And yet, for many critics, nothing is more plainly unartistic than Knausgaard’s style: “The problem with My Struggle,” William Deresiewicz insists, “is that nothing happens in the writing.
What makes My Struggle mesmerizing, then, can’t be the events depicted, but rather the writing. In the last volume he devotes almost four hundred pages to an essay on Hitler’s childhood and youth, particularly dwelling on his unsuccessful attempt to become an artist. Quite late in the story he tells us about school teaching in northern Norway, and about his frustrating twenties in Bergen, years of constant and mostly futile efforts to become a writer. He butters some more sandwiches and rails against politically correct child-rearing practices in Sweden. He pushes a pram through the streets of Stockholm.
The ordinariness of his daily existence is breathtaking. He wonders what writing is, and why he is the way he is. When he is thirty, his estranged father dies. Over the years he marries and divorces, then marries again and has three children. His shyness thwarts his early attempts to connect with women. He hides his feelings, tastes and opinions. He has trouble becoming a writer, let alone a good writer. But why did I find this particular novel so mesmerizing? The story of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s life is hardly full of unusual events. There was something extraordinary about the experience of reading My Struggle. (The English-speaking world is still waiting.) When I finally held the gigantic tome in my hands in November 2011, it felt as if I were reading it intravenously. The long wait for Book 6 was excruciating. Every two or three months or so, I needed my Knausgaard fix. (By now, Book 1 of My Struggle has sold over 500,000 copies in a nation of five million inhabitants.) The publication schedule was addictive. Along with the rest of the Norwegian population, I was hooked from the start. Books 4 and 5 followed in the spring and early summer of 2010. The next two books were published that same fall. The first book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle appeared in Norway in September 2009.
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