A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård is a strange animal: the author himself classifies it as a novel, but it is generally considered a Proustian memoir (an author that Knausgård says he "imbibed", but since I haven't read In Search of Lost Time, I'll have to take that on the authority of others); close enough to the truth to prompt his family to attempt to stop its publication (or perhaps that's just proof of the liberties Knausgård took with "the truth"?). This is the first of six volumes of memoir that Knausgård has written so far -- he is apparently trying to remember and record everything that has ever happened to him -- and the entire project is titled Min Kamp or My Struggle, yet even after finishing this first volume, this struggle is unclear, or at least, it's unclear how his struggle differs from everyone else's.
The literati are nuts about Knausgård -- hallowed The New Yorker book critic James Wood gives an intensive and glowing critique here -- yet even Woods says of A Death in the Family, "even when I was bored, I was interested". And that's the thing -- it can be quite boring, with Knausgård remembering minutiae about meals and weather and conversations (there's seventy pages about trying to smuggle beer into a New Year's Eve party when he was sixteen), and that's apparently the point: we all live these boring lives, punctuated with flashes of insight. And so Knausgård punctuates his book with insights:
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, the way it reacts, what newspapers write about it; the artist is a performer. That is how it is. 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.Knausgård seems to have always been a bit of an outsider: with a loving but absent mother and an unpredictably violent father (Knausgård hints at this violence but doesn't include any in this volume), and moving homes often in his childhood, his connections with others were weak. Highly sensitive, Knausgård cries easily: with happiness; with hurt feelings; when looking at art. He's a Norseman who gags eating fish; he loves music but can't play more than memorised pieces; he has a heart filled with love to offer to girls, but they rarely see him "that way"; he loves words and literature but has too serious a nature to join in the jokey wordplay that is enjoyed in his family. And while this outsider status might have caused him grief as a child, he now embraces it:
And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky -- so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.Knausgård's struggle might be seen as this inability to find connections, as with his young children:
When I look at a beautiful painting I have tears in my eyes, but not when I look at my children. That does not mean I do not love them, because I do, with all my heart, it simply means that the meaning they produce is not sufficient to fulfill a whole life. Not mine, at any rate.Or it might be his quest to express himself through his writing:
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?But as the English translation has been titled A Death in the Family, the central struggle in this volume can be seen as Knausgård coming to terms with his father's death; a man he hates; a man whose pitiful death Knausgård believes he deserved. Much of this book is taken up with the funeral arrangements and cleaning up his grandmother's house where his father died, drunk and bloody.
We took Jif for the bathroom, Jif for the kitchen, Ajax all-purpose cleaner, Ajax window-cleaner, Klorin disinfectant, Mr. Muscle for extra difficult stains, an oven-cleaner, a special chemical product for sofas, steel wool, sponges, kitchen cloths, floor rags, two buckets and a broom.We join Knausgård as he scrubs at a stained and sticky toilet and shovels excrement-smeared clothes into garbage bags. We see him and his brother view their father's body; choosing the coffin and funeral music. We see him realise that his grandmother is also an alcoholic and watch him pouring her vodka until she wets herself. And through everything, while he explains that he never thinks of his father anymore, we watch Knausgård choke back sobs. The book ends with Knausgård viewing his father's body, once more, alone:
Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.A Death in the Family feels a bit like "an unmade bed, a couple of photocopiers in a room, a motorbike in an attic", but what redeems it from being post-modern-non-art-as-art are the insights and reflections that pop up, and for that, the truthiness of the details aren't very important. And yet, although the universality of his life's story is its apparent charm, I didn't really identify with Karl Ove Knausgård; this wasn't transcendent for me. I'm satisfied that I now know what the fuss is about, and I can't see me seeking out the next five volumes.
