A Death in the Family (My Struggle Book 1) – Karl Ove Knausgaard

As usual I hop on a literary bandwagon a couple of years after everyone else to find the detritus of second hand views and the remnants of sensation. I remember a lot of talk in the literary pages about this multi-volume memoir of a Scandinavian novelist, hyperbolic praise (on the cover of my paperback – “It’s unbelievable… It’s completely blown my mind”, Zadie Smith), and comments about the damage it had done to the writer’s relationships with friends and family. At some point I must have bought the first book, A Death in the Family, but it lay around unread, mainly because I’d been left with an impression of the intensity of the writing and that said heaviness for me. And I’m a bit of a procrastinator, and nothing makes me procrastinate like hard work and this book seemed like it was going to be hard work. So when I selected my twenty books from my To Be Read pile I resisted the urge to make them all sub-150 page Muriel Spark novels (though there was one – The Girls of Slender Means – and it was fabulous) and, knowing I could delay reading them for a while at least, chucked in a few tougher tomes, also knowing that it would force my hand and I’d have to read them sometime.

Reading A Death in the Family is an intense experience, but it’s not necessarily hard work – though there is a section in the middle that it pays to read closely, more on that later. But firstly, there is deliberate mistake in my second sentence above; strictly speaking the book is not memoir, it’s fiction, but it deep mines his life for its subject matter; though given the frequent references to his poor memory in part two of the book it is clear that much of the detail is reconstructed. It is unsparing and unflinching in its portrayal of his father and grandmother, and in particular himself.

At times the pages fly by, part one focussing on his life as a teenager, though the subject matter is often mundane. He is concerned with the minutiae of life, incredibly detailed reconstruction of day to day events. The level of detail is amazingly absorbing, the sections that focus on him and his brother cleaning their grandmother’s squalid house, where their alcoholic father had been living when he died, should be really boring but they are mesmeric and immersive. I spent a day deep cleaning our bathroom after reading that. But he can also move seamlessly from this detailed description to deeply personal musings and to more abstract essays on art, for example, and of course death. The book opens with a discussion of death and our aversion to being exposed to the everyday reality of it, while death and killing is on news and TV drama all around us. This ability to range across topics mimics the way our brains work; how an absorption in the banal can free up our mind to wander across the internal and the external, the personal and the abstract. However, there is little retrospective analysis of his younger self. He explains what he was doing and what he was thinking in great detail, but does not analyse it from the perspective of his older self.

The most intriguing question raised by this book is why is he writing in this way and what does he hope to achieve? Not the very personal subject matter, I think we are all accustomed to confessional material in novels and memoirs, it’s the detail and the attention paid to the everyday activities. Part two abruptly switches to an older Karl Ove (the names are as per real life, except for the members of his father’s family who objected) married and trying to establish himself as a writer, and here we find what I think is an explanation of what he is trying to achieve by writing in this way, it comes at around half-way through the book, just after the start of part two and immediately precedes the key event, the death in the family.

In it Knausgaard seems to go some way towards articulating a manifesto for what he hopes to achieve. He starts by describing how he is struggling to write a novel, explaining that “A world that after 300 years of natural science is left without mysteries. Everything is explained, everything is understood […] the world is small, tightly enclosed around itself, without openings to anywhere else”. He is writing to find a way out but feels that “What I ought to do is affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are, in other words, revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out”, but he can’t do this because

it had not only been thought but also experienced, in these sudden states of clear-sightedness that everyone must know, where for a few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself for a brief glimpse before reverting and leaving everything as before…

Knausgaard describes these epiphanies as intense experiences of “enormous significance” feelings “akin to the one some works of art evoke in me”. So what he is looking to create in his work is this sensation of the world revealing itself, but struggling to do this through fiction because the world is too known, too tightly bound. He moves on to describe the paintings that have had this effect on him;

it was striking that they were all painted before the 1900s within the artistic paradigm that always retained some reference to visible reality. Thus, there was always a certain objectivity to them, by which I mean a distance between reality and the portrayal of reality, and it was doubtless in this interlying space where it ‘happened’, where it appeared, whatever it was I saw when the world seemed to step forward from the world. When you didn’t just see the incomprehensible in it but came very close to it

Analysing post-1900s art he identifies that “the great beyond” – the divine up to the Age of Enlightenment and then nature during Romanticism – no longer finds expression, because human feelings and inner life have taken up all the space in modern art. He uses Munch as an example from Norwegian art, think of his painting of The Scream, human emotions dominate the canvas. So these days “Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not any more. Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it”. But death is different, “It is all around us, we are inundated by news of deaths, pictures of dead people […] but this is death as an idea”. The “physical and material” aspect of death “is hidden with such great care that it borders on a frenzy”. Revisiting themes with which the book opened, he claims that “Death is the last great beyond. That is why it has to be kept hidden. Because death might be beyond the term and beyond life, but it is not beyond the world”.

Within this short section of the book we find subject, motivation, and explanation of his approach. By “affirm[ing] what existed, affirm[ing] the state of things as they are” he is attempting to do what he finds most moving in pre-1900, pre abstract modern art, creating a direct representation of life, because somewhere between the artist’s rendering of real life and real life itself something magical happens, and the world reveals itself just for a moment. And the sense is that the death of his father has given him his subject, and has also somehow freed him up to attempt something without fear of contradiction or failure. Out from the shadow of his father he has his own chance at a stab at the sublime.

Immediately following that section is the key moment:

I was almost thirty years old when I saw a dead body for the first time. It was the summer of 1998, a July afternoon, in a chapel in Kristiansand. My father had died.

The abstract discussion of death, and art, and part one about his adolescence and the last lost chance for him and his father to be close, all coalesce in this moment and part two is a haunting description of the aftermath of his father’s death.

Does he succeed? Does he make the world reveal itself for a moment? It clearly very much depends on the reader, some will, no doubt, find it self-indulgent, but I found it intensely moving, perhaps because I’m someone who constantly needs reminding to get out of the abstract and into the real.

And also, maybe his way of thinking reminds me of my own? Though clearly much better at articulating those thoughts. I read this straight after completing Viv Albertine’s memoir, Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys. It is a book that is similar in its undaunted honesty, yet with Albertine I felt I was reading about someone inspiring who could teach me a lot about perseverance (I’m always impressed by people whose lives have good second acts, and her life post-Slits fascinated me, anyway I do have a blog on that drafted somewhere) rather than someone whose experiences had much in common with my own. I think much of this is a time and gender thing, Albertine is fifteen years older than me, and her experiences as a woman growing up in London and in and around the punk scene are a world away from my provincial boyhood in eighties Northern Ireland. Knausgaard’s Norwegian youth seems much closer and many of the experiences feel very familiar.

It hasn’t helped me get through my To Be Read pile though, because now I’m itching to read book 2 of My Struggle, A Man In Love. And then there’s book 3, and book 4 is just out in the UK and books 5 and 6 are to come.

Here we go.