‘My Struggle: Book Five,’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard
In the second book of his six-volume autobiographical novel, Karl Ove Knausgaard shares one of his career’s core principles.
A writer, he says, has “to burst the balloon that is the world and let everything in it spill over the sides.”
Book Five is about itself — how a taciturn Norwegian came to be the author of an epic literary project that, when the final entry arrives in the U.S. next year, will have exceeded 3,000 pages and been translated into more than a dozen languages (the English edition has been splendidly handled by Don Bartlett).
In the intervening years, he takes writing courses and develops pompous views about literature; renounces some of his pretensions and chafes at well-meaning critiques of his short stories and poems; starts several novels and abandons each after deciding he’s talentless; gives it one last shot and, finally, sells his first book.
The answer has to do with his improbably successful effort to reshape our expectations about storytelling, character arcs and closing-act resolutions.
In a culture “inundated with fiction and stories,” he doubts his ability to craft a conventional novel that might break through the noise.
[...] he decides to turn inward, to chronicle his life in unsparing detail, to explore the “struggle” that is human consciousness (yes, he’s playing an abstruse literary game by choosing a title that evokes “Mein Kampf”; no, he doesn’t like Hitler).
Over the past couple of years, I’ve read something like 2,500 pages of Knausgaard, and I can attest that he has an astonishing knack for insinuating you into the minutiae of his daily affairs — whether he’s a teen falling in love with Roxy Music and XTC, a stay-at-home dad enduring an endless kiddie birthday party, or a conflicted son watching his domineering father drink himself to death.
Throughout, Knausgaaard demonstrates a limitless capacity for self-reproach, and after a while, you feel that you have something invested in his shortcomings, humiliations and losses.
[...] more than anything else, the latest installment is the one in which Knausgaard wills himself to become a writer.
Much of the book’s second half focuses on his capricious decisions to destroy lengthy but flawed manuscripts, and his eventual breakthrough, which occurs only after he devotes himself to a punishing schedule.
Whenever I dried up or thought I wasn’t good enough I leafed through one of the books I had with me, particularly Proust, and, invigorated by the atmospheres of that fantastic world and the clear language, I went on.