Why Do I Love Karl Ove Knausgaard?

 

Book II of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. 

I started the 600-page book II of the My Struggle series in, according to my Goodreads account, December of 2022. I devoured a good portion of it and stopped to focus on some books about climate change. I read two books and then picked it back up. 

This is not to suggest I was getting bored with Knausgaard, in fact, I couldn't wait to get back to it, but I couldn't get through 600 pages in time to get to some other texts I had planned to read for a personal writing project. 

This is all to say there has to be something I really love about Knausgaard's work, something that really drives me to read it. Which is funny because it really shouldn't; the text isn't exactly suspenseful, it is certainly poetic but not classically, grippingly so. The narrative itself is practically absent, I could pick it up after reading two other books and it's not like I had to really remind myself of what happened because everything is only conceptually connected rather than by pieced together with important plot points. 

There is some faint reliability in what I'm reading in My Struggle, but just barely. In my brief review of Book I in 2017 I seemed to feel the same way (I also didn't even appear to like it that much but that's strange because I look back fondly on it now). It's not called "Your Struggle" for a reason. When I read Book I about his adolescent years and his relationship with his father in his 20s, I was also reconciling some personal relationships with my father and thinking a lot about my high school days/early 20s (since they were coming to an end). 

In Part II Knausgaard reflects on becoming a father and a husband, as well as his struggles to balance these things with his career as a writer. I was reading this in between having my two children and also balancing my career, so there are obviously a lot of really relatable aspects of the book in theory.

When Knausgaard gives the harrowing account of his wife giving birth I was instantly transported to memories of my own wife giving birth. Taking his children to Rhyme Time at the local library, navigating awkward conversations with his in-laws; very "been there, done that". 

Except there is a lot that I don't share with Knausgaard. The intense self-loathing and doubt, the disdain with which he regards so much around him. I was struck in that same scene where he takes his children to the music program at the library, or really any scene in which his wife and children are present, how self-centered and critical he was of himself. Terrified of the way he appeared. 

It's a reoccurring theme in Part II; how he appears to strangers when his pregnant wife accidentally gets locked in the bathroom and a boxer has to kick in the door, how he appears to other parents at the daycare co-op when another child is dunking on him, the last 50 pages of the book is a torrent of Knausgaard obsessing over how he comes off in a literary magazine interview. While I can imagine myself in these situations and settings, really a majority of situations and settings Knausgaard finds himself in, the suspense comes from the rising panic in Knausgaard himself, something I don't share but find endlessly fascinating. 

The actual events of Knausgaard's life are seamlessly transitioned; you're taken from Knausgaard with three children living in Norway and attending a fair, to Knausgaard meeting his soon-to-be wife Linda at a conference, to giving birth, to living with two children, one child etc etc. It flows so incredibly well as though you were simply in conversation with Knausgaard, which is emphasized all the more with the punctuated philosophical flourishes that Knausgaard will spontaneously put forward. 

These reveries, short and sporadic enough to not be overbearing or preachy, are just another aspect that drives my interest in My Struggle. I remember enjoying it in Book I, which usually waded into thoughts of death and eternity. Book II also dwells on the themes of the novel and offers some truly impactful writing on the nature of parenthood, on being in love, and on the nature of fiction itself.

Only 19 pages in and we get this beautifully articulated paragraph on parenthood:

"When I think of my three children it is not only their distinctive faces that appear before me, but also the quite distinct feeling they radiate. This feeling, which is constant, is what they 'are' for me. And what they 'are' has been present in them ever since the first day I saw them. At that time they could barely do anything, and the little bit they could do, like sucking on a breath, raising their arms as reflex actions, looking at their surroundings, imitating, they could all do that, thus what they 'are' has nothing to do with qualities, has nothing to do with what they can or can't do, but is more a kind of light that shines within them."  

Poetic, conversational, and relatably human is probably everything I could say to explain my fascination with what could easily be described as a boring, insular, and too-long book. Which I would imagine seems inadequate, I might have just had good timing. It seems Book 3 is about his childhood, the final installation (Book 6) is apparently about Hitler (so I've heard), so time will tell if timing is really everything as I continue to pick up Knausgaard. 

When the Billboard Says The End is Near

 “Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

When it comes to climate change I have borrowed a phrase in my own writing from my good friend and climate change pragmatist Chris Powers that goes something like “Things might get bad, but I won’t be pushing my children around in a shopping cart in some Cormac McCarthy-style apocalyptic wasteland anytime soon”.

One of the things that always seemed to make the climate crisis somewhat easier to reconcile with is how far away all of the consequences seem to be from me and, since having them, from my children.

Things might get bad, I may witness some nascent systemic failures and even some far-away climate-driven atrocities, but I won’t be inflicted with the worst of it. The world will not become uninhabitable. That is until I read David Wallace-Wells book The Uninhabitable Earth where he explores the very real shopping-cart-in-wasteland-possibilities.

Wallace-Wells opens the Uninhabitable Earth explicitly and aggressively challenging the concept that the climate crisis is a distant crisis. Part one, titled only “Cascades” lays out two arguments to consider. The first is the possibility that the climate model’s predictive power is only so good and we could be in for more devastation, and sooner, than the scientific community previously thought. The second is that it is inaccurate to expect a singular, apocalyptic event to deal a final blow-style devastation, but rather cascading increments that will start to shape and change our lives, the pace of that change determined only by our efforts to mitigate damage to the planet.

In “Cascades”, Wallace-Wells contextualizes the crises in a way that feels very personal to my generation, explaining how the historic fossil-fuel burning in the Industrial Revolution “is a fable about historical villainy that acquits those of us alive today”, and that “the majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld”, which was exactly one month before I was born. If the purpose of reading texts like these is to reconcile the climate crises with my decision to have children, the Uninhabitable Earth is essential reading; this framing brings with it an awareness that there is a cost to my life’s comfort and that is the comfort of my children.

But only possibly. Throughout the Uninhabitable Earth, we are reminded that “some climate research is speculative, projecting our best insights into the physical processes and human dynamics onto planetary conditions no human being of any age or era has ever experienced”, particularly as it pertains not to the reality of climate change but rather to the devastation it will wreak. It is inevitable that “some of these predictions will surely be falsified; that is how science proceeds. But all of our science arises from precedent, and the next era for climate change has none.”

So while we cannot know what the horizon will bring to our children or even ourselves, Wallace-Wells expects the changes to come in small cascading and interconnected phenomena that in many ways we are experiencing the very early stages of right now. He titles these the “Elements of Chaos” and each is devoted its own section in part two: heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfire, disasters no longer natural, freshwater drain, dying oceans, unbreathable air, plagues of warming, economic collapse, climate conflict, and systems [collapse].

Each “element” is expressed both as a singular possibility and as a compound with other elements. The singular possibilities are themselves compounding, sometimes taking the form of an unlikely and unconsidered phenomenon, such as the “hunger” element featuring something called “the great nutrient collapse where every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising” thereby making food itself less filling. But hunger also ties into economic collapse, or supply chain systems collapsing, or water scarcity; themselves all their own elements as well.

This is how the climate crisis will impact us. Not through one giant disaster (although jury is not out there either), but rather death by a thousand cuts. The idea that climate change will mount some singular horrific act that will affect tragedy onto one’s personal life is rooted in individualism; it centers the person imagining the horror. In reality, climate change is a systematic change that will impact us exactly because of the interconnectedness of everything.

And in many ways, we’re seeing it already. We’ve seen fires increase their scale and damage, same with different varieties of storms. Even in my home state Michigan, sometimes marketed as some sort of climate change oasis, the winter wonderland can be made all the more deadly; “the warmer the Arctic, the more intense the blizzards in the northern latitudes - that’s what’s given the American Northeast 2010’s Snowpocalypse, 2014’s Snowmageddon” and 2016’s Snowzilla”. Just last year I watched my kids choke on wildfire smoke from Canada (wild fires and air pollution are elements of chaos explored in the book). Nowhere is safe even if they are safer than others.

Systems we have come to rely on will be pushed to the max, some already seem to be bending. And this is not some distant world of 5 degrees of warming, this is the very real, very present possibility given our trajectory; “at just two degrees, cities now home to millions would become so hot that stepping outside in summer would be a lethal risk…wildfires would burn at least four times as much land. The sea level rise would flood or down hundreds of major cities sooner, with as little as two degrees of warming.”

The Uninhabitable Earth also has very little room for optimism or any insistence that we will avoid this future, the only question is when we will endure it. Wallace-Wells beefs with everyone here; major infrastructure investment arguments of the left receive jabs about the improbability, pointing out that to avoid two or three degrees of warming we’ll need “a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture, and perhaps even a meatless planet” when in reality “it took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line.”

Techno optimists and market pragmatists receive their fair share of doubt. Wallace-Wells points out the complete failure of market forces to deliver a “green energy ‘revolution’” despite “yielded productivity gains in energy and cost reductions far beyond the predictions of even the most wide-eyed optimists”. Pointing out that it “has not even bent the curve of carbon emissions downward. We are billions of dollars and thousands of dramatic breakthroughs later, precisely where we started…that is because the market has not responded to these developments by seamlessly retiring dirty energy sources and replacing them with clean ones. It has responded by simply adding the new capacity to the same system”. The market is not designed to scale down engines of profit, only to build on them.

Christopher Suarez, “The Download,” 2023

So if we are to watch the world become uninhabitable and the only question is how fast we will watch it become so, how do you reconcile having children? I’m now cursed with the knowledge that I have brought them into a world rapidly in decline. Wallace-Wells seems to feel similarly to this as a father himself:

“I know there are horrors to come, some of which will inevitably be visited on my children…She will hit her child-rearing years around 2050, when we could have climate refugees in the many tens of millions; she will be entering old age at the close of the century, the end stage bookmark on all of our projections for warming. In between she will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat, and the people of her generation making a future of themselves, and the generations they bring into being, on this planet. And she won’t just be watching it, she will be living it - quite literally the greatest story ever told.”

It doesn’t feel particularly great starting this piece on a 70 degree day in February, after what many are deeming “the winter that wasn’t”. Yes, many of the explanations for the anomalous weather center around the El Ninio hurricane, but I just finished a book about how all the climate models could be incorrectly skewing optimistic and we could be facing an apocalyptic-level crisis in the next week or month or 12 years. The hurricane explainer might have helped me breathe easily before reading the Uninhabitable Earth, but I’m sure I will never feel that way again. It’s one of those books that curses you with a knowledge that is not forbidden, just foreboding.

There is no happy ending or optimistic lift to this piece. There was nothing like that in the Uninhabitable Earth either. Just the reality of how we will “deal” with what is to come:

”People will likely fall into spasms of panic - some of us, sometimes - considering that a future of so many more of them seems so unlivable, unconscionable, even uncontemplable today. In between, we will go about our daily business as though the crisis were not so present, enduring in a world increasingly defined by the brutality of climate change through compartmentalization and denial, by lamenting our burned-over politics and our incinerated sense of the future but only rarely connecting them to the baking of the planet, and now and again by making some progress, then patting ourselves on the back for it, though it was never enough progress, and never in time”

Andy Abeyta photographing billboard by Thomas Broening for The Desert Sun...