What sets the current volume apart is the fact that this one takes the reader up to the point in the author’s life when he is about to get his novels published, and part of the drama in it is created by the tension between Karl Ove and his uncle, who is called “Gunnar” in the books. His uncle had been sent a copy of the novels by email (as had all the other people Knausgaard had named in his manuscript) but he had objected violently to the way Knausgaard’s father had been characterised. He had even threatened legal action.
Poor Karl Ove! (It’s like the refrain of a Greek chorus: “Poor Karl Ove!” is heard offstage at key moments in the books as the author haltingly comes to terms with his own unwieldy personality.)
The author blames his father for a lot of his problems (what, for example, he calls his tendency to defer to the opinions of others) but for my part I see very few signs of mental ill health in Knausgaard. His father might have been a bit rough on his at times, as he chronicles in the books, but the author certainly doesn’t seem to have suffered any long-term ill effects as a result. Not as far as I can see. People who have been treated very badly in their childhoods tend to suffer from clinical depression and other mental illnesses. Karl Ove is just a bit shy and awkward.
But what was really different for me about this volume is that I only got 37 percent of the way through before giving up, irritated and frustrated by the fuzzy thinking involved in the exercise. I had read the earlier instalments with ease and pleasure. But poor Karl Ove is your typical autodidact and has an amateur’s confidence in his own powers of deduction. He’s never been asked to write anything like a serious essay to critique a book, let alone anything else, and has never been challenged by anyone with real knowledge about the disciplines he interests himself in, such as sociology, history, literary criticism, or psychology. He ploughs on dauntless into the farthest reaches of his own comprehension and tries to take the reader along with him but it’s as though he never rereads anything he writes because much of his exegesis is just blather (as a friend noted about one part of the book he had just read).
The author doesn’t seem to care when his knowledge is lacking, he just blurts out whatever occurs to him at any moment he needs a fact to buttress one of his pet theories. He thinks Japan is too much like the west, for example, even though he knows nothing about Japan and has probably never visited the country for any length of time. (Another indicator of ignorance is that he thinks that the first novel written was ‘Don Quixote’ when in fact it was the Japanese novel ‘Tale of Genji’.) This kind of error is everywhere in this book and you just can’t take anything Knausgaard says at face value. Everything has to be questioned (although I suspect that his uncle’s objections about the precise facts appertaining to the death of his father were probably unwarranted).
Knausgaard does wonderfully well when he is describing his children’s bedtime or the texture of his relationship with his wife, Linda. In these sections of the book I was entranced as he catalogued the small details of existence and the vagrant thoughts overlaying them as he dotingly goes about the tasks needed to get the kids settled down for the night. Vanja, Heidi, and John each have their own characters and they are lovingly and intricately drawn by a kind of hairy, furrow-browed, androgynous earth-mother. I did wonder when he was relaying conversations he’d apparently had with his friend Geir how he could have been so sure of his recall, but I choose to let that flaw pass without more comment.
Where he seems to be going with his meditations on the nature of the individual in society is potentially rewarding in its details but he never really gets the thing off the ground long enough to fully develop the ideas he seems to harbour in his imagination. I think that he feels disquiet about the nature of the individual and the boundaries that separate him or her from the collective, but I was left wondering what he was going to do with his half-formed intimations. His distrust of postmodernism and his critique of the ideological uses of art seem to point in this direction but by the point at which I left off reading the book he hadn’t explored these ideas properly. He comes back to ideas about the individual again and again.
His observations about the impact that the French Impressionists must have had on the prose of Marcel Proust seems to me to have been a worthwhile point to make, but he doesn’t take it to its logical conclusion. He seems to have a deep sense of loyalty in favour of Scandinavian authors such as Nobel Prize-winner Knut Hamsun, a Modernist, which might actually reflect a seam of nationalistic exceptionalism but we’ll let that one just lie there without further comment. The monologues he conducts within himself using ideas and tropes borrowed from other Scandinavian authors will not mean much to people who live outside the region.
He is on surer ground in terms of his audience’s ability to keep up with his thinking when he talks about the Irishman James Joyce or the American William Faulkner, but here again his thinking is not clear or focused enough to have the desired impact. He has a cow’s tendency to ruminate on things and a self-starter’s ability to formulate totalising systems of ideas that help him to manage his emotions in an often alienating world. But the trick for an author is to be able to communicate such things to another person, and it’s here that Knausgaard’s much-vaunted prose style falls on its face at a walking pace.
Overall there’s a lack of rigour in his thinking that means he fails to endow his ideas with the specific gravity they need to punch through the barriers in place within the reader’s mind. This seems to me to be a grave defect, but others might think that Knausgaard’s facile cogitations resemble in their effect a fine wine of a select vintage. I have no idea. I call them just as I see them.
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