imitates the sticky sibilance of an overripe apple, or Dickens or Joyce modulate their sentences to
evoke fog or snow. Knausgaard simply doesn’t bother with any of this, which becomes a kind of oppositional
statement in itself. His stubbornly deadpan delivery accentuates the rupture between now and then, the void that
separates the historical self from the self that tries to recapture experience and recreate it through prose. Yet this is
not the mannered, deliberately enigmatic Dirty Realist minimalism of Hemingway and Carver, or even the offhand
garrulousness of Kerouac. It lies somewhere much closer to the tone of Imre Kertesz’s remarkable novel Fateless,
in which the narrator revisits Auschwitz and rather than emoting just ingenuously describes what he sees.  

In Knausgaard the resistance to emotiveness is not merely a way of confronting the ineffability of trauma without
reducing it to the forms and codes of habit, though this is undoubtedly partly where he is coming from. It is also
down to a more general, pervasive sense of the impossibility of writing, of which the recollection of trauma is
merely an extreme example. It is much more obviously impossible to convey the actual sense of Auschwitz than it
is to convey the actual sense of the dinner-table atmosphere of one’s childhood, or the feeling of playing in a
rubbish band, or making a pot of coffee or lighting a cigarette; there is much more at stake in its being subsumed
into the normalizing network of shared association. But it is ultimately an amplification of the same incongruity. The
sense of a moment passes through words like so many grains of sand through despairing fingers. If Knausgaard is
to overcome this problem he must do so obliquely.

What does it mean to say that Knausgaard’s artistic effects arise from form and structure rather than style? Take,
for example, the line that begins the passage that deals with his father’s death and its aftermath, the real subject
matter of the book: “I was almost thirty years old when I saw a dead body for the first time”. This comes on page
222, but it is really the book’s beginning. The events that the narrative concerns – Knausgaard’s confrontation with
the squalid house in which his father died, and his attempts to make sense of the events that drove him to what
was in effect a prolonged suicide - are all to come. Yet Knausgaard prefaces this all with 222 pages, consisting of a
mixture of saturnine overtures, philosophical asides, quotidian detail and fractured anecdotes from his youth, that
can at times seem slightly directionless. However, in retrospect it becomes clear that by doing so he creates the
conditions under which the objects and events that the main narrative concerns can become meaningful,
independent of the stylistic shortcuts of a more conventionally literary treatment. We can well imagine a lyrical
memoir in which the above sentence serves as a killer opening. It might continue with evocative prose that
transports us inside the mind of the observer, creating resonance and an illusion of empathy. Yet this is not how
Knausgaard continues. He merely dispassionately describes what happens:

“It
was
the
summer
of
1998,
a
July
afternoon,
in
a
chapel
in
Kristiansand.
My
father
had
died.
He
was
laid
out
on
a
table
in
the
middle
of
the
room,
the
sky
was
overcast,
the
light
in
the
room
dull,
outside
the
window
a
lawn
mower
was
slowly
circling
around
a
lawn.”

The significance of the scene arises from the painfully accumulated sensibility we have derived from the previous
222 pages, insidiously, accretively drawing us into the author’s way of looking at the world, his many-sided
relationship with his father, the ineffable web of significations contained within the corpse laid out on the table
before us and its relationship to the observer. Knausgaard could try and communicate something of this through
evocative prose, perhaps using free indirect discourse to try to recreate his mental reaction to what he observes.
Yet he knows that this would be a fraudulent way of recreating the ‘there’ of the moment. Instead, through its
structure and painfully assembled detail, the novel cultivates a sensibility whereby the signification is able to arise,
to some extent, out of the objects themselves. Hence, when Karl Ove and Yngwe pull up outside of the house in
which his father drank himself to death, all he needs to do is flatly describe what they see:

“The
garden
was
completely
overgrown.
The
grass
was
knee-high,
like
a
meadow,
grayish-yellow
in
color,
flattened
in
some
places
by
the
rain.
It
had
spread
everywhere,
covering
all
the
beds,
I
wouldn’t
have
been
able
to
see
the
flowers
had
I
not
known
where
they
were…”

Knausgaard doesn’t tell us what he is thinking, because he knows the structure of the novel does that for us. We
immediately cast our minds back to our first encounter with his father digging his immaculately maintained garden

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5/27/2015 My Struggle: Book One by Karl Knausgaard « Book Review « ReadySteadyBook - for literature...
twenty years previously, a cold, rigidly disciplinarian figure. The contrast with the dissolute slob who drank himself
to death does not need to be articulated through high-flung phrases or hand-wringing lamentation; Knausgaard
subtly creates a textual structure in which it arises out of the detail itself.

The fault line separating autobiography and fiction was explored by some of the great writers of the 20th century,
from Nabokov and Cendrars to Bernhard and Coetzee, though the obvious source text for Knausgaard’s epic is
Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu. Knausgaard’s memoir is a Proustian undertaking not just in the most
obvious sense of it being a gargantuan six-volume novelistic examination of the author’s memories, but also in the
sense that it tells the story of how it came to be written. It remains to be seen exactly where the remaining five
volumes will take us, but even as a standalone Knausgaard’s narrative is circular in the sense that it creates the
conditions for its own coming into being in the reader. It engenders the requisite sensibility in the reader who has
finished the novel whereby he is able to comprehend something of the full meaning of the author who began writing
it. In this sense it is a book that reinforces the Nabokovian diktat that we cannot read, only re-read. And one of the
great gifts of this devastating, urgent and original masterpiece is that its resonant last line invites you to do just that:
turn back to the first page and start over, all the better equipped to make sense of the journey.

Also
published,
in
the
UK,
by
Harvill,
as
A
Death
in
the
Family.

-­-­  Reviewed  by  Danny  Byrne  on  15/05/2012

Further  Information
ISBN-­10:  1935744186
ISBN-­13:  9781935744184
Publisher:  Archipelago  Books
Publication  Date:  08/05/2012
Binding:  Paperback
Number  of  pages:  250
URL:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search?
keywords=9781935744184&index=books&linkCode=qs&tag=marksbookrevi-­21

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