Why do I have a great deal of affection and interest in Knausgaard's personal stories? Is it his down-to-earth style of realism that attracts me on a general level more than any other literary genre? Is it his ability to attract the reader to the sublime, mundane events of one's life because many of us, especially men in their 40's like myself, can strongly relate to it? Or is it in our own human nature to be attracted to another's memoirs, when it appears nothing is held back? I would answer that it is many factors, many of which I did not include in my self-indulgent questions. The genre does naturally attract me but that is only scratching the surface. On a much more significant scale, Knausgaard has the ability to pull the reader into his "story", which has a lot to say, even if on surface, it's immediate narratives are day-to-day occurrences. Overall, Knausgaard's narrative skills make it matter little if the story is autobiographical or not.
Knausgaard, in writing about himself writing this novel, has a brute honesty with regards to his own fallacies and his own feelings about others. He tells us that "life is simple, it beats for me as long as it can. Then it stops." The first part revolves around his father's death. He tells us of both our fascination and repression of the dead. The latter because we conceal them at death. Understanding how we comprehend the dead and life itself is the purpose Knausgaard gives to his writing. "As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it."
What Knausgaard discovers about writing about his father's death is the similarities between he and his father, at least in a perceptual way. They both have the need for solitude("I don't get anything out of socializing anyway") and a toxic love for alcohol. "I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can become almost panicked, or aggressive." He depicts his present life as always being on the brink of chaos, lacking any certainties but amongst his immediate family, he has "intense happiness." Family, however, is not a goal or a source of joy. Beautifully put, he says, "the only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing." He can only come face-to-face with his life through his craft. On the topic of drinking, Knausgaard saw it as an engine, where limitations were put aside. "A feeling of boundlessness", as he put it. Later in the novel, he discovers that not only he and his father, but his paternal grandmother also developed a sense of comfort through drinking. The same grandma, whom earlier, was noticed to have two paintings with Old Testament motifs.
Knausgaard has that understanding that many of us, especially those who choose to have that route of solitude, get stuck in the unsolvable pain of longing. As he says, "..the most important thing in it was the longing for what was going to be, not for what I did or had done." Knausgaard brilliantly applies this same thinking to memory. He declares his own memory is insufficient, yet obviously his own details, if not fictionalized, are pinpoint accurate. "Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows." I love his reference to Rimbaud and his declaration that "writing is more about destroying than creating."
For the last 200 pages of Part One, Knausgaard delves on the specific occurrences of what happened when his father died in 1998. He breaks into this state of uncontrollable tears and immediate grieving for a father he had long wished to be dead. His father had an element of mystery to him, like many men of solitude. The questions unanswered are perhaps what provokes Karl Ove's tears. He sees how he "couldn't sit and chat with people anymore, my awareness of the situation was too acute, and that put me outside of it."
Beyond his father, you get to analyze his relationship with other family members, such as his older brother("I needed Yngve but Yngve didn't need me")and his grandmother, with whom there is an uncomfortable amount of distance. Yngve and Karl Ove make the arrangements for his father's funeral, while cleaning up senile grandmother's house, where his father stayed for the last part of his life. One night, Karl Ove, Yngve and grandmother sit and drink at night. To Karl Ove, this meant a radiance, a celebration, of a moment in life, no matter how banal. This is the uttermost statement of joy we get from Karl Ove in Part One. Otherwise, for perhaps reasons of accumulated grief, there is no end to his unease, or more aptly put, his struggle.
A lot of credit has to be given to the narrative skills of Knausgaard. His blunt introspection of himself and his unease with the world around him, arguably expresses universal feelings that none of us can deny at some point in our lives. An unforgettable book for me, even without any grandiose, Tolstoyian plot lines. It is definitely a 21st century version of Proust. I cannot wait to read Part 2.
****1/2
No comments:
Post a Comment