Few of us, while on a long-distance flight, are glad to be seated next to a loquacious stranger who ignores the signal we try to send with our open book, our earbuds, the sleep mask we pull down over our eyes. Imagine, then, that the traveler beside us is a craggy, middle-aged Norwegian determined to tell us everything that ever happened to him in his life, every boyhood memory, every random association and metaphysical speculation, every song he listened to, every book he read, every detail he can recall about his parents, his first friendships, his three children’s personalities, the diapers he changed, the meals he cooked, the highs and lows of his second marriage. It’s not all that difficult to imagine, but what seems far more improbable is that we become so riveted by our companion’s story that we begin to wish the flight could continue for as long as his monologue lasts—or at least until we figure out why we are so enthralled.
That unlikely scenario vaguely approximates the unusual experience—and the mystery—of reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, a dense, complex, and brilliant six-volume work, totaling more than thirty-five hundred pages, that could, I suppose, be described as a cross between a memoir and an autobiographical novel were it not unclassifiable: a genre of its own. The book has been a critical and popular success in Europe, where it has won literary prizes. It was a sensation in Norway, its notoriety boosted by Knausgaard’s nervy decision to borrow the title (Min Kamp, in Norwegian) of Hitler’s literary call to arms, and by the media scandals that erupted when his ex-wife and uncle objected to the ways in which they are portrayed in his work.
In a masterful translation by Don Bartlett that follows Knausgaard’s tonal shifts from the colloquial to the conversational to the lyrical, My Struggle has gained a sort of cult following that has gradually broadened to include a larger base of readers, most of whom agree that there’s nothing else like it, and also that it is difficult to explain just how the book works its particular magic. Why are we so interested in the minutiae of this guy’s life?
The third volume, “Boyhood,” is—like the first half of “A Death in the Family”—an account of the author’s childhood: his loving but distant mother, his tyrannical father, his adored older brother, Yngve, his pals, teachers, grandparents, and neighbors, the local girls who become the objects of his first romantic obsessions. What “Boyhood” shares with its predecessors is not simply Knausgaard’s (by now) familiar voice, its alternations between narration and essayistic rumination, between passages of lyrical elegance and scenes of dialogue, or even its setting and cast of characters, but, more important, Knausgaard’s determination to include everything, no matter how banal, trivial, embarrassing, or personal. This volume poses the same questions as the previous books: How do we construct a self from each experience and impression, each moment of our lives? And how can the ghosts of the past be not only recaptured (as in Proust, to whom Knausgaard has been compared) but exorcised, so that a father need not repeat the mistakes his father made in raising him?
Long after we stop caring how much of this is “true” and how much has been embellished, we remain intrigued by the challenge of explaining why, given the memoir-novel’s unexceptional subject matter and its author’s encyclopedic approach to his personal history, we are unable to put the book down. Why is it so hypnotic, a word that keeps cropping up in reviews of Knausgaard’s books and among his fans? Why do we follow, with breathless excitement, the seventy-page account, in “A Death in the Family,” of the teenage Karl Ove’s Herculean efforts to procure beer for New Year’s Eve? Why are we so engaged by the depiction (in the second volume, “A Man in Love”) of the super-crunchy children’s birthday parties and nursery school classes to which Karl Ove reluctantly takes his son and two daughters, after he moves from Norway to Stockholm? And why do we so happily follow his recollections, in “Boyhood,” of how he liked his breakfast cereal?
In Book Three, Karl Ove could be Everyboy. A ragtag gang of Scandinavian Huckleberry Finns, he and his friends search for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow; they play soccer, start fires that briefly threaten to burn out of control, visit the local dump to watch some guys shoot rats. They learn to swim, go fishing, pore over a treasured cache of porn. They grow older and compete on the playing field, in their classrooms, and in a school election. Karl Ove joins a terrible rock band, with the generationally perfect name Blood Clot, and falls in love with a succession of neighborhood girls who ditch him for more attractive and popular boys. He wrecks an early romance by persuading his sweetheart that they should try to break the local record for length of time spent kissing; he is mocked by the other kids when his mother buys him a swimming cap decorated with flowers; a family crisis erupts when he loses a sock. His father, a high school teacher, is transferred. The family moves to another town. And Knausgaard reflects on the beauties of the lost-forever world in which he came of age:
Landscape in childhood is not like the landscape that follows later; they are charged in very different ways. In that landscape every rock, every tree had a meaning, and because everything was seen for the first time and because it was seen so many times, it was anchored in the depths of your consciousness, not as something vague or approximate, the way a landscape outside a house appears to adults if they close their eyes and it has to be summoned forth, but as something with immense precision and detail. In my mind, I have only to open the door and go outside for the images to come streaming toward me. The gravel in the driveway, almost bluish in color in the summer. Oh, that alone, the driveways of childhood!
Ultimately, very little happens to Karl Ove that might not have happened to countless other middle-class boys living on the outskirts of a Scandinavian town (or, for that matter, in a small American town) during the 1970s—or at least to every other boy who was terrified of his father. In the first volume, we witness Karl Ove’s Pavlovian response to his father’s presence: just the sound of Dad’s footsteps on the stairs is enough to inspire a watchful unease, perpetually on the brink of tipping over into panic and fear. In Book Three, the boyhood idylls screech to a halt whenever Dad comes onstage to perform the petty acts of cruelty, impatience, injustice, and rage that make the child—and the reader—feel a jolt of anxiety whenever Dad’s car pulls into the driveway. The party’s over.
As stern, omnipotent, and implacable as the Old Testament God, Dad is uninterested in details like the difference between intentional and accidental, between disobedience and carelessness, innocence and guilt. Who cares if Karl Ove didn’t mean to break the TV he was specifically instructed not to turn on, or if it’s true that he got a five-kroner coin from an old woman he and his friends helped by moving a fallen tree lodged in a stream? The punishment—slaps, ear pulling, shouting, humiliation—is the same as if the boy had been lying.
When Dad’s enraged, capricious unfairness makes the child cry, his tears not only shame him but further enrage Dad, whose son is weak enough to cry like a girl. After his father torments him for eating one too many apples by making him eat so many apples he nearly vomits, Karl Ove thinks, “I hated Dad, but I was in his hands, I couldn’t escape his power. It was impossible to exact my revenge on him.” In Karl Ove’s fantasies, “I could hurl him against the wall or throw him down the stairs. I could grab him by the neck and smash his face against the table. That was how I could think, but the instant I was in the same room as he was, everything crumbled, he was my father, a grown man, so much bigger than me that everything had to bend to his will. He bent my will as if it were nothing.”
What makes this all the more affecting is the skill with which Knausgaard captures the boy’s mixture of fear, rage, and love, the intensity with which he monitors Dad for the slightest sign of approval, the helpless joy he derives from his father’s infrequent moments of contentment. A trip to the fish market and the record store, where Karl Ove’s choice of music (Elvis!) pleases Dad, ends with an almost ecstatic interlude during which Dad shows his son how to “cure” the warts on his hands by rubbing them with bacon grease. All of this painfully underscores the rarity of tender or even peaceful exchanges between the child and the adult.
That we follow a multi-stop shopping trip with Dad with such rapt fascination is a tribute to Knausgaard’s narrative skill, a talent that alone provides enough reason to keep reading. Our interest is sustained by the sense that we know the most essential things about everyone in the book. And each new thing we find out provides the fascination of learning some previously unknown anecdote or piece of gossip about close friends or neighbors: a family we know almost as well as we know our own.
Three quarters of the way through “Boyhood,” Dad leaves for Bergen to “major in Nordic literature and become a senior teacher.” Until this point he has maintained dictatorial control over everything that goes on in the house, but now Mom asks Karl Ove if he would like to bake some bread. “That might have been the year Dad lost his grip on us.”
There follows an ominous sentence. “Many years later [Dad] was to say that Bergen was where he started drinking.”
That is, this sentence will seem ominous—extremely so—to anyone who has read “A Death in the Family.”
It is impossible to know how Book Three of My Struggle would seem to a reader unfamiliar with the preceding volumes. It’s like trying to imagine what it would be like to meet, for the first time, someone we imagine we know as well as we may feel we know Karl Ove after reading Books One and Two. Everything that happens is shadowed by everything that has happened, which is the result of Knausgaard’s inspired decision to tell his story not chronologically but thematically, and to begin (more or less) at the end, with the death of the father whose influence he has spent his adult life trying to escape.
The first volume starts with a meditation on death, features the aftermath of what may be the most horrific (and certainly the most squalid) demise in literature, and concludes with the following sentence, the end of a thought that occurs to Karl Ove as he contemplates his father’s corpse: “And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.”
Halfway through “A Death in the Family,” Knausgaard writes, “I was almost thirty years old when I saw a dead body for the first time. It was the summer of 1998, a July afternoon, in a chapel in Kristiansand. My father had died.” Together with his brother Yngve, Karl Ove comes home for the funeral, but the ceremony—and the complex task, for the brothers, of sorting out their feelings about Dad—turns out to be the least of it. For some time, Dad had been living with his mother, Karl Ove’s grandmother, drinking himself to death, while Grandma, intermittently aware of her surroundings, kept up with him, consuming massive amounts of alcohol to obliterate the pain of being feeble, incontinent, and forced to witness the spectacle of her son’s slow suicide. Mother and son have constructed a sort of fortress of garbage; the rooms of Grandma’s house are littered with refuse: hundreds of liquor bottles, filthy clothes, old newspapers, rotten food. The walls and floors are covered with excrement. And the brothers must clean up the mess.
Doubtless there will be readers who would rather avoid the dubious pleasure of accompanying Karl Ove and Yngve as they scour and tidy a house that makes the jam-packed dumps on Hoarders look like luxury spas. Once more Knausgaard spares us nothing: the smells, the sights, the prodigious quantities of cleaning products required, his own bouts of weeping and vomiting. But the point is, it is an experience, and a powerful one, which the reader shares with the writer, and we read “Boyhood” in a very particular way when we know (as Knausgaard did when he wrote it) the ultimate destination to which Dad was heading.
When, in “Boyhood,” Karl Ove tells us how much he loves his grandma, who smells good and is the only person who is interested in him and generous with physical affection, we cannot forget the heartbreaking old woman who will wind up as Dad’s housemate and drinking buddy, in whose living room Dad will die. Afterward, she will try to manipulate her visiting grandsons into having a drink, and will urinate on the floor in the midst of a conversation.
Whenever Dad even briefly disappears from “Boyhood,” Karl Ove revels in the intermittent attentions of his sweet but detached and frequently absent mother. Left to his own devices, he delights in his daily life—the escapades, the freedom, the intrigues among his pals. What Knausgaard is describing is nothing less than that process so rarely captured in literature: “the conversion of a child into a person as it is happening,” as John Berryman said of Anne Frank—in this case a grown man, a writer who is more or less conscious of who he is, of what he has become, and of how that transformation occurred.
Reading about young Karl Ove in “Boyhood” is a bit like watching home movies of a child—observing the gestures, the physical features, the interests, obsessions, and personality quirks that will not only persist but become even more visible in the adult. In this book, as in the first volume, Karl Ove grows obsessed with a series of local girls who, as distinct and individual as they clearly are to him, tend to merge in the reader’s mind into one girl whom he cannot stop thinking about, who shows a passing interest in him—and then dumps him.
We already know about Karl Ove’s propensity for erotic obsession. In “A Man in Love,” that mania focuses on Linda, a poet and writer (and sufferer from bipolar disorder) who will eventually become his wife and the mother of his three children. The agonies that Karl Ove endures over his failed boyhood loves will come to seem like innocent rehearsals for a children’s play when we compare them to the scene, in Book Two, in which—rejected by Linda—he returns to his room at a writers’ festival and cuts his own face with a shard of glass.
In the first three books of My Struggle, Knausgaard mostly lets us draw our own conclusions about his parents’ marriage, which in general seems to involve efforts on the part of both parents to find pressing professional reasons for living apart. By contrast, “A Man in Love” contains an unusually complete dissection of Karl Ove’s own marriage to Linda, alternately passionate, resentful, joyous, tedious, grateful, and contentious, rendered in far more detail than any other marriage one can think of, in fiction or nonfiction. His best male friend and confidant during this time (by now Karl Ove and Linda are living in Stockholm) is a man named Gerd, with whom he has soul-searching Dostoyevskian conversations about human nature and literature. In “Boyhood,” we again meet Gerd, this time in an earlier incarnation as Karl Ove’s childhood best friend and partner in boyish mischief.
In the publicity surrounding My Struggle, there’s been a surprisingly steady interest in Karl Ove’s description (in Book Two) of his understandably mixed feelings about changing his children’s diapers. Though perhaps it’s not so surprising. We may not realize just how uncommon such passages are unless we try to think of another literary work whose author is so engaged by (and so honest about) the profound pleasures and the numbing boredom of fatherhood, and the problem—nearly always considered a women’s problem, though serious women novelists don’t tend to write about it, either—of how to balance the demands of being a writer with the very different demands of parenthood.
Karl Ove’s anxieties are partly the result of his fear that he and Yngve might repeat Dad’s failures, his uncertainty about “whether what Dad had handed down to us was in our bone marrow or whether it would be possible to break free.” In “Boyhood,” he reflects:
I have my own children, and with them I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father. They aren’t. I know that. When I enter a room, they don’t cringe, they don’t look down at the floor, they don’t dart off as soon as they glimpse an opportunity, no, if they look at me, it is not a look of indifference, and if there is anyone I am happy to be ignored by it is them. If there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it is them.
By the time we reach this section, we understand what this happiness has cost him, especially after having read (in Book Two) about the toll taken on both Karl Ove and Linda by their bickering over housework and childcare. As he diapers and plays with his children, struggles with the shaming but undeniable fact that pushing a stroller makes him feel emasculated, and brings his children to classes and parties at which (in a series of at once funny and tragic scenes) Karl Ove feels humiliated just by having to be there, he must anticipate and fulfill his children’s needs even when he desperately longs to go off somewhere and be alone and write.
I wanted the maximum amount of time for myself with the fewest disturbances possible. I wanted Linda, who was already at home looking after Heidi, to take care of everything that concerned Vanja so that I could work. . . . All our conflicts and arguments were in some form or another about this, the dynamics. If I couldn’t write because of her and her demands, I would leave her, it was as simple as that. . . . The way I took my revenge was to give her everything she wanted, that is, I took care of the children, I cleaned the floors, I washed the clothes, I did the food shopping, I cooked, and I earned all the money so that she had nothing tangible to complain about, as far as I and my role in the family were concerned. The only thing I didn’t give her, and it was the only thing she wanted, was my love. That was how I took my revenge.
Once again, it is the sort of thing we may see around us, among our friends and neighbors, or even in our own homes, but rarely in a book. Unlike most novelists, who take us on the whaling voyage or the safari, as far as possible from the trivia of daily life, Karl Ove transforms that trivia into a complex, even orchestral plot, peopled by characters who happen to be his family—and himself. In his determination to cover page after page with the reality of the inner and outer life, Knausgaard seems willing to do anything to get it right: to surrender his privacy, his dignity, the impulse to seem like a good person, in the interests of explaining what it is like for him (and for all of us) to be alive on earth.
The literary voice of My Struggle takes up permanent residence in our consciousness, for how can we not be changed by the time and effort it takes to read thirty-five hundred pages of narrative this intense? Afterward, you may never be able to see a father pushing a stroller or a boy riding his bike, or go to a middle-class children’s birthday party, or see a parent being nasty to a kid in public without thinking of Karl Ove. The emotions we may feel upon finishing “Boyhood” are akin to those that often accompany the season finale of a favorite TV series. We’re sad that it is over, aware that we must wait for a new season, consoled by the fact there will be one. After reading three extremely long, detailed, and dense installments, there is still so much about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s life that I can’t wait to find out.