And so after five years I’ve come to The End (which happens to be the title of the British edition of this work—the American editions just get numbers). Book Six leads off with 400 pages describing the author’s life in a cramped apartment in Malmö, Sweden, with three kids and a wife. The time is 2009 and Book One of My Struggle is about to be published. Karl Ove’s uncle, after viewing the manuscript, is claiming that the gruesome details about the death of Karl Ove’s father are lies. He threatens to sue. Karl Ove reacts by shrinking in terror and wondering if his uncle might actually be right. (Does everyone now hate me? Oh my god, what have I done?) The narrative ingredients for the section include trips to pick up the kids at preschool, obsessive checking of email to see the latest splenetic message from the uncle, reassurances from friends and family, and endless cigarettes on the balcony.
If you think of My Struggle as a single novel (rather than as six separate novels, assuming you even accept the premise that the work is in fact a novel), then you might consider how strange it is in the latter section of a novel to be reading about the public reception of an earlier part of that same novel. It’s even stranger to consider that the author, in writing Book Six, already knows exactly how his audience has reacted to the earlier volumes, and has, both deliberately and unconsciously, altered his project in response to those reactions. Knausgaard is trying to be radically honest about his life and circumstances, but at the same time he is unable to avoid playing metaphysical games with himself, his friends and family, and his readers. It isn’t necessary for him to be a devious person for this to be so: it’s an inevitable byproduct of the author’s mind and the nature of the enterprise. You could no more expect him to not exploit the metaphysical ambiguities of his work than you could expect a loaf of bread in a plastic bag not to develop mold if left out long enough. Another way to put it is this: Knausgaard’s life has been irrevocably contaminated by his book, and his book has been irrevocably contaminated by his life. The suspense is just in determining where his loyalties lie.
All of which makes it difficult for me to form anything as one-dimensional as an “opinion” about all of this. I’d already invested significant time and energy in Books One through Five, and now I’d committed to the 1150 pages of Book Six. Knausgaard certainly understand that anyone still reading at this point is very much a fish on the line—it’s as though we’d subscribed to the Knausgaard-Of-The-Month club, and he can deliver just about anything he likes at this point.
= = = = = =
Which opportunity he seizes by following the 400 pages of autobiographical minutae with 400 pages of philosophical musings, historical analysis, and literary theory. Sounds awful, perhaps, but I found it mostly informative and thought provoking, though I did wonder just how good Knausgaard really was at this kind of intellectual writing as compared to people who do it on a more regular basis and whose work I might tend to steer clear of. On the other hand, Knausgaard gives himself the license to take his musings anywhere they might lead him—he isn't constrained to stick to a particular thesis or subject. This allows him to make some surprising and interesting associations and connections.
The bulk of this middle section is devoted to the early life of Adolf Hitler, up to and including the composition of Mein Kampf. Hitler’s book, of course, has the same title as Knausgaard’s, though our author maintains that this provocative choice preceded any serious considerations of its implications. Knausgaard, I should make clear, is in no way an admirer of Hitler, but nor is he particularly intimidated by this third rail of modern culture:
The organization he [Hitler] was a part of building up in Munich in the 1920s, with its storm troopers, uniforms, and weapons, was an extension of the military, and the politics he put forward, with its starkly defined enemy and all its muscular aggression, was an extension of the war by other means. That his appeal should be so vast that he could draw many hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of people along with him seems unfathomable to us today; we read the arguments and the perils are plain to us, the idiocy, the sheer contempt for fellow human beings, yet it was not by arguments he won over the people, but by that very abyss that ran through his soul, or by what it generated within him, for what he thereby expressed, his inner chaos and his yearning for that chaos to stop, were curiously congruent with society’s inner chaos and its yearning for that chaos to stop. His chaotic soul strove toward the boundaries by which it was constrained, his hometown morality and the order provided by the military, which is to say the petty bourgeois and the Prussian or Wilhelmian, both belonging to the past, which in the hardships of the Weimar years was where the majority, Hitler among them, turned. What made Hitler so different, however, was the flame he ignited in all who listened to him speak, his enormous ability to establish community, in which the entire register of his inner being, his reservoir of pent-up emotions and suppressed desire, could find an outlet and pervade his words with such intensity and conviction that people wanted to be there, in the hatred on the one side, the hope and utopia on the other, the gleaming, almost divine future that was theirs for the taking if only they would follow him and obey his words.
Hitler’s defining characteristic, according to Knausgaard, and the defining point of contrast between Hitler’s struggle and his own, is that Hitler lacked the ability to emotionally interact with other human beings on a one-to-one basis. Hitler had no access to the “you”—no significant emotional attachments whatsoever. But he had a spectacular ability to establish a “we,” and so he poured all of his energy and emotion into conjuring this collective identify for those who constituted his chosen “we”—that is, ethnic Germans. The notion of a volk, a people, has ever since remained suspect at best in large part because of Hitler. Similarly, the concept of nationalism has been tainted ever since World War II because it divides the world into an “us” and a “them,” allowing little if any voluntary subscription to either camp. The worth of the people allocated to the “them” camp can then be devalued; in the case of the Nazis, it was reduced to zero. Growing up in America (or in many countries) in recent decades, it is a matter of principal that every human life has worth. Even people who violate this principal at least pay lip service to it. It was not always so. Nor is it safe to assume that this principal will always be respected.
Knausgaard, if I understand him correctly, is thoroughly, excruciatingly alive to the human beings around him, to the “you”; but hardly at all to the “we.” In this he is hardly unique. His life, his work, is an unending meditation on his friends and family. It’s as though he lives in a different universe from the one Hitler inhabited. The Groucho Marx line about not wanting to join any club that would have him as a member, well, that’s Knausgaard’s position as well. And if there is one club I’m sure he would not care to be a member of, it’s the club of Knausgaard admirers, the people who think they know him and can be his friend because they relate to his books.
The notion that “race” constitutes an empirical distinction between different groups of people in the world is a persistent one. I think most people today still accept this notion to some degree, though it is no longer entirely possible to get away with saying that one race or another is more one thing or another—more athletic or intelligent or advanced. You can believe it, you can even let that assumption be your guiding principal, but you should be careful about saying it out loud. Knausgaard notes that from the late 19th century right up through the middle of the 20th century, notions of empirical racial differences were one of the cornerstones of a pseudo-science known as eugenics. A recent book, THE GUARDED GATE: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians and Other European Immigrants Out of America, by Daniel Okrent, describes how prevalent and appealing (at least to members of the race that got to run the universities and write the books) this pseudo-science was. Did racism lead to eugenics, or did a sincere but incorrect set of assumptions, backed by faulty science, provide a warrant of credibility and objectivity to racists? It had to work both ways. In any case, both Knausgaard and Okrent note how much Hitler cribbed from American racists and their Jim Crow laws.
But Knausgaard has a lot on his mind besides Hitler. This passage got me thinking:
Charisma is one of the two great transcendental forces in the social world; beauty is the other. They are forces seldom talked about, since both issue from the individual, neither may be learned or acquired, and in a democracy, where everyone is meant to be considered equal and where all relationships are meant to be just, such properties cannot be accorded value, though all of us are aware of them and of how much they mean.
Hitler had a kind of charisma, of course, but what of Knausgaard himself? He could never say it, but what else but a kind of charisma could make it possible for an otherwise unremarkable middle-class Scandinavian to make his unremarkable life a literary sensation? I’m not saying that Knausgaard has some mysterious ability that is not the same as talent or insight, but rather that talent and insight are, in part, a kind of charisma that has been successfully channeled onto the page. Just as a charismatic person doesn’t have to worry about being charming and interesting, a writer with the right kind of talent can sit down and tell us about trips to pick up the kids, obsessive checking of email, and endless cigarettes on the balcony without worrying about whether readers will find it all interesting. Or rather, he may have worried—allright, he definitely worried—but he had the alchemical knack for turning everything, even this worry, to account.
The non-Hitler passages from the middle section of Book Six could easily be broken out as a set of essays, some long and some short. For example, Knausgaard gives us an excruciating forty-page line-by-line reading of a poem by Paul Celan. It’s an impressive exegesis, but it seemed endless. There’s also much about James Joyce, the Bible, the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, and (of course) Knausgaard’s father. How well it all hangs together, or whether it even needs to hang together, is up to the reader. For me, it was like auditing a class with a brilliant but eccentric professor. I didn’t ever have the feeling that it wasn’t worth my while.
= = = = = =
For the final 400 pages of Book Six we return to the apartment in Malmö. As we join the action, Books One and Two have been published, and our author is beginning to be famous, but so far just in Scandinavia. Knausgaard’s wife, the writer Linda Boström, is beginning to experience symptoms of the bipolar disorder that she had first experienced in early adulthood, perhaps jolted out of stability by having to read her husband’s erstwhile private thoughts about her and their marriage, just a few weeks before the rest of Northern Europe was to have the same opportunity. For several weeks she experiences catatonic desolation, then ascends through a relatively normal phase to a state of distracted ebullience. The depressive phase sounds awful enough, but Knausgaard’s account of her mania is devastating. As depicted, Boström is blithe and affable during this phase, but her affability seems to float above an abyss of terror and confusion. She can’t quite connect with the person she knows she was and which everyone, including her husband, expects her to be. It’s as though she were impersonating herself. She removes herself to a nearby mental hospital, where she befriends other patients and staff. After visiting home on two occasions she wanders off into town (instead of returning to the institution, as required) and meets people in bars. On another occasion, she shows up at their apartment to attend one of her children’s birthday party:
She rang the doorbell of the apartment at eleven.
She’d had a haircut and dyed her hair black. She wore heavy green eye shadow, a red skirt, purple tights, and high heels. She was smiling, but looked utterly drained.
“What do you think of my Frida Kahlo look?” she said.
“You look good,” I said.
“Shall we go and get some cake? And fruit?” she said.
“Can we have a cup of coffee first?” I said.
“Yes, of course,” she said.
I wondered how to tell her. After seeing her, I knew there was absolutely no question of her organizing the birthday at the school.
“How are you?” I said.
“I’m very well. A bit tired maybe.”
On one wrist she had an enormous watch.
“You bought yourself a new watch?” I said.
“Yes! I took the biggest they had to remind myself to be punctual. Otherwise I can’t handle it. They get so angry with me then.”
“And the green strap?” I said, nodding toward her wrist.
“That’s to symbolize that I’m totally free. Whenever I look at it I think about it. About being completely free.”
“Very nice,” I said. “Mm, Linda?”
“Yes?”
“It might be best if you don’t go to the school. It’ll be very intense, you know. And what you need is peace and quiet. It’s much better if I go, and then you can come in the afternoon and celebrate at home. What do you think?”
“Yes, it’d be wonderful not to have to go,” she said.
This is heartbreaking—this passage has come to mind often in the weeks since I first read it. My sense of indignation at Knausgaard’s seeming betrayal was somewhat tempered when I learned that Boström herself had made her disorder the subject of a radio documentary in 2005: Jag skulle kunna vara USA’s president, which translates as “I Could Be the President of the United States.” Knausgaard and Boström divorced in 2016, five years after the events described—and after a fourth child.
Knausgaard depicts his own behavior during this episode as sensitive and caring. Perhaps it was, but what a price to extract for that solicitousness. I can’t imagine what was going through his mind as he wrote this account—I feel I can know the man in the book to some extent, but as for the man writing the book, not so much. Some lines from Macbeth come to mind, though; a bit over the top, I concede, but here they are:
…For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
So yeah, Macbeth was killing people who interfered with his ambition and Knausgaard ... wasn't. But in the end, his greatest loyalty is to his writing project. It gave him the means to write himself right out of that apartment in Malmö and into a new life with a new woman, spent partly in London and partly in Sweden. I’ve read some of his more recent pieces, and they’re fine, if less riveting than My Struggle. It’ll be interesting to see if he ever ups the ante to such a degree again.
