My Struggle: Book Two

Karl Ove Kanusgaard, the Norwegian novelist, has emerged as a major force in the current world literary scene, as well as a major contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His Magnum Opus is the six-volume "My Struggle" which is a blend of autobiography, fiction, mini-novella, and a philosophical treatise on life, love and family. The title of his dense novelized memoir "Min Kamp"  was "deliberately borrowed from Adolf Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf." But the similarities between these two books end there. While Hitler's book ends up propagating hatred and advocating world dominance, Knausgaard 's is poetic, artistic, and leaves one feeling loved. He was just named the "2015 Literary Innovator" by the Wall Street Journal Magazine. 

Book Two of "My Struggle" originally published as "A Man in Love" has been translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett.  It offers details of his relationship with his wife and two daughters, and an analysis of people in different social settings --for example at birthday parties where he hangs out and at his children's daycare center's meetings. As a stay-at-home dad, his companions are his two daughters, Vanja and Heidi, and he offers such loving characterizations of their divergent personalities. But we also get insights into his writing style and modus operandi from a conversation at a birthday party with Gustav, father of Jocke, who was his older daughter, Vanja's friend.

"So, are you writing anything new?" he asked.

I shrugged.

"Yes, I'm keeping busy," I said.

"Do you work at home?"

"Yes."

"How do you go about it? Do you sit waiting for inspiration?"

"No, that's' no good.  I have to work every day like you."

An enduring charm of Knausgaard is his humility. It is evident in his views on poetry.  He writes, "Although much has changed in my life since then my attitude to poetry was basically the same. I could read it, but poems never opened themselves to me, and that was because I had no "right" to them: they were not for me. When I approached them I felt like a fraud, and I was indeed always unmasked, because what they always said as well, these poems, was: Who do you think you are, coming in here? That was what Osip Mandelstam's poems said, that was what Ezra Pound's poems said, that was what Gottfried Benn's poems said, that was what Johannes Bobrowski's poems said. You had to earn the right to read them."

He touches many aspects of his life that he either mentions in the first volume, and events that happened later in his life. His father's death was traumatic for him and he covers extensively in book one. His father, a former school teacher, lived the last few years of his life with his old mother. He died a terrible death; alone, drunk and buried in detritus.  The reader is left with a mystery; how could his mother be absent at the funeral? We learn from Book One that his parents were separated, and thiscasts was very dark shadow on Knausgaard's very detailed description of his father's last days and the funeral arrangements.  The last page of this volume offers a beautiful and sweet closure for the reader, as he describes a conversation with his mother.

"That morning she went on to tell me about the first time they had met. She had been working at a hotel in Kristiansand during the summer when she was sixteen, and one day at a terrace restaurant in a large park, in the shade of a tree, her friend had introduced her to her boyfriend and his pal.

"Ididn't quite catch his name, and for a long time I thought it was Knudsen, she said. "And at first I liked the other one better, you know. But then I fell for your father… it's such a good memory. The sun, the grass in the park, the trees, the shade, all the people there…We were so young, you know…Yes, it was an adventure. The beginning of an adventure. That was how it felt."

Knausgaard's account of his first encounter with his father-in-law, Linda's father, Ronald Bostrom is very revealing.  He met Ronald for the first time a few years after he married Linda. Ronald, who had spent some time in a mental institution, comes to visit them, and after the introduction, and some perfunctory talk about the job that Karl Ove did by painting his house, they go inside the house. There, he continues, 

"Something I had never seen before had come over Linda. She adapted to him, she was subordinate to him somehow, she was his child, she gave him attention and her company, while also being above him, in the sensethat she was consistently trying to hide—although never quite succeeding—her shame."

He is also indiscreet. He told an interviewer that his revelations caused his wife Linda, a poet and novelist, to have a nervous breakdown.  One should not be completely surprised at this turn of events after going through his lengthy account of his first meeting with Linda, which happenedwhile he was still married to Tonje, his first wife.  Regardless, it touches your heart.  As a master of "hyperrealism" (realism in art characterized by depiction of real life in an unusual or striking manner), his love story is mesmerizing. He begins this way,

"The first time I set eyes on Linda was in the summer of 1999 at a seminar for new Nordic writers at Biskops-Arno Folk High School, outside Stockholm. Standing outside a building with the sun on her face. Wearing sunglasses, a white T-shirt with a stripe across the chest and green military fatigues. She was thin and beautiful. She was thin and beautiful. She had an aura that was dark, wild, erotic and destructive. I dropped everything I was holding. "

Knausgaard, regardless of the size of these volumes (3600 pages), is read around the globe (his books have been translated into at least 15 languages), and is the most sought after author in the creative writing circuit. If you Google Knausgaard, you get almost half a million hits, and he is being quoted for his views on art, music, and realism in every corner of modern literature. 

The reviewer is a regular contributor to this section.