Inspiring Older Readers
A Death In The Family ( Part One of My Struggle) by Karl Ove Knausgaard
When Knausgaard’s epic project of writing a life story that blurs the boundaries between autobiography and fiction first began to appear in translation from its native Norwegian in 2012 it caused quite a stir. The full sequence, entitled My Struggle, would it seemed encompass six fairly hefty volumes of analysis and detail of the writers life and obsessions. To date, five of these are now available in the UK.
In his native Norway, Knausgaard’s reputation was well established before the books started appearing in the UK but it was hugely enhanced when other authors began to lavish extravagant praise on the undertaking – Zadie Smith in particular is often quoted for her remark about regarding Knausgaard as her ‘crack’ addiction. However, the literary world is nothing if not fickle and, predictably, before too long the literati began to get bored with this new phenomenon and decided it was time to take a fashionably unimpressed stance as new volumes appeared.
I have to admit that I was put off reading any of Knausgaard’s sequence of books partly by a contrarian streak – I just thought that anything so ‘trendy’ and fashionably ‘in’ was likely to be a disappointment - and partly because I was suspicious of the echoes of the Hitler allusion in the ‘My Struggle’ title, which I assumed must have been a deliberate piece of smart-arsed ‘branding’. I was also nervous about the referencing of Proust by the author himself as well as his admirers – I always tend to think that use of the word Proustian is a deliberate piece of elitism.
So, it was with considerable trepidation that I decided to pick up volume one – A Death In The Family – partly to see what it was really like and also because the author is paying a visit to this year’s Cheltenham literary festival and I wanted to know if it might be worth trying to get a ticket. All I can say is that, on the strength of this first instalment at least, I’m a total convert.
The book is effectively split into two halves, the first of which deals with Knausgaard’s dysfunctional boyhood and teenage years. In often painful detail he maps out his always odd relationship with a father who grows increasingly distant and unapproachable and a mother who is affectionate but nearly always absent. The desire to please or to not anger his father dominates his life and constantly seems to sit at the heart of his emerging personality. We get drawn into the young man’s world in such convincing detail that we live out with him his friendships, his love of music, his minor successes and his many failures and his growing love of alcohol – which, along with his infatuations for a number of young women appears to dominate his teenage years. This is superbly skilful writing and allows us to share the young man’s point-of-view perspective almost as if he was wring about us. There was so much here that I instinctively knew was about me – and I suspect lots of teenage boys - as much as it was about Knausgaard .
The second half of the book sees the now thirty something Knausgaard and his older brother dealing with the sudden death of his father . The death itself stirs predictable conflicting emotions but it is also the manner of the death - squalid and physically repulsive - that we are invited to share. His father, it would seem, simply fell apart physically and emotionally and returned to live with his mother, Knausgaard’s grandmother, and, making recluses of themselves, sustained a sort of life characterised by their shared alcoholism. Knausgaard is forced to revisit his feeling for both his father and his grandmother and struggles to understand what is the right thing to do by them – one dead and one living. As a kind of tribute to his father and as a therapy for himself, he sets himself the task of getting the dilapidated and disgustingly soiled house his father died in in a fit state to host the funeral wake.
This is raw stuff and somehow genuinely elemental. However, I can also see it walks a fine line because what is revelation could easily have become melodrama or even self-obsession but it is a tribute to his skill ( and that of the translator) that this never becomes an issue. I felt his emotion to be genuine and I didn’t feel any sense of manipulation or that difficult truths had been dodged - and certainly no feeling that we were being given something synthetic or untruthful.
I found the book to have some genuinely cathartic passages and powerful enough to take me on , in due course, to the next in the sequence. I’m not the kind of reader who will sit down and plough my way through such series, one book after another, and so I suspect I will take my time but I do intend to continue the journey.
Terry Potter
September 2016