Time to get controversial? Why does he have Karl Ove
Knausgaard’s second instalment higher than Jon Kalman Stefansson when as a
member of the Shadow Jury for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize “The Sorrow
of Angels” was announced as the winner. To make matters worse Tony here even
put Birgit Vanderbeke’s “The Mussel Feast” higher than the Shadow Jury
winner!!!
There is a simple explanation (I think it’s simple), as a 50
something male with children Karl Ove Knausgaard captures and explains all
those hidden thoughts, fears, struggles that men have with love, family,
responsibility and acceptability in minute detail. Karl Ove’s voice is an echo
of my own voice?
“The two of us should go down and
see El Clasico. Stay overnight. I can arrange the tickets. No problem. What do
you say?”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“Sounds good to me,” he snorted. “Let’s
go, man.”
Linda looked at me and smiled. “You
go, I’d be please for you,” her look said. But there were other looks and
moods, I knew, which would appear sooner or later. You go and enjoy yourself
while I sit at home alone, they said. You only think about yourself. If you go
anywhere it should be with me. All of this was in her eyes. A boundless love
and a boundless anxiety. Fighting for domination all the time. Something new
had appeared in recent months, it was tied up with the imminent arrival of the
baby, and lay inside her, a mutedness. The anxiety was delicate, ethereal,
flickering through her consciousness like the northern lights across a winter’s
sky or lightening across an August sky, and the darkness that accompanied it
was weightless, too, in the sense that it was an absence of light, and absence has
no weight. What filled her now was something else, I thought it had something
to do with earth, it was earthy, taking root. At the same time I considered it
a stupid mythologizing thought.
“My Struggle” is a six book series and after the first
instalment (“A Death in the Family”) we actually move from Karl Ove’s struggle
with his father’s death and alcoholism to his move from Norway to Sweden and
his falling in love and having children. My edition is 573 pages and basically
starts and ends with our writer taking his children to a broken down fair
ground, but it is the flashbacks to how his children came into being and his
reactions to becoming a family man that is the real story here. Or the story of
Karl Ove’s struggle to just be a good person is probably more to the point.
His relationship and discussions with his friend Geir give
us detail as to how Karl Ove verbalises his struggles. His friend’s jealousy of
Karl Ove’s writing ability, for example:
“Technical? Technical” Easy for
you to say, that is. You can spend twenty pages describing a trip to the
bathroom and hold your readers spellbound. How many people do you think can do
that? How many writers would not have done that if only they could? Why do you
think people spend their time touching up their modernist poems, with three
words on each page? It’s because they have no other option. After all these
years surely you must understand that, for Christ’s sake. If they could have,
they would have. You can, and you don’t appreciate it. It means nothing to you,
and you would rather be clever and write in an essayistic style. But everyone
can write essays! It’s the easiest thing in the world.”
How does an ordinary man, who thinks he has limited writing
ability, who believes he is a poor father, son, brother and partner, fall in
love and then come to terms with the imposition this places on his writing
career?
Then I met Linda and the sun
rose.
I can’t find a better way to
express it. The sun rose in my life. At first, as dawn breaking on the horizon,
almost as if to say, this is where you have to look. Then came the first rays
of sunshine, everything became clearer, lighter, more alive, and I became
happier and happier, and then it hung in the sky of my life and shone and shone
and shone.
Such a struggle, as we turn each page we are drawn into Karl
Ove’s need for acceptance, need to define himself, need to write a truly
memorable book.
That was where I had to go, to
the essence, to the inner core of human existence. If it took forty years, so
be it, it took forty years. But I should never lose sight of it, never forget
it, that was where I was going.
There, there, there.
These outpourings of the soul, to his partner, friends, and
family are all on the pages to see, raw and exposed. To think these people
would be reading this (once published) is at times cringe worthy, in some
circumstances you’d not blame people for never talking to Karl Ove again.
Of course I have to end on the quote about fiction itself:
Over recent years I had
increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something
someone had made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with
fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw
fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVD’s and TV series, they
were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news
in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries
had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether
what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis, I felt it in
every fibre of my body, something saturating was spreading through my
consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction,
whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was
constant. In other words, it saw the same. This sameness, which was our world,
was being mass-produced. The uniqueness, which they all talked about, was
thereby invalidated, it didn’t exist, it was a lie. Living like this, with the
certainty that everything could equally well have been different, drove you to
despair. I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every single sentence
was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up. It has no value.
Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only
genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays,
the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about
anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a
life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of
another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height
as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is
something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.
A stunning work, something that has been an absolute
revelation, 2015 will see me tackle Book Four of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle”,
to be honest I can’t wait.
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