Reviewed by Eric Gudas
Note
I wrote this review of The End, Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken’s translation of the final installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Min Kamp (My Struggle), in Spring, 2019. At the time, Knausgaard-mania was at its height, at least in the U.S. For a few years in this century’s teens, half the whole world, it seemed, turned into a Knausgaard book club. Readers eagerly awaited each new volume with something of the fervor that 19th-century readers anticipated the latest installment of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop to learn the fate of Little Nel. We compared our reactions on online and in-person conversations. Knausgaard himself, with his tangled shock of graying hair and ubiquitous stubble, became an instantly recognizable literary celebrity. Audiences in Europe and the U.S. filled standing-room-only venues to hear Knausgaard read from translations of his novel and to engage in question-and-answer sessions with writers like superfan Zadie Smith. Less than a year later, however, the COVID-19 pandemic swept over the world, and not only made such communal gatherings impossible but also brought Knausgaard-mania to an abrupt end.
The End worries over the harm Knausgaard’s novel, not yet published, might do to members of his family who are depicted in the text. His dilemmas remind me of Elizabeth Bishop’s now-famous 1972 letter to Robert Lowell, when the latter sent her an early draft of his book of poems The Dolphin, which incorporated excerpts from his then-wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters. Bishop opposed using the letters: “One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust? … art just isn’t worth that much.” Lowell went ahead and published a revision of The Dolphin anyway. For me, Bishop’s question hung over Knausgaard’s depiction of his then-wife Linda, whose struggles with mental illness his narrator views, characteristically, from his own perspective. These depictions struck a nerve with me. My own life-long struggle with mental illness made it difficult for me to read these sections with any objectivity.
The fiction editor of a publication to which I regularly contribute turned my review down, writing, “this reads as a slam on [Knausgaard’s] character, in addition to on the books.” I took this critique at face-value—perhaps I had lost my cool as a reviewer and engaged in an ad-hominem attack on the author—and put the review away, until now.
Nevertheless, before I considered Knausgaard’s treatment of Linda, I tried to articulate how much I’d been captivated by previous books in the series. The sixth novel simply didn’t, for me at least, measure up to the previous five. I’m not sure Knausgaard himself knew how to conclude his Big Novel, and, I thought at the time, he ended up producing a hot mess. My review itself is a hot mess of contradictory feelings about My Struggle and the whole Knausgaard project. When I wrote the review, that project mattered intensely to me and legions of readers around the world. Perhaps it still does. Recently, I saw someone reading The End in a movie theatre before the lights went down.
I began thinking about how I was going to dispose of my copy of the sixth and final installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical novel, My Struggle, co-translated by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken, when I reached page 155 of the Archipelago Books edition. Because of its length, 1,157 pages including bibliography, and square format, the novel—published as The End in the U.S.—dwarfs the books on the only shelf where I had space for it, including Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, The Brothers Karamazov, and Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. I didn’t want to let Knausgaard’s book hulk, like a schoolyard bully, over so many legitimate classics, because I had stopped caring about My Struggle’s significance, to which it alludes to, questions, undermines, and gloats over at every possible juncture. The title, courtesy of Adolf Hitler, is a deliberate provocation. Scattered allusions to Proust throughout the books remind us that À la recherche du temps perdu also has six volumes. (My Struggles’s first five volumes were translated into English, heroically, by Don Bartlett.)
Like the first five books, The End overflows with minutiae from the narrator’s daily life, so much specificity that one wants—or I wanted—some sort of pattern to emerge from the detail as recompense for having slogged through it. Amazon’s “Search Inside This Book” function spits out 55 instances of the word “stroller,” in The End, not surprising since the narrator and his wife Linda have three children. Because one of the novel’s subjects is daily life, certain details recur: “John was asleep in his stroller” (p. 56), “I checked on Heidi, she was still asleep in the stroller” (p. 119). In long stretches of the novel, like the first part of Book Six, during which he takes care of the children while Linda’s on a trip, Knausgaard seems indebted to not only literary but cinematic sources—specifically Chantal Ackerman’s landmark of feminist cinema, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975).
Ackerman’s almost three-and-a-half hour film depicts, in real time and long static shots, the daily routines of a single mother and sex worker in Brussels. You can start watching her make veal cutlets, go out for a cigarette—as my friends and I did in college—and come back to find her still working four minutes later. Ackerman’s purpose is as straightforward as her film is excruciating to watch: women live lives of deadening routine. I found zero hits for “feminism” in Book Six, but the narrator and his wife practice a rigid kind of equality in sharing childcare duties. When the narrator expresses his reluctance to pick the kids up from daycare, Linda rejoins, “Of course I can. But it was my turn this morning. So it’s your turn this afternoon.” This 50/50 split (actually, the narrator’s own math shows that he’s doing 75% of the housework and childcare, while Linda does 25%), even if equitable, doesn’t seem to foster much goodwill between the ostensibly equal partners.
Back to page 155, where I began to doubt whether the time and the emotional investment—I can’t think of a less hackneyed phrase—I was beginning to put into this very long book and all the people in it, would be, after five previous installments, worth it. My turning point occurred in the almost 400-page first section where the narrator recounts, in what feels more or less like real time, a few days in the fall of 2009, shortly before the first and second book’s simultaneous publication dates. On this particular evening, the narrator makes dinner for his children the second night in a row while Linda’s on a trip: “I went and got the phone in the hall, called Geir Angell, measured out some water and milk, put it in a saucepan, added the recipe mix, and started stirring all before he answered.” Something snapped in me. I was barely one-hundred pages into the book, and already the narrator was dragging me into his boring routine. You can tell the routine bores him because he has to call his friend and interlocutor Geir to get through it. But readers who’ve made it this far in My Struggle have become accustomed to real-time narration of everyday events. I deem this particular moment “boring,” but I read, and re-read with pleasure, an approximately one-hundred-page section in Book One where the teenaged narrator and his pal go to great lengths to get drunk on New Year’s Eve. What happened between Books One and Six—to me the reader, or to Knausgaard the writer, or some cosmic overlap of the two?
What the narrator really wants to talk about with Geir is the act of waiting for reactions from those he’s written about in Books One and Two—and also, it turns out, for their assent to have their real names used in the books which, he reports, is “ready for typesetting.” That doesn’t give dissenters much time to object, and indeed our hero’s plans for swift publication get derailed when his paternal uncle “Gunnar” (it becomes clear that Knausgaard anonymized this member of his family) objects to the book’s portrayal of his brother’s—the writer-narrator father’s—death and its aftermath, and that he has, for years it turns out, harbored resentment towards Karl Ove and his mother. “Gunnar” calls the first volume of My Struggle “a self-centered shambles of a book”—an assessment which anyone who’s read My Struggle would have to agree has some credence, even if the novel’s shambolic structure is why its defenders like it in the first place. As for “self-centered”: if one has any affection for Knausgaard’s narrator, it’s because of, not despite, his utter inability to get outside of his own head and into someone else’s—like, say, Linda’s (about which more later).
But “Gunnar” thinks he knows with certainty how his brother died, and it’s not how his “helpless wretch” of a nephew narrates that death. “Gunnar’s” vitriolic certainty causes the narrator to doubt his memory of his father’s death, and ultimately sends him down a postmodern rabbit hole about the nature of truth. Does the narrator’s account of the utter squalor in which his alcoholic father lived and died, in the home of his mother, the narrator’s grandmother, have validity simply because that’s how he remembers those events? And if so, does “Gunnar’s” much less squalid version also have its own claim to truth because that’s what he believes?
Readers of Book One will remember the power of those scenes in which the narrator and his brother Yngve enter the utterly debased space of their grandmother’s house and work, again in what seems like real time, to clean it up and, in the process, restore some dignity to it: “The wall tiles beside the toilet seat, on which the toilet paper holder was fixed, were covered with light brown stains and the floor beneath was sticky, and these seemed to me to be most in need of attention, so I squirted a line of Jif over the tiles and began to scrub them, methodically, from the ceiling right down to the floor.” These scenes, which also seem indebted to Jeanne Dielman, belong among the novel’s most powerful passages. Indeed, for me, they’re the height of Knausgaard’s literary enterprise. Maybe there’s no way to get beyond the scrim of language—both the words of narrator’s novel and those of “Gunnar’s” emails to the narrator, his mother, and his publisher—to the “truth” anyhow. Of course, these are not new quandaries for imaginative artists and their critics (cf. Rashomon, Jacques Derrida).
The newness of Knausgaard’s approach lies in the way he embeds the literary-philosophical debate in a minutely detailed account of his narrator’s day-to-day life, which goes on with its own momentum, even if he’s having an aesthetic-moral-legal dilemma as the result of his uncle’s emails. His children still need to be picked up from daycare, the laundry, piling up in blue IKEA bags—hey, I put my laundry in those bags, too—still needs to be wrangled downstairs to the communal clothes washers. The narrator thinks out loud as he talks to Geir on the phone:
“I will publish it.”
I went to the cupboard and got the box of macaroni out, shook some into the boiling water, stirred a bit with a fork, and turned the heat down.
“The question is by what right. The right of literature? That means I’m saying literature is more important than the life of the individual. And not only that, I’m saying my literature is more important than [Gunnar’s] life.”
“But it’s not his life! It’s your father’s life. He’s the brother, you’re the son. The son’s closer.”
I angled the chopping board over the saucepan and scraped the chunks of sausage into the sauce, took four plates out of the cupboard and put them on the table, opened the drawer and got the forks and knives out.
The entanglement of form and content in Knausgaard’s method reveals itself here. The debate about whether literature has some kind of imperative over and above life can’t be separated from hunger’s imperative—and more importantly, the imperative to care for one’s children, for whom the narrator makes this dinner. At the same time, there’s obviously more vitality in the conversation than there is in the narrator’s descriptions of himself cooking, which are packed with verbs that show how he works on auto-pilot while he talks—shook, stirred, angled, scraped, opened. You can love your children and not enjoy ecstatically every moment you spend caring for them. In this instance, literature and life stand at cross-purposes because the narrator cares more about “Gunnar’s” effect on his novel than on how well the food turns out. But ultimately, Knausgaard the writer wants to collapse the categories of “life” and “literature,” and thereby free himself from the postmodern novel’s capacious but nonetheless—to him—constricting generic conventions.
That enterprise pretty much worked, to varying degrees, for this particular reader, as I read the first five books. Their style embodies what I’d call diaristic realism. You can tell Knausgaard wrote them fast—and indeed their two-at-a-time publication schedule in Norway made the series almost a literary stunt—which gives one the dispensation to read them at a bracing clip. Knausgaard locates his characters in granularly described settings, mainly the island of Tromøya, Kristiansand, the village of Håfjord, Bergen, Stockholm, and Malmö. Toril Moi claims that My Struggle represents “a genuine effort to figure out what it means to write a novel in a new aesthetic and historical dispensation.” However, I’d say that the novels pretty much follow the conventions of the Künstlerroman, or novel of artistic development.
Knausgaard’s narrator locates himself specifically in the twentieth-century segment of this tradition when, as an eighteen year-old in Book Four, he unpacks the books he’s brought with him to northern Norway: “Books about young men who struggled to fit in to society, who wanted more from life than routines, more from life than a family, basically, young men who hated middle-class values and sought freedom. They traveled, they got drunk, they read, and they dreamed about their life’s great passion or writing the great novel.” The awkward, father-loathing child of Book Three becomes the cocky enfant terrible of Book Four and early Book Five, while by the end of Book Five, he has matured into the happily married and critically successful postmodern novelist at thirty. If you shuffle Book Two into a position after Book Five, you can get the narrator into his thirties, second marriage, and fatherhood, and most of the way towards the personal and artistic crises that precipitate My Struggle.
The parts of My Struggles that initially hooked me come when the narrator slows the action down as far as he can to describe something so mundane it’s hard to pay attention to while you’re doing it. In Book Six occurs when the narrator finds a frozen pizza in the freezer to feed the kids:
I took the pizza box out and put it on the counter, switched the oven on, found the scissors in the drawer, tore off the long strip along the side of the box, tipped it so the pizza itself, round and surprisingly heavy, slid out into my hand, snipped open the see-through plastic it was wrapped in, which was stiff and had a kind of crinkly crispness about it, nothing like the see-through plastic of the bags we bought our fruit in, which were looser in some way, or the thin cling film for wrapping food up before putting it in the fridge. Nor was it anything like the slightly thicker, more durable plastic that covered the corn-on-the-cob we sometimes bought, or the six-packs of beer.
As an inveterate eater of frozen pizzas, my first thought here was, Wow, I never cut the plastic off the pizza with scissors, I just tear into it with my forefinger until I make a fissure big enough to pull the pizza through, always scattering some frozen cheese-bits on my way.
My second thought was, this must be what my students mean when they say a work of literature is “relatable,” which seems to be their generation’s sole aesthetic criteria for assessing imaginative works like novels and from which I’ve long ago given up trying to wean them. Here’s a guy doing what I’ve done a million times, making a frozen pizza, and at the same time meditating on all the kinds of plastic—the prototypical material for our consumer age—he’s come into contact with. The narrator’s not writing about plastic as much as he is about a phenomenon Joni Mitchell gave expression to almost fifty years ago—“the crazy you get from too much choice.” Just yesterday, the vegetable section of my local Whole Foods had three separate sets of avocados, all at different prices, none of them ripe. I must have dithered back and forth between the neatly displayed stacks before giving up. This surfeit of choice—according to Amazon, the word “shopping” appears forty times in Book Six—in the late capitalist industrialized West is a subject ripe for treatment by artists of all stripes, novelists included.
Until I’d finished Book Six, I’d never contemplated writing about My Struggle, considering that the novel and its author started blowing up the English-language internet starting in 2012. I feared I’d just be like one of the literary bloggers the narrator scorns, who “seemed to view themselves as important people with important opinions.” However, I joined the bloggers (and book reviewers) when I read the The End’s four-hundred-page interregnum which the narrator flails about intellectually to justify naming his novel after Hitler’s Mein Kampf, with a four-page “Bibliography” at the end. If Books One through Five constitute some kind of literary meal—and indeed all six novels expend a great deal of prose about what the narrator and those around him eat—then the check comes in Book Six. It turns out there never was a good reason, other than, perhaps, as a marketing tool, to call the book Min Kamp. Knausgaard and his narrator seem to be working out a faulty syllogism that goes something like, “Hitler hurt people – I hurt people – Therefore I’m a little bit like Hitler.” The syllogism—entirely of my own devising and which may have nothing to do with how Knausgaard conceives of his novel—is flawed on the basis of “hurt.”
The greatest harm the narrator does comes in his portrayal of his wife, Linda. (The biographical Karl Ove Knausgaard and Linda Boström Knausgaard have been divorced since 2016.) A writer and radio producer, Linda, like her fiction-writing husband, goes through periods of artistic blockage. Unlike the narrator, she suffers from bipolar depression that affects not just her artistic productivity but her ability to do much of anything at all, including household chores. In Book Two, the narrator mercilessly evokes their marriage’s: “joylessness”: “That was what [Linda] wanted, that was what she dreamed about, for us to be one happy, contented family. All I ever dreamed about was for her to do her half of the housework. She said she did, so there we were, with our accusations, our anger and our longings, in the middle of life, of our lives, no one else’s.” The “her half of the housework” aspect of his recrimination is a red herring, but for what? The narrator’s wife isn’t satisfying him in some fundamental way—and he can’t, or doesn’t want to say, how. But it doesn’t occur to him to consider that his wife’s mental illness might interfere with her ability to function.
It’s hard to believe, but at the beginning of Book Six, Linda hasn’t even read this passage because the narrator hasn’t yet given it to her. When he does, she assents to the whole second volume’s publication. What else can she do when the book is virtually in proofs? Probably the most insidious effect Knausgaard creates is for the reader—or at least this reader—to see Linda as his narrator sees her, namely as less engaged in serious work than he is. In Book Six, she comes home from shopping: “‘They had these filing boxes at Granit, the ones I was saying we could use for our mail, one for you and one for me. So now we don’t need to leave all those letters and bills lying around all over the place. Do you want to see?’” Having come this far with our narrator, one doesn’t need to hear him say or think that the activity Linda has been engaged in—shopping for mail-containers and clothes—has less significance than his act of worrying about the potential effects of Gunnar’s email on My Struggle. In that moment I felt myself allied, despite myself, with the narrator: those boxes are just going to get so stuffed full of unopened mail we won’t be able to open the drawers, but what about My Book? The couple gets into a petty verbal altercation, and, characteristically, their marital ennui plays out in terms of eating: “I was finished in a couple of minutes, the food was barely warm and it offered nothing in the way of resistance, the only thing was to shovel it in.”
In the last part of Book Six, Linda enters a psychiatric hospital for treatment, and the narrator worries whether her manic episode has been brought out by the forthcoming publication of Book Two. As a husband, father, and writer who struggles with unipolar major depression, I identify profoundly with the character of Linda, who “would be lying in bed oblivious to [her children’s] expectant calls of Hello? and Mamma? as they came in.” I, too, have experienced such obliviousness, and I know the attendant guilt that my own child has childhood memories of me lying in bed, unreachable. The narrator never identifies with Linda enough to ask himself whether his novel about their marriage is worth their marriage itself, because there’s no question of his not publishing the novel.
Art supersedes life, even if that art is made from what feel like a billion tiny bits of one family’s actual life. Call the project auto-fiction, memoir, Künstlerroman, whatever, but call it some form of Art. The narrator’s nascent regret at having injured the actual Linda psychologically, however, infiltrates the novel’s ending, which sentimentalizes Linda as much as David Copperfield, another Künstlerroman’s hero, haloes his wife, Agnes:
And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet, these faces fade away. But, one face, shining on me like a heavenly light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond them all. And that remains. I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me. My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company.
Knausgaard’s narrator goes Dickens one further to evoke his idealized wife’s beatitude in more specifically maternal terms:
Leaning over Heidi, whispering something in her ear, Heidi laughing her trilled laugh. Lying on the sofa with Vanja on top, laughing at something our clever daughter has said. The tenderness in his gaze as she looks at John. And her hand at the base of my neck, warm, those totally unguarded eyes of hers.
Those “unguarded” eyes suggest vulnerability, even defenselessness. I can only imagine Knausgaard’s possible dilemma as a novelist—whether to protect Linda, or to subject her (or at least their marriage) to the merciless scrutiny of Art. But, as I say, to protect Linda would mean changing or omitting huge chunks of My Struggle. My own particular insoluble struggle lies in my identification with Linda, or at least with the novel’s representations of her, and with Knausgaard the novelist, who needs to get the whole mess of human life into his book.
If you think My Struggle has gotten a tsunami of press already, just wait five or six years for the dissertations about Knausgaard’s novel to come pouring out of Comparative Literature and Scandinavian Literature departments the world over. My concern is more workaday: what to do with this book that I don’t plan to read again and which not only takes up too much space on my shelf, but which (the way I feel today) doesn’t belong there beside Chekhov, Tove Jansson, Lester Bangs, et al? There’s a culture vulture in my apartment complex who leaves copies of New York Review Books Classics books and other highbrow reading in the laundry room. So next time our blue IKEA bag fills up with dirty clothes, I’ll toss my copy of My Struggle, Book Six, on top of the pile for other readers to grapple with.
Eric Gudas is the author of Best Western and Other Poems (Silverfish Review Press, 2010), winner of the 2008 Gerald Cable Book Award. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Raritan, All About Jazz, Poetry Flash, Senses of Cinema, and elsewhere. He contributed the afterword to Natalia Ginzburg’s Family and Borghesia (NYRB Classics, 2021).