Author: archipelago

Posted on by

"Back in this World:" a review of My Struggle: Book One from Paul Binding, in The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

 

“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.”  These sentences occur half way through A Death in the Family, and constitute the nub not only of the novel itself but of the six-book sequences of which it is the first volume.  The book opens with a powerful disquisition on death, as the writer maintains our culture’s dangerous falsification of the subject by refusing to recognize the biological laws unswervingly in operation.  A major reason for this whole ambitious fictional undertaking is, we soon realize, to offer refutation of such distorting views of existence.  And what instance could be more effective for this purpose, in an overtly autobiographical work, than the narrator’s first confrontation with a corpse.

Further, the corpse is that of his own father, toward whom, as by this time we know, he felt not just resentment but consuming hatred, and whom he had banished from his life many years ago.  The reference to Kristiansand is a resonant one also.  By now Karl Ove has distanced himself from the coastal town where he grew up, where he went to school and where his grandparents had their home, and the centre of satellite communities with which he was once intimately familiar.  In Part One of the novel we have experienced the Kristiansand district in winter, when the narrator was sixteen – snowy weather, games of football in raw conditions, listening indoors to discs of favorite groups, the hazards of making it to a New Year’s Eve party.  The summer of 1998 is not offering him that fullness of life towards which adolescence strives but the ineluctable reality of death.

The novel’s very last page will give us Karl Ove’s second viewing of his dead father and his decisive epiphany.  On this occasion he cannot see any difference between “what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood…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.”

The book of which this is a translation was called in Norwegian simply Min Kamp I (the U.S. edition, from Archipelago, gives it the more faithful title My Struggle), with Min Kamp II and III available weeks later.  The Norwegian nomenclature ensured that the first book was not read as an autonomous entity.  The enquiries it sets up – even into so definitive-seeming an event as the death of the novelists’ father – will not achieve resolution between one set of covers.  Equally the author’s (sometimes extended) references here to immensely significant aspects of his life – his breakaway from familiar circumstances and environment, the dissolution of his first marriage, his move to Sweden, his second marriage, the birth of his first child – should be regarded as essentially scrupulous and reverberant pointers to what he will explore in detail and depth later on.

It becomes clear that Karl Ove Knausgaard is attempting nothing less than a highly personal A la Recherché du temps perdu, a view, from a position of comparatively successful individuation, of his own life and of the people it proffered him, either as givens (grandmother, father, mother, older brother) or as figures in a shifting, quotidian landscape (beautifully rendered with its seasonal changes of face), with whom some form of communication was possible, if often only at an ad hoc or institutional level.  In this volume these last consist principally of school and neighborhood friends and do not include any female friends yet, but this, it is clear, is to change.  The context of the writer’s presentation of his people is his hard-won acceptance (both intellectual and visceral) of physical development, of change, degeneration and death as inescapable facts of being which we largely refuse to honor as such.  Knausgaard even censures our custom of referring to a deceased person in terms of the life that is over, when in grim truth he or she does have a continuation in the present: as rotting flesh in a coffin or as the product of an incinerator.

Karl Ove’s parents, of obvious importance to the initial volume, are from “the new educated middle class,” father a teacher, mother working at a nursing college.  Though they externally accepted conventional ideas about family, professions and responsibility the inference to be made from the book is that inwardly they did not.  The father was moody, erratic, often cruel-tongued, increasingly undependable, all characteristics of his growing addiction.  Yet the mother – described as kind, sympathetic, with the lively interests in personalities that she shares with her younger son – was prepared to leave a sixteen-year-old in his precarious, often disquieting charge.  To a British reader the society of which the Knausgaards are members is conspicuously egalitarian.  Even within the peer group of the neighborhood boys, there is little differentiation between those who will join the professional class and those who will not.  But Karl Ove’s preoccupations, even at his most wayward, are existential rather than societal, and this is endorsed by his interest in those movements through which the 1980s absorbed the previous two decades’ counterculture: indie label music, the graphic arts, non-ideological communes, to all of which Yngve, Karl Ove’s more affable and adjusted brother, was greatly drawn, inspiring his emulation.

There are surely sociological questions to be asked about the narrator’s father and his dreadful last thirteen years.  Did the “newness” of his position as a professional man cause him inner unease?  Did the community fail to give an intelligent man the necessary material to palliate his angst, his nagging exasperations?  Similarly the narrator himself – who after all finishes up residing in another country – would appear to lack strong cultural ties to any single group or place.  Yet Knausgaard belongs to an identifiable Norwegian tradition – Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, Edvard Munch, Tarjei Vesaas, Per Petterson – in his ability to achieve the frank, unfettered concentration on naked personal experience that is responsible for the magnificent section of A Death in the Family. Yngve, now married with children, and running a graphic design business, telephones Karl Ove, himself married and living in Bergen, no longer the loutish loner of Part One, and tells him their father has died.  The brothers agree that Karl Ove will fly to Stavanger, from where, after recuperations at Yngve’s home, the pair will drive to Kristiansand, to their grandmother’s house where their father was found dead – unexpectedly in a literal sense, but, in light of the chaos into which they knew his mode of living had plunged him, an occurrence they has already imaginatively anticipated.  Together they will make arrangements for his funeral.

After the intense proximity of childhood, the coolness of adolescence, and the inclusive intimacy of young manhood, the brothers’ paths have diverged.  Now, brought together by a basic event and a central personage whom they have both detested and rejected (while mindful that other more tender emotions coexist with their hostility), Yngve and Karl Ove re-establish a relationship surely the profounder for being built without undue conscious intention.  They enter the house of their father’s demise to find a stinking hell of filth, detritus and decay, feces, and breakages everywhere, and amid these their grandmother, senile, incontinent yet not without a ghastly, sometimes infectious, jollity.  Later, they scour the place, a realistically described procedure that works as a kinesthetic metaphor for the psychological cleansing.  The rapprochement of the two brothers is not only intensely moving, Karl Ove’s account makes Yngve emerge as a lucent and sympathetic character in his own right, his portrait both outwardly and psychologically attentive, and executed with palpable love.

The novel’s Yngve is, of course, real life Yngve Knausgaard, responsible for the jacket design for his brother’s prizewinning debut novel Ute av Verden (1998, “Out of this World”).  Everybody who features in A Death in the Family existed or still exists.  This state of affairs is indivisible from the fictional project itself, and has – with the author’s justifications, apologies and collusions – helped it to enjoy quite unprecedented “succes d’estime et de scandale” in Norway, from 2009 through to November 2011, when the sixth volume ofMin Kamp was published, which tackles the often controversial attentions granted to its predecessors.  Over 400,000 copies have been sold, the ethical question of authors’ rights to take hold of others’ lives and expose them (or their interpretations of them) to the public has been extensively debated, and the distress of keydramatis personae widely broadcast.  Although UK publishers have been circumspect in their publicity, news of all this attends the first volume’s appearance, and – in a society where Reception Studies are a respected discipline – it is impossible altogether to ignore it.  The writing itself reveals authorial awareness of the moral audacity of his enterprise.

But this audacity (whatever Knausgaard’s later disclaimers about forgetting the rest of the world while he worked on his book) is absolutely intrinsic to the undertaking itself, from its far-from-unworthy ambition to make sense of everything that has happened in a single life, of everybody who as moved affectively through it, and to share that attempt with Western society, so helpless in the fact of completingWeltanschauungen that it desperately needs common ground to be unflinchingly and articulately explored.  As an artifact Min Kamp is not lacking in post-Proustian parallels as its Scandinavian champions suggest.  There is Henry Roth’s remarkable four-volume Mercy of a Rude Stream (1994-8). And there’s Anthony Powell’s – less uncompromisingly persona – A Dance to the Music of Time.  What they are right to insist on, though, is the author’s literary integrity, his admirably, unflagging belief that every human experience, his own not excluded, deserves an artist’s devotion.  And whether in the Thomas Bernhard-like ruminations on literature and time, his translator Don Bartlett has served him with impressive and galvanizing sensitivity, so that British readers, like the Norwegians, will be captured by Karl Ove’s narrative intensity.

Posted on by

"My Struggle: Book One," a review from Jonna G. Semeiks, in Confrontation

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard had already written two prize-winning novels before he began My Struggle (Min Kamp), which runs to a Proustian six volumes and more than 3,500 pages. It was called a “novel” in his native Norway but deliberately given no label (neither novel nor memoir nor autobiography nor creative nonfiction) by his publisher in the United States. An enormous success in Norway, My Struggle was purchased by approximately one of every ten Norwegians. In Europe at large it has done very well also. Almost certainly its sales were helped by the controversy surrounding it. First, there is the issue of its title, the same Hitler chose for his own autobiography and ideology. Second, members of Knausgaard’s family (and his ex-wife) publically resented being represented in the book, and some resented their particular representation. (We remember the outrage Truman Capote’s friends expressed when they found themselves in his books.) I have read only the first volume (Archipelago is going to be publishing at least some of the others), so I cannot judge what offenses reside elsewhere, but it seems to me that the only character whom one is likely to judge harshly here is the writer’s father, a bias that begins to take shape after reading the first pages. And even then, we don’t learn a great deal about the father. Why he is cruel, why he is so angry and contemptuous, and why he drinks himself to death remain mysterious. Knausgaard doesn’t analyze him (it’s possible that, because of their estrangement, the writer doesn’t have enough information, either); he merely presents the facts of their interactions.

In this country we are used to people revealing the intimate details of their lives, and others’ lives, on television, on radio, in print, on Facebook. In Norway, not so. An incident late in the book makes this clear. The writer, his older brother, and their grandmother sit in her kitchen, all drinking multiple glasses of vodka. The father has just died, and the cleanup job in the house, where Knausgaard’s father also lived (indeed he had essentially barricaded himself and his mother in), is Herculean and stomach-turning. Presumably the alcohol is a much-needed release. But the writer, without thinking, places the bottle in the kitchen window, and both the grandmother and the brother are shocked and upset—not because they are drinking so soon after the father’s death, not that they are imbibing the thing that killed him, but simply because the neighbors will know they are drinking.

The passages describing the elimination of all traces of the father’s destructive end in “the house of death,” as Knausgaard calls his grandmother’s house, occupy many pages of the book and are some of the strongest parts of it. What we are shown is not just evidence of disease—alcoholism promises an ugly death, sans dignity, sans consciousness, almost sans humanity—but also evidence of moral decay. But it seems to me that the power of this section of Knausgaard’s book is that it nonetheless rises above morality: his presentation of death is grave, awful, intensely and relentlessly physical, and yet also, paradoxically, unknowable, the final Other. It is possible that Knausgaard’s father, a stern, demanding, hypercritical, unforgiving, unsentimental man, might approve of this one thing, at least, that his son has accomplished. For the reader, there is something salutary in the writer’s refusal to deny death its terrible dominion.

My Struggle is a work about a boy’s and then a young man’s attempt to become someone other than who he is: to become older, accomplished, attractive to women, respected, an artist. The young Karl is sensitive, insecure, nervous, frightened of his father, full of dread, inclined to cry, sometimes filled with self-loathing, particularly during his adolescence; he is physically healthy but not emotionally strong. From his mother he learns what he can about how to relate to other beings, but still he regards emotional “closeness as a necessary evil.” The book, which some have described as a work of hyperrealism (which is fundamentally opposite to magical realism) presents in great detail the minutiae of his life, minutiae we sometimes call “the real world,” even down to the stray, meaningless sounds we make in conversation, such as “hmm” and “um.” Because Knausgaard’s adolescence is much like any boy’s adolescence (except for the peculiar nature of his fraught relationship with his father), the first half of My Struggle sometimes becomes a struggle to read, unless one is really captivated by the countless mundane details of living; of this sort of thing, less really is more. This exhaustive presentation of the surface of life, as if it somehow captures the reality of life, is a mistake and the reason why realism (whose impetus was largely to reject romanticism), when rigorously practiced in literature, was and is unreadable. (Art is as much about excision as it is about creation; meaningful order rather than chronology.) Fortunately, this approach (which is powerful if the details involve degradation, death, and decomposition) is not the only thing we find in Knausgaard’s book. There are occasional lyrical descriptions of nature; the writer captures the fears and anxieties of childhood, its internal realities, quite well; he has some very interesting things to say about art; and there are some provocative philosophical remarks to be found as well.

Why Knausgaard devotes as much time and language as he does in this fairly long novel to the “realistic” aspects of his enterprise (the mundane, the prosaic) is an important question. Two passages in the novel suggest an answer. One morning he sits on a bench in subzero weather, taking a break from writing My Struggle and observing the comings and goings of people in his new neighborhood. He reflects that once he knows the neighborhood better, he will cease to notice it. About anything, if “you know too little . . . it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. 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?”

And in another, much longer passage, which I shall abbreviate here, he reflects on art. He prefers art created before the twentieth century (Constable can move him to tears), though he recognizes that it belongs to the past, when there was still a sense of the “great beyond,” often simply called the Divine. For the Romantics, Nature was the repository of these categories of apprehension. But in the last century, Knausgaard writes (and signified by the paintings of his fellow Norwegian Edvard Munch), “for the first time, man took up all the space. It is as if humans swallow up everything, make everything theirs. The mountains, the sea, the trees, and the forests, everything is colored by humanness. Not human actions and external life, but human feelings and inner life.” There is more than a note of loathing here, and indeed self-loathing of a peculiar kind: loathing of being human.

What he himself aims at (ironically in an autobiography) is to remove human feelings and inner life from the there. I think Knausgaard has hit upon something, as far as the visual arts are concerned. Fortunately, however, literature cannot be stripped of the human. We have to be there, heart and intestines, mind and spirit; even when trying to shrink our dominion over the world, we must comment on our intention and reveal our anguish.

The first sentence of My Struggle is “For the heart, life is simple: it beats as long as it can.” Knausgaard then segues to a clinical description of death’s attendant processes moving through the body, which reads like a depiction of water flooding a strange, allegorical landscape. His work ends with death too: he returns to look at his father’s corpse in the funeral parlor once more. After days of weeping, which neither he nor his brother can account for—so hated was their father—he claims to feel nothing. There is, he says, no difference between his father’s body and the table it is lying on or the electrical socket in the wall—and, more important, he implies there never has been. The language of the last sentences is startling and beautiful (which I will not spoil here for the reader) but the entire book has worked to show that human beings are not just another life form, any more than life is simple for the heart.

Posted on by

Photos from PEN World Voices

What a weekend of events!

Thank you to everyone who came out to the PEN World Voices events this weekend. Below are some pictures taken by Erling Maartmann-Moe, a Norwegian tourist who dropped by and snapped some photos.


Karl Ove Knausgaard prepares for the reading at Invisible Dog.

More after the jump:

Karl Ove Knausgaard at the PEN Literary Safari in the Westbeth Center for the Arts Gallery.

Karl Ove Knausgaard reading for the PEN Messiah in Brooklyn event at Invisible Dog.

The storefront.

And our own hastily-snapped photo of the Invisible Dog gallery, with Knausgaard at the helm! :

Posted on by

A review of A Dream in Polar Fog from The Bloomsbury Review

 

If it were just an adventure story, one would not expect A Dream in Polar Fog to have been published by a press with Archipelago’s literary credentials. And indeed, while plot is what drives the book forward, local color gives it depth. Add a dose of historical fiction and the novel lopes briskly along on three legs without the need of a fourth, be it character depth or stylistic complexity. Searching for these will lead one down the wrong path in approaching this book, and one is likely to lose sight of the emotional truth and compassionate understanding that lie at its core.

 

The story unfolds in the far northeastern corner of Siberia, in the village of Emmyn, where a young Canadian explorer, John MacLennan, has been injured after an attempt to blast free his icebound ship. The ship’s captain appeals to the local Chukchi tribesmen (a people closely related to the Eskimo), who agree to transport MacLennan by dogsled across the tundra to a Russian hospital in exchange for three Winchesters, a box of cartridges, and a two-handed saw. It is the fall of 1910.

 

There is a good deal of mistrust and chauvinism on both sides, but the helplessness of the Canadian—his hands have been wounded—creates natural points of contact: He cannot eat or drink on his own or unfasten his own trousers in order to urinate. When the travelers are stranded by a blizzard, he becomes so ill with fever and infection that they must call on a local medicine woman to amputate portions of his damaged hands. The ensuing scene is both brutal and riveting as four men hold down the screaming invalid while the old woman washes his wounds in puppy’s blood and applies her knife. With this striking opening, MacLennan’s misfortune—and, in truth, his transformation—have only begun. On returning from their aborted journey, the travelers find that the recent storm has cleared the ice that prevented the ship’s departure. MacLennan’s shipmates have sailed for home, leaving him behind. By 70 pages in, the setting has been prepared for MacLennan’s—and largely through him, our own—intimate journey with the Chukchi people.

 

The Chukchi, for their part, adopt MacLennan, whom they for some reason call “Sson,” caring for him initially as they would a helpless infant. He moves in with Toko, Toko’s wife Pyl’mau, and their small son, and begins slowly to learn and appreciate Chukchi ways—their language, beliefs, and methods of survival in the often unforgiving environment they call home.

 

The author announces his ethnographic intent from the very start by footnoting a variety of Chukchi terms: for parts of the home (chottagin, polog), foods (kymgyt), clothing (kamleika, kerker), and animals or tools made from them (yarar, kamuss). Likewise, he explains aspects of Chukchi cosmology. For instance, the “Invisible Land” means Wrangel Island, and “fast ice” forms in shallow water along the coastline. Such direct commentaries peter out (fortunately) within the first 30 pages or so, giving way to the characters’ own observations. Mostly these are MacLennan’s views of the Chukchi, but Rytkheu doesn’t shy away from shifting perspective, sometimes abruptly, in order to allow the Chukchi a reciprocal look at John once in a while.

 

As MacLennan heals and learns to live with his disability, he comes not only to appreciate his hosts but to respect and love them. With a growing sense of responsibility he assumes the role of a provider, learns t hunt, and takes part in their trade with the outside, their internal rituals, their domestic affairs. He marries and has children. In the ensuing eight years of his life among them, he comes to see the Chukchi more and more as his people and takes a jealous, hostile view of the influence of outsiders.

 

MacLennan sometimes expresses Rousseauistic attitudes toward the Chukchi, suggesting, for instance, that their existence requires no literacy or books, that theirs is the most sensible way of living, that they are closer to nature and freer and untainted as a result. While he never chooses the outside world over his adopted one—even after a surprising visit from a close family member near the end of the book— these “noble savage” ideas are toned down as his experience with the Chukchi deepens. One can’t help but see irony in the author’s presentation of MacLennan’s simplistically rosy views at times, as when John writes in his journal that the people are uncomplicated but immediately thereafter he is reprimanded by the village elder for not following proper etiquette after his daughter’s birth. What MacLennan comes to prize is not eh Chukchi people as some more or less abstract, idealized good, but the uncomplicated fullness of his own place among them, despite his occasional mistakes and unfulfilled longings.

 

American readers might be inclined to see the sudden announcement that the Bolsheviks have seized power, in the work’s penultimate chapter, as an ominous note for MacLennan and his adopted people. This would be a mistake. Even if Rytkheu had such thoughts (which is unlikely given the considerable Soviet support for Chukchi culture), he certainly would not have been able to express them in such a direct manner in a book published in 1981 in the USSR. And indeed, the news is delivered by a two-faced American capitalist named Carpenter who is trying to trick MacLennon into leaving Chukotka. He wants free rein to trade (cheat) and gobble up the gold discovered in the streams on Chukchi land. MacLennan keeps Carpenter honest in his business dealings, and the Chukchi have no need for the gold. His ultimate response to the businessman in effect likens socialist doctrines to the absence of personal property among the Chukchi. He has no fear of the Bolshevik’s arrival. This is a perfectly orthodox Soviet message.

 

But MacLennan does voice concerns for the future. The Chukchi’s fragile, living balance with their environment is under constant threat, and the march of civilization, through trade, exploration, and politics, is having an ever greater effect upon them. MacLennan’s personal journey—his experience of loss and renewal, his gratitude, sense of belonging, love, respect—has fostered in him a keen sense of responsibility for the Chukchi’s continued well-being in the difficult times to come. By the story’s end, this is a sense that one cannot help but share.

 

Russel Valentino’s essays and translations have appeared in numerous literary journals and book series. He teaches translation studies at the University of Iowa and is publisher of Autumn Hill Books.