Karl Ove Knausgaard delivers a long, meticulous, and surprisingly enthralling read in his autobiographical series My Struggle. Part 1 opens with some fun reveries on death and dying before launching into tales of Kanusgaard’s childhood. These are a series of somehow (assuming you’re a white male) relatable stories that range from elementary school to early college. There are a lot of things in these passages for people to enjoy; the painful attempts at starting a band in middle school, the pathetic attempts at fitting in and the misguided importance placed on doing so, the looming presence of a stern father and the growing resentment that follows. Many of us have gone through at least some of these things and, for reasons I cannot really explain, there is a tremendous amount of pleasure to be found in reading them recounted in extreme detail.
This is where My Struggle begins to dwell in the realm of fiction. It isn’t just an autobiography, what makes it a fictional account lies in the story’s minutia. Knausgaard doesn’t rely on charged drama or even all that much human interaction to carry the action of his fiction. What he decides to embellish are the details. This doesn’t require a killer memory and surreal perception skills like one might think. The real skill employed here is imagination. There is no real way of telling whether Knausgaard can really tell what embarrassment felt like, the color of things, the texture, whether he sneezed and at what moment in the conversation. I know I can’t recall many of these things in my own life, but nor could I necessarily imagine myself doing so. That could be because I don’t have the range of imagination Knausgaard allows himself to employ in the retelling. Dwelling with him in these past moments though, is cathartic and rewarding. As a reader I don’t know if I’ve ever really been anywhere like this in a book, even the most detailed fiction leaves out what Knausgaard so essentially and effortlessly captures.
The second half of part one takes a darker turn as Knausgaard comes face to face with a tragedy. I won’t spoil anything, but the detail in emotion intensifies, not in clarity but in scope. We can’t see why Knausgaard feels the way he does or does the things he does, but he is more interested in transporting his reader to the scene rather than the trappings of his psyche. When the book is finished and Knausgaard’s riff on death from the beginning of the novel comes to a close, the reader is greeted with a deep sense of satisfaction reserved for the most beloved of literary classics. I’ll be picking up Book 2.
