It’s becoming an annual tradition for me to read the latest installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical saga My Struggle. The middle volumes are less intense than the first two, but I’ve read that he dials up the intensity again in the final 1000+ page volume. In book four our narrator conducts us down the stream of time in a relatively laminar manner, with only one major chronological perturbation. We begin with the 18-year-old author arriving in a small village above the Arctic Circle in Norway, to undertake a year of schoolteaching. Norway has difficulty attracting and retaining teachers for such remote locations, and so the government has a program that allows recent high-school graduates to come north for one-year postings. The communities get inexperienced teachers, but I guess the alternative is no teachers at all.
In the UK edition, they give each volume a title in addition to a number—this one is Dancing in the Dark. For about 130 pages we read about 18-year-old Karl Ole’s first few weeks in the north, weeks filled with solitary microwaving, lust, and drinking. He is also attempting to write, and I did admire his determination in that regard, for what on earth does he have to write about? But he’s just as determined about the drinking. He regularly drinks to the point where he “blacks out,” such that he has no memory of what happens beyond a certain point in the evening. In relating one such incident, he writes:
I had experienced blackouts like this, after which I remembered only fragments of what I had done, ever since I first started drinking. That was the summer I finished the ninth class, at the Norway Cup, when I just laughed and laughed, a momentous experience…
Then he begins to fill in the details about that earlier time. We expect to return to the Arctic shortly, but in fact half the book, about 200 pages, elapses before we do so, by which point we have begun to suspect that we might never return. Because Knausgaard has no use for such quaint literary conventions as chapters, we have only a single blank line to mark the transition.
This time slip is strange because the 18-year-old Karl Ove, obsessed with sex and alcohol, that we encounter in the first and last hundred pages isn’t much different from the 16-year-old Karl Ove, obsessed with sex and alcohol, that we encounter in the middle two hundred. It’s like a double image in photography—if there is any intent to put these two periods of his life into perspective, to “compare and contrast,” it isn’t apparent to me. The discontinuity serves to remind us that Knausgaard is a meta-novelist and that this isn’t your everyday fictionalized memoir. Maybe that reads as if I’m accusing the author of being cynical, and maybe I am a little, but I didn’t really mind the discontinuity, and it did sort of raise my level of vigilance, and also reminded me that it’s neither the 18-year-old nor the 16-year-old who is delivering words to the page, but the 44-year-old writing in 2009.
Knausgaard’s much despised father is not spared in this volume any more than he is in any of the previous three. Here he is divorced and remarried and sinking steadily into chronic alcoholism. He alternates between grim white-knuckled sobriety and unsavory drunken sentimentality.
The memoir of a teenage boy in the 1980s who faces no daunting challenges, learns no dark family secrets, and makes no remarkable journeys is a peculiar thing. Who would undertake to read such a book, in translation no less, if it were not part of a larger, more remarkable series of books? But that is exactly the sort of brinksmanship that makes Knausgaard so remarkable. The reward is in the workmanship, the attention to detail, and not in any dramatic flourishes. Any number of passages could serve to illustrate this point. I’ll choose one that describes the onset of encompassing darkness as winter comes on in the Arctic:
The days became shorter, and they became shorter quickly, as though they were racing towards the darkness. The first snow arrived in mid-October, went after a few days, but the next time it fell, at the beginning of November, it came with a vengeance, day after day it tumbled down, and soon everything was packed in thick white cushions of snow, apart from the sea, which with its dark clean surface and terrible depths lay nearby like an alien and menacing presence, like a murderer who has moved into a neighbouring house and whose unheeded knife glints on the kitchen table.
The snow and the darkness changed the area beyond all recognition. When I first came, the sky had been high and luminous, the sea vast and the countryside open, nothing seemed to hold together the village with its random huddle of houses, it barely existed in its own right. Nothing stopped there, that was the feeling. Then came the snow and the darkness. The sky fell, it lay like a lid over the rooftops. The sea disappeared, its blackness merged with the blackness of the sky, no horizon was visible any longer. Even the mountains disappeared and with them the sensation of finding yourself in wide open country. What remained were the houses, which were lit day and night, always surrounded by darkness, and now the houses and the lights were the focal point to which everything gravitated.
