It’s Karl Ove’s anxious mixture of fear, sadness, guilt, and anger that makes “My Struggle” seem, at times, Dostoyevskian: he feels, and sometimes acts, like a murderer. Karl Ove, having long wished his father dead, is now driven nearly crazy by the fact that the man is actually dying. In the new volume, his dad is no longer abusive-he’s started a new family in another part of Norway-but he’s become suicidally alcoholic his darkness has turned inward. In previous volumes, we’ve watched a younger Karl Ove struggle to absorb his father’s dark energies. They seem to issue from a misery so unbearable that those ordinary woes can’t account for it. He also commits two shocking acts of violence-one against himself, the other against someone he loves. He works long hours at a mental institution and on an oil rig in the North Sea. He drinks too much and becomes a petty thief and vandal. He falls in love, has his heart broken, gets married, cheats, and gets divorced. Karl Ove spends years laboring over a few terrible pages of fiction (helpfully reprinted, in full, by Knausgaard). The years leading up to that success, however, are unhappy and sometimes unhinged. As it opens, he is nineteen and entering the Writing Academy in Bergen by the end, he has published a well-received novel. edition, covers a difficult period in Karl Ove’s life-his twenties, more or less. Volume five of “My Struggle,” which is called “Some Rain Must Fall” in the U.K. It’s reacquainted me with the vividness of feelings. Instead, “My Struggle” has pushed me to think more about my own self, and, in particular, my emotions. The book isn’t really about politics, aesthetics, or the nature of society.
When I tally up the pleasures and surprises “My Struggle” has given me, I find that they have little to do with intellectual subjects. I’m sympathetic to these readings of the book, but something in me resists. The final volume, it’s thought, will reveal the novel’s grand intellectual design. Earlier this month, in an essay on the fifth volume in The New Republic, Ryu Spaeth argued that “My Struggle” is “actually a commentary on contemporary life in the West, a sweeping novel of ideas in the tradition of Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoevsky.” Other critics have likened Knausgaard to Proust, whose novel wasn’t just a life story but a philosophical meditation on aesthetics, time, and selfhood. Photograph by Martin Lengemann / laif / Reduxįive volumes in, there’s still a temptation to redeem Karl Ove Knausgaard from egotism-to find, in his multi-volume autobiographical novel “My Struggle,” some subject other than Karl Ove's life, some theme profound enough to justify these thousands of pages. In fact, it’s about openness to the world.
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” is described as a solipsistic epic.
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