Coming of Age in Bergen: Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book Five

Outside of a classic that contemporary readers often feel obligated to read, for example, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, few probably ever spend 3000 pages reading a single writer. There are only a handful of writers who I would admit I would stay with for over a million words: J.M. Coetzee. Norman Rush, possibly. Beckett, of course. Beckett’s entire oeuvre likely doesn’t equal 3000 pages. I also think of William T. Vollmann, with his voluminous output, some of which I’ve read and dared to read, but I’ve never read anywhere near 3000 pages of his work; 3000 pages is merely a fraction.

Having read almost 3000 pages of My Struggle thus far, I’ve been with Karl Ove Knausgaard for the long haul. Every book of My Struggle has had me eager to read the next one.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what draws me in and keeps me coming back; there’s voyeurism in looking at his life. I found myself fully engaged reading Book Five, feeling a mix of recognition tinged with despair, and the satisfaction of simple narrative anticipation.

Whereas there was a kind of romantic youthful innocence an easy settling in Book Four, with Book Five we live with Knausgaard through that difficult period that is the twenties. Of the five books so far, Book Five is where Knausgaard reveals himself becoming serious about his life. This might be the most fraught, most difficult time of a man’s life. For Knausgaard, it’s that period where he discovers the first inklings of adulthood with the casual recklessness of relationships, the reckoning with a career and the daunting prospect of trying to imagine life going forward. As this is a writer’s memoir, Knausgaard is searching for his voice at this time, also, to become a writer and find the inspiration to take to the page. I’m reminded of Bryan Charles’s There’s a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From, though in that memoir the writer is coming to terms with similar issues, a kind of extreme social anxiety was the narrative driver.

I’ve had many of the same experiences that Knausgaard had growing up in the seventies, though of course with different landscapes and cultures. There’s the curiosity of the unfamiliar, which is embodied in the Norwegian customs and rituals, the rural differences. This is an enthrallment of an unfamiliar, or an eerily familiar, like an alternative universe paralleling my own. All of which made me feel present and involved in his life in the way the best fiction manages to engage. His musical references are mine, also: XTC, The Smiths, Simple Minds, are among some of the bands he is often profoundly affected by. On the other hand, I never went through the desperate relationship that he had with his father, nor did I have a gravitational attraction to alcohol. In some way, the crying he readily admits to feels manipulative of the reader; it can smack of forced sentiment. But his life is lived on his sleeve. The helpless anxiety that Knausgaard expresses at believing his future wife, Tonje, is going to slip away from him and fall into his brother’s arms--is palpable. It has already happened, after all, with another girlfriend early in the book. The pain and shame that is clearly a burden of an alcoholic father and wrestling with a major drinking problem himself, as well as a tendency to self-harm, feels painfully real to me as a reader.

Reading Knausgaard becomes an act of empathy. On the other hand, Knausgaard comes off as a sad case, and the inclination to take pity on him is there. But he’s not exceptional. His initial words on the book are retrospectively bleak:

“All that is left of the thousands of days I spent in that small, narrow-streeted, rain-shimmering Vestland town is a few events and lots of sentiments. I kept a diary, which I have since burned. I took some photos, of which twelve remain; they are in a little pile on the floor beside the desk, with all the letters I received during those days. I have flicked through them, read bits and pieces, and this has always depressed me, it was such a terrible time. I knew so little, had such ambitions, and achieved nothing.”

This might be a near universal sentiment for anyone looking back on their youth. I avoided seeing his story this way, perhaps out of some further sense of identity with him. Halfway in to the book comes the recognition that the engine that drives his life, is Knausgaard coming to terms with a shame instilled by an abusive father.

Knausgaard overcomes the role his father portrayed: brute, quick to anger, alcoholic, everything that’s the opposite of Knausgaard’s mother. This awareness is a component of the first few volumes, assuming one has read them in sequence, and this knowledge, I think, colors our subsequent reading. In a sense, a man learns the role from his father, good or bad and all in between. The male of society is not typically thought to be a natural nurturer.

Questions linger, unresolved in Book Five. Why do the two sons—Karl Ove and Ygnve--hate their father so much--and how overwhelming to them is his death? They are rife with sadness, as much as his passing might be a relief to them. In Knausgaard’s life, the death of the father becomes a kind of transfer of the role. When Knausgaard goes into family life, he seems to want to overcome his own father’s terrible life and legacy. That’s the struggle of My Struggle. Shame is the more obvious statement, as some reviewers have grasped onto, but is it shame at being like his father? Or not being obedient enough as his father demanded of him? What is really the source of shame? When you are sensitive, and you are shamed for it, it can be one of the most crippling experiences. I almost added the phrase “to overcome”, but I think one does not overcome their true nature: one learns to live with it.

Moving forward with a family for Knausgaard, would seem to suggest a sort of bargain. He’s confused about his life going into his thirties; as difficult as the family situation is, however fraught or full of joy and tribulation--it’s not easy. But as he leaves his family, he returns to one. The difficulty of his life with his father lingers and seems almost unresolved. AS much as he struggles with his new life, having children saved him. At least it makes him less self-involved. In them, his life carries on.

In a sense, in Knausgaard’s closing words at Book Five, his escape from Tonje and Bergen is, as he says, a way of not thinking. To play armchair psychologist, could we surmise that his eventual marriage and four children is also a way to move forward without thinking about the past? In other places in the memoir he talks about how he will do right by his children--it is stated almost as if it’s in spite of himself. It seems more as if he believes it’s the only thing he can do to not become his father--which some would say he is fated to do anyway.

A Reading on the Penultimate Eve of the Possible

HAARP, a literary journal brought to an unwitting public and published by The Hexagon Press, and as part of The Possible exhibition in cooperation with The Berkeley Film Museum & Pacific Film Archive, are publishing one of my poems, “Of Kafka” in their third and final issue, Vol. 1, No. 3 (scroll down to third issue to see index). In addition, there is a reading at Adobe Books (San Francisco) on Thursday, info available here.

Update: The link will allow you to download the PDF of the entire issue!

Consistency. And the rise of short forms

A foolish consistency, though it may be the hob goblin of little minds, is also the way to go for a writing career. This seems particularly true when it comes to the short story. Perhaps it’s a choice based on economics: you’ll only grab a reader for those few pages, and if you can pull it off then, you might be wise to do it again and again. Some of the greatest writers of short stories are all about this economy of scale: Raymond Carver, John Cheever, John Updike, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Tobias Wolff, Charles Baxter. I might even include Lydia Davis in this incomplete list, though I’d add that her longer short stories never quite seem satisfying enough as short stories. But she’s got her short pieces down to a science, consistently. With these writers, you might see some formal playing around, but generally, not much deviation from the guidelines that have succeeded before. You can essentially take any one of their stories and it will offer a kind of template in tone, style, length, subject matter, among whatever other qualities that could be checked off, to their entire oeuvres. That these are the most beloved and lauded of writers says something about consistency. What it also might say about the marginalization of short stories, and their estimable writers who have made their names generally under the purview of short stories, is something else entirely.

The short story might be the most conservative of forms, in this regard. David Foster Wallace was anything but consistent when it came to the short story. He bridled at consistency, perhaps out of a need to challenge himself, to avoid boredom, or just because he could. But he seems to have cared less for the incremental rewards of the equivalent of little caffeine hits, and, as so many are led to believe in the publishing industry these days are, too, that short stories don’t sell, aren’t read, etcetera. Insert any number of maligning/marginalizing epithets here. I would guess that for a lot of short story writers, or writers in general, the onus is more on finding a habit that fits, though for a writer of DFW’s caliber, consistency in formal qualities was nothing to strive for. Consistency can be a lowest common denominator, but over a career I would suspect it would feel stifling and eventually as rewarding as sending out your dry cleaning.

***

The rewards of reading a short story might be like the incremental hits one gets from any addiction, caffeine, a check of the inbox, etc. In this way, the argument seems to be made for the popularity of shorter forms. They certainly become more facile to write, if only for the time required to produce them. And I’d venture in a very curious suggestion, that this is where populist poetry and the short story are converging, which is bound to make poetry less of a ghetto, eventually more mainstream (and you can imagine how the capital P poets feel about their territory being impugned upon!) Whenever poetry is popularized, you can hear the traditionalists crying foul. 

The form is ready made for the web.

This arrival of short forms has arisen with the internet and the self publishing venues. Before, this niche might have been under the canopy of poetry. In fact, some of these short prose pieces are difficult to define, and might just as easily be thought new forms of poetry. (As I’ve written a kind of poetry for years—I can’t even allow myself to call it straight up poetry, though others have—I’ve taken to submitting these short prose pieces both as prose and as poetry. Who is to say what they can or cannot be called?) The purists or experts might claim there’s too much writing to wade through, and the playing field has been leveled to a ground zero nuclear fallout zone. But who knows? I’m sure it was easier to be a writer, and be recognized for it, fifty or sixty years ago. Maybe this is about adaptation to technology.

I’ve gone through something of an evolution in my own work. I never used to write these short pieces, other than to be convinced I was writing poetry, and I’m not sure when I thought of it as a good idea. In some way it’s easier when you have time constraints, but it’s also more difficult to pull off successfully, because you have to accomplish that kind of frisson moment, perhaps even to call it a catharsis, within the space of a paragraph. In the same way you might question whether your 3500 word short story is working, you have to accomplish something--more often than not--enigmatic, in 2 or 300 words. 

Bob Dylan's Nobel

I’m not usually interested in speculation--or writing about it, rather--but I feel compelled to say that the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2011 will be Bob Dylan.

Initially, my pick was based on a hunch: Why not Bob Dylan? And then, when I saw how upset it was making the fellow at The Literary Saloon, and that the odds at Ladbroke’s had jumped in Dylan’s favor, pushing him to the top, it does seem the right choice.

Bob Dylan is a quirky pick for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he’s as influential, in a culturally significant and altering way, as Mark Twain or William Wordsworth. And, he’s a poet.

He’s neither so obscure and forgotten as some past Nobel picks (Camilo Jose Cela, anyone? Or J. M. G. Le Clezio?) nor as obvious a choice as someone like Coetzee or Beckett, though he’s close when you compare him to his American counterparts.

From year to year, I sometimes scratch my head when they pick the Nobel in Literature. Often, the choice seems more puzzling as time goes on. Granted, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not as thoroughly steeped in world lit as some*, but I always check out the winners, eventually, at least in the last twenty years of Nobels.

Usually, when they select, you can see the baseline quality of the choice, in contrast and comparison to the other choices. In this way, Dylan has it hands down over any of his American rivals. Cormac McCarthy might be my next choice, but I still think Bob’s got it.

Now some have been angling for Philip Roth for years, as if he simply deserves it, but this kind of argument only goes so far. This is the Nobel, after all, and Roth feels like a long-shot. He’s probably not humble enough (and hasn’t he won enough prizes already?). His work is also distinctly self-centered and prurient enough to its own end that reinforces its exclusionary effect. All of which is to say Roth’s work precludes itself from embracing humanity in the way most Nobel winners have done.

I love Roth, don’t get me wrong, I just don’t think he’s a Nobel candidate. In fact, I think Joyce Carol Oates would be a more fitting choice than Roth.

Question is, regarding Bob Dylan, are they going to use his real name?

*Though I’m not trying to be exclusionary about it, either, disregarding those that don’t pass my snob test. Can you tell me why the fellow at The Complete Review is so proud of himself when he excludes writers such as Vollmann from the review?

Metamorphoses It Was

A very short fiction, "Seven Dreams Under the Knife", is now available to read online, here. 

Never knowing whether to call this a short story or a poem, or unclassifiable, I submitted this piece under many forms--so thanks to editor John Burgess at Snow Monkey for taking it on. Also, to read some of my submission drama, look at my March 22nd post here.

Under the Knife

Prescriptions for writing abound. “Eliminate repeated words.” “Never write a boring sentence.” These come from the Gordon Lish school of writing via n+1. In the Lish arena, the student would be asked to read their piece aloud until they came to a boring sentence--called out by the master with great mocking fanfare, undoubtedly--and the student would be forced to sit down.

In my fiction, I was eliminating repeated words because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, I had an editor once return a story with repeated words circled. As for never writing boring sentences, it’s never easy. Of course you can hold up these ideas to the point that you lose the sense of the writing, if you had it to begin with.

And that seems to be a prescription, too, to be clear about what you are going to write before you begin.

Another good idea might be to eliminate as many words as possible--I’m not talking about repeated words, but excess words--avoiding wordiness. Maybe you pare it down and rewrite it a few times. I’ve sometimes shied away from this procedure, if only because a first draft sometimes has a rhythm inherent in the linkage of sentences as written. Perhaps even a poetry.

Why is it that poetry is so often invoked in fiction writing--what does it mean exactly? I suspect I have a bias against poets because they can be so precious about their work, romanticizing their little gulag. Poetry is rarely exciting, to me. Poets seem like the martyrs of the writing universe.

Yet, I like poetry in fiction, if I understand it correctly.

What does it mean to say a fiction writer’s writing is poetic?

I look at E. L. Doctorow, because I’m reading Loon Lake at the moment. Besides the actual use of a kind of verse in the novel (although I’m not sure if it’s bona fide verse, in the sense that it’s made up for a fictional work), here is a passage that I would say is poetic:

“They were hateful presences in me. Like a little old couple in the woods, all alone for each other, the son only a whim of fate. It was their lousy little house, they never let me forget that. They lived on a linoleum terrain and sat in the evening by their radio. What were they expecting to hear? If I came in early I distracted them, if I came in late I enraged them, it was my life they resented, the juicy fullness of being they couldn’t abide...”

This also happens to be the opening to the novel. Which is where you are going to notice poetry and in a sniff decide if this is a book you should read, should a reading of such be your thing.

It’s not a fellow writer’s thing. He occasionally laments how writing is literary or maybe that’s too literary because he believes he is secretly a blockbuster writer who has a commitment to providing airport fiction as he sees this as the only way to break in to publishing.

I don’t get it. Those airport reads bore me. But I’ll also admit that sometimes the literary stuff bores me, too. The problem with those (non-literary) books is that there’s no love of language. Maybe there’s a bit of craft in storytelling--there would have to be, it seems--but generally the work feels mired in a lack of spirit.

Getting back to revision...How do these approaches necessarily lead to good prose?

The Lish school as I’m calling it seems to approach the writing on the level of sentence and word choice, which is fine, but what happens when you need to stretch your legs--which is where all good fiction should inevitably go? (this can be argued, and I’ll shortly contradict myself...) I think of this because another writer who I’ve been looking into again lately (leave it to the NYTimes to get me to dust off my shelves), Donald Barthelme, seems to write in this style that Cheever had a hilarious comment on (“The stuntiness of Barthelme disconcerts me. . . . Blooey. It’s like the last act in vaudeville and anyhow it seems to me that I did it fifteen years ago” (this in the Bookforum review of Cheever's ouevre)). What is it about this style that feels like McSweeney’s co-opted as if it were a province of their (some might say) elitist identity? I think this is what we talk about when we talk about being clever. It’s whatever no one gets, or gets in only their way, but that a clever writer can imitate enough so that only a select few think they get it. So many journals claim and decry cleverness in equal measure, that it ruins it for those writers of us who don’t necessarily look at what we do as trying to be clever; maybe that’s the point, that if you actually are good at what you do, not everyone is going to get it. They’re only going to see you as a wannabe... Maybe I’m hypocritically doing the same thing criticizing McSweeney’s.

I never thought of “Seven Dreams Under the Knife” as clever. I had a woman run away from me when she read it. (How’s that for intrigue?) But this is also a woman who had plastic plants and scant aesthetic taste and thought my minimally appointed rooms here in the Mission resembled Van Gogh’s room at Arles. Initially, I was flattered by these revelations; upon reflection, I’m guessing that it was a perception of “cleverness” dogging me.

Maybe I could have stretched my legs on that piece, but after all the prescriptions about revision, I considered it done. I saw it as a gem that I didn’t want to do anything more with than see published. Which, however humbly, it is, finally.

Bolaño The Great

At the cafe recently I saw a woman with a copy of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. I got so excited I almost dropped my latte. I wanted to rush over to talk about the book with her, to see if she loved it as much as I did--but as these impulses go, I checked myself. Maybe I had overestimated the novel. What’s to say she wasn’t so easily charmed?

Was it all that I recalled? I decided to go back and re-read The Savage Detectives. It is a bigger surprise the second time around. It will stand for me as an exemplary, nearly perfect novel. Much of it has to do with Bolaño’s ability to weave a compelling tale and just hook me in--the goal of any narrative, of course. Bolaño writes as if everything depends on his words. It’s a beautiful gift to have as a writer. The effect can come off as irreverent, even mildly shocking. You realize, as you read, that for the moment, everything does depend on his words.

I read the book vicariously, as Bolaño’s subject was easily my own fantasy for myself when I first started writing. When I was the age of the novel’s protagonist, the idealistic, seventeen year old Juan Garcia Madero, I imagined I was a poet. Except that, in my coming of age, I hadn’t been reading much poetry--beyond the eventual spark in an undergrad class in the Romantic poets, who inspired me to pen my feelings into verse -- I was primarily interested in writing it. I had no literary community to glom onto and was probably too timid to look for one. But I loved to attend academic poetry readings and once asked Robert Creeley (at an interview and reading with Charles Simic, probably in 1993 or so, well into my first attempts at writing fiction) what he thought the difference was between writing prose and poetry. All I recall of his response was my sudden discombobulation at the fact that he was taking the time to answer my question thoughtfully.

In The Savage Detectives, Garcia Madero (the name everyone calls the narrator) relates the early start of the Visceral Realists, a stand in for the actual group of Infrarealists that Bolaño was a founding member of (in the book, Bolano is Arturo Belano), along with one Ulises Lima. The subtext is in this diary, essentially the first half of the novel, a kind of pseudo documentary of this group that intends to overthrow the Mexican poetry tradition of Octavio Paz, whom Garcia Madera refers to as “our great enemy” in the first pages: “Our situation (as far as I could understand) is unsustainable, trapped as we are between the reign of Octavio Paz and the reign of Pablo Neruda. In other words, between a rock and a hard place.”

Garcia Madero, empowered by falling in with this group, is eager to alleviate himself of his virginity and achieve edification. He thus makes lists of his older companions' stolen books to eventually read, and details his lusts for the women around him in his frequently frank, sometimes illicit, diary entries.

Much of the narrative is focused around the Font house and the two alluring sisters, Angelica and Maria, and their father, the sporadically unstable Quim. The Fonts are the center of the tenuous initial get-togethers, casually social and political, that forms the fabric of their group. The intent of the Visceral Realists is to publish a journal that will exceed their founder’s previous effort, embodied in a magazine that exists almost as an innuendo, an eponym, entitled Lee Harvey Oswald, that takes its title from a misreading of a publisher’s name.

Poetic prose--something a reader might almost expect from a poet--does not really characterize Bolaño’s style. There are definite poetic moments, but this isn’t prose you so much as savor but devour, reading for the sheer joy of the voice, to take in the story. (Here’s a thought: might voice be style?) But neither is it merely “serviceable” prose. For example, when Garcia Madero first encounters the sisters, he compares them, noticing in Angelica that: “When I saw her, or rather when I saw that she was looking at me...I felt as if a hand, its fingers long and delicate but very strong, was squeezing my heart. I know Lima and Belano wouldn’t approve of that image, but it fits my feelings like a glove.”

In part II of the book, Bolaño employs dozens of first person narrators who are portrayed in interviews retelling the history of the movement covering a period of twenty years. (By part III, we are charmed again with Garcia Madero’s diary going into a new year.) Amusing the reader and occasionally giving a palatable dose of tedium. Yet all of the narrators, because they are so invested in their experiences--make their tale-tellings resound and magnify.

The effect reminded me of Jim Jarmusch’s film Mystery Train, where characters seem to drift on their own self-interests, but somewhere along the line we are enlightened to discover they are inter-connected in unusual, unexpected ways. Against the clumsiness of a single narrator revealing to us what he chooses (the purview of the unreliable narrator), we have instead a series of wonderfully subjective interpretations: because no two people remember events exactly the same.

An example of this in The Savage Detectives involves a sword fight on the beach--and calls to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s duel in Tender is the Night. Where Fitzgerald, in my possibly faulty recollection, attempts to play the duel straight, and thus, self-consciously melodramatically, the absurd sequence is an opportunity for Bolaño to play for its variety. Bolaño is something of a melodramatist, too, albeit smiling through clenched teeth. He never takes any of it too seriously.