This is the sixth and last book of MY STRUGGLE, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s monumental autobiography. It’s been four thousand pages, and it feels funny to leave him at last.
The series started with his father’s death, and then moved around in time, covering his childhood, adolescence, first marriage, second marriage; and now this one takes us through the early years of his childrens’ lives, the blowback from the publication of the first novels in the series, and the early life of Adolf Hitler.
Yes, for some reason there is a four hundred page sidebar on Hitler. Why? I can’t say I know. Let’s get the sidebar out of the way first. Generally, I think it is creepy to be overly interested in Hitler. It’s also not very illuminating; Karl Ove is a novelist, not a historian or academic (indeed, he did not work very hard at school, as I know, because I spent six hundred pages on the topic), and it shows. So while you don’t learn so much about Hitler, you do learn a lot about Karl Ove, and Scandinavia. It’s funny to see how unimaginable Weimar Germany is to a contemporary Norwegian, and it’s hilarious to see how much emphasis he puts on the character of Hitleer as a driver of the war as opposed to say economic meltdown and hyperinflation, which is obviously by far the bigger issue (I guess a Zimbabwean is always going to think everything is about hyperinflation). That said, I did find some interest in extracts from MEIN KAMPF. I mean, you know that book is always going to be crazy, but try this, even the first few sentences are far more batshit than you would ever imagine:
TODAY it seems to me providential that Fate should have chosen Braunau on the Inn as my birthplace. For this little town lies on the boundary between two German states which we of the younger generation at least have made it our life work to reunite by every means at our disposal.German-Austria must return to the great German mother country, and not because of any economic considerations. No, and again no: even if such a union were unimportant from an economic point of view; yes, even if it were harmful, it must nevertheless take place. One blood demands one Reich.
Okay, Hitler. This Hitler digression is bizarre, but not actually so bizarre as the rest of the book. A discussion of Hitler’s life at least fits into a framework with which we are familiar. What Karl Ove tries to do is something quite out of our experience: actually write about his own life, as honestly as he can. It’s a truly weird thing to do, and in early books I hadn’t quite appreciated how much he was really telling his life. In this book, he describes how people around him responded to the earlier books coming out. His brother, for example, who read in the book how he felt about him for the first time; his high school girlfriend; his wife. In this book he tells us how, after he emails out drafts to them, he lies on his bed and shivers in fear for hours. (Let’s not forget that Karl Ove is not a tough guy: he was terrified as a child of indoor plumbing as I recall.).
Apparently the whole idea came to him on a dreadful package holiday in the Canary Islands, right after he almost got conned into a timeshare. He was inspired by the diaries of someone called Gombrowicz.
. . to go down beneath the surface, beneath the ideologies, which you can only stand up to by insisting on your own experience of reality, and not by denying it, for that is what we do, all the time, deny the reality we have experienced in favour of the reality we have learned, and nowhere was the betrayal of the I, the unique and individual I, greater than in art, as art has always been the privileged domain of the unique. My hands trembled at the very thought, that I could actually describe everything as it was. That all I had to do was just go ahead and do it. What a treacherous thought!‘Just’ my arse!
. . . because I have always had such a weak ego, always felt myself inferior to all others, in every situation. Not only the brilliant individuals I have met, who with their charisma, intelligence and talent have outshone all others, but also taxi drivers, waiters, train conductors, in fact every kind of person one can possibly meet out there. I am inferior to the man who washes down the stairs and the corridors in the building in which we live, he possesses an authority greater than mine in that situation, so for instance, if he says something about the stroller and the balance bikes left outside our door, in a voice that carries even the slightest hint of annoyance, I tremble.
. ..if you want to describe reality as it is, for the individual, and there is no other reality, you have to really go there, you can’t be considerate. And it hurts. It hurts not to be considered and it hurts not to be considerate. This novel has hurt everyone around me, it has hurt me, and in a few years, when they are old enough to read it, it will hurt my children. If I had made it more painful, it would have been truer.
It has been an experiment, and it has failed because I have never even been close to saying what I really mean and describing what I have actually seen, but it is not valueless, at least not completely, for when describing the reality of an individual person, when attempting to be as honest as possible is considered immoral and scandalous, the force of the social dimension is visible and also the way it regulates and controls individuals.
The truth was that when I sat down to write the novel I had nothing to lose. That was why I wrote it. I wasn’t only frustrated, the way you can become when you live as a parent with small children and have many duties and have to sacrifice yourself, I was unhappy, as unhappy as I have ever been, and I was all alone.My life was quite dreadful, that was how I experienced it, I was living a dreadful life, and I wasn’t strong enough, I didn’t have the spine to abandon this and start anew. I often thought about leaving, sometimes several times a day, but I couldn’t do it . . . But that was what made me decide to write a novel in which I threw caution totally to the winds and told it as it was. Only when the book was ready to be published did I realise what I had done and went through the manuscript and crossed out the worst.
I am not sure how you held out this long on Karl Ove.