Detailing Karl Ove

I’ve pushed bodies covered with blankets along corridors, down designated elevators, and into the bowels of more than one hospital’s morgue, but I have never discussed the experience with anyone, in fact, I left the memories fermenting in a forgotten corner of my psyche until I started reading My Struggle, Book 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

"... there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only hidden away in discrete, inaccessible rooms, even the pathways there are concealed, with their own elevators and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered." 

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 1 

The narrator, loosely based on the real Karl Ove Knausgaard, discusses the western cultural proclivity to hide death and other struggles. He draws upon profound moments of memory and immerses the reader into the microcosm of smells, sights, tastes, and emotional punches in order to tell his story. As he learns about himself so does the reader.

Days before starting the book, I had sat at the bedside of dying family member. A few pages into this book its intimacy with the concealment of death spooked me. However, a few months later, I began again, drawn by it's intimacy of death and life.

The writing is closely observed, the reader is pulled into the moment with the force of an irresistible tractor beam from the first recalled memory at age eight through adolescence to the challenges of adulthood. I kept turning the pages, in part because of the details that are so vivid, so right there in the moment, so tangible and fresh that they took me into my own recollections and reveries. The reader, too, sees a face in the sea and must tell someone even if it is the prickly dad hacking away in the garden. Book 1 explores the struggles of adolescence and mourning, but it is also a book for those who long to know the shadows that lurk within and who trust that the darkness must be integrated into the light. It is a book for those drawn to authenticity and that can glean truths from another’s struggles and willingness to commit them to the page.

"'Are you still there, boy?' 

I nodded. 

'Get yourself inside.' 

I started to walk. 

'And Karl Ove, remember, ' he said. 

I paused, turned my head, puzzled. 

'No running this time.' 

I stared at him. How could he know I had run?"

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 1  

He connects his memories of his youth and thus stirs the reader to also remember what has been forgotten.

"The remarkable thing was not that the face should be visible here, nor that I had once seen a face in the sea in the mid-1970s, the remarkable thing was that I had forgotten it and now remembered." 

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 1  

Over and over the book brought me into familiar territory with my own youth- struggles with parents, negotiating with peers, negotiating life and desire, and even with music of the time.  He also ranges across ideas in art, writing, and self in ways that struck me as fresh or truthful to both him and thus me, the reader.

"Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?" 

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 1 

 

“Contemporary art, in other words, the art which in principle ought to be of relevance to me, did not consider the feelings a work of art generated as valuable. Feelings were of inferior value, or perhaps even an undesirable by-product, a kind of waste product, or at best, malleable material, open to manipulation.” 

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 1 

"The situation we have arrived at now whereby the props of art no longer have any significance, all the emphasis is placed on what the art expresses, in other words, not what it is but what it thinks, what ideas it carries, such that the last remnants of objectivity, the final remnants of something outside the human world have been abandoned. Art has come to be an unmade bed, a couple of photocopiers in a room, a motorbike in an attic. And art has come to be a spectator of itself, they way it reacts, what newspapers write about it; the artist is a performer."  

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 1 

The book, the first in a series of six, is not for the faint of heart, but it is hard to put down despite it containing over four hundred pages. I finished it over Labor Day weekend with my feet planted at the edge of Lake Michigan. Until I can afford missing a few days of sleep, I’ll hold off buying the next book, assuming I can also resist the siren’s call for me to plunge in yet again.

My Struggle, Book 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard was published in 2009 in Norwegian and translated into English in 2012 by Dan Bartlett by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It can be purchased at The Little Professor Bookstore in Athens, Ohio, at other independent bookstores, or on the usual internet sites.

Detailing Karl Ove Review