Over the last two years my girlfriend and I have been listening to the six My Struggle books by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård. It’s the most fascinating, uncompromising and moving piece of fiction I’ve read in my life. Several times over I’ve been in awe and the books have profoundly changed the way I think about myself, my relationships and my life. Here are some of the thought’s I’m left with.
The 6 books came out between 2009 and 2011 in Norwegian and have since become an international bestseller and phenomenon. As an audiobook the whole series is a solid 134 hours worth of listening, just shy of a month’s worth of full time work. Through long road trips, walks in the woods and mountains we’ve explored this literary masterpiece - from unimaginably long descriptions of simple matters to epic historic and philosophical insights.
The whole series consists of Karl Ove Knausgård telling the story of his life from his own perspective and memory. It’s written when he was around 40 years old and married, with three young kids. He jumps around between different periods in his life, starting with the death of his father. The very first pages of book one displays the force of Knausgård’s writing with a captivating take on death itself that is at the same time dark, somehow funny, yet profound. Writing both meaningfully and originally about death is not easy, but Knausgård dives right in on the deep end.
Oftentimes the descriptions and stories told are extremely detailed and elaborate. Pouring a bit of milk in a glass can easily take up a full page as it is described in excruciating detail. He has certainly been criticized for being too elaborate and boring, but this is also part of the power of this novel. There are plenty of biographies and autobiographies, but they practically always depict the big achievements or grandiose lives lived by influential people. What Knausgård is describing is at the core a mundane everyday and straightforward life, but packed with poetic beauty and grand philosophical detours. It’s as far away from the TL;DR-ways of modern social media-life you can get. And this is part of the power of all the words he uses: it takes the mundane so seriously. By taking time to paint explicit and vivid pictures of his everyday life he implicitly tells us how important every piece of it is. He turns every stone of his feelings, even though there is no hero, moral lesson or grand narrative. Life is a random walk, and this is a raw look into the mind and life of a person going through it. I often like to think that less is more when it comes to writing, but the most extraordinary outcomes only emerge when rules are broken: in My Struggle more is more.
But it is not the elaborate storytelling that has yielded the most criticism. In My Struggle Knausgård explores and therefore exposes relationships with people in his life. His wife, his father, his brother, his friends, his kids and beyond. We get his unfiltered account of what he think’s about the family friend on the other side of the dinner table, or how his troubled relationship with his father evolves throughout his life and even after his death. This is what has made these books so controversial. The fascinating thing is that it’s the ordinary that makes the book so controversial. Basically everything he describes is something millions, if not billions, of people have experienced and thought. Yes, his father was abusive and he lays that out to the world in excruciating detail, but how many kids growing up in the second half of the 20th century didn’t have an abusive father? Yes, his relationship with his wife is turbulent but half of marriages end up in divorce. The books are of course controversial because all of these are real and often living people that get their lives exposed to the public. But that is also where the potency of this work lies.
In book six is written at the same time as the first book is published. This yields an interesting meta story where he talks about the process of publishing the first book. What it’s like when his wife reads about his previous girlfriends, his deepest feelings and even an affair that almost happened while they were together. His wife becomes beyond upset, which is very understandable. Reading a book like that written by your partner must be a tough experience. He describes how his uncle tries to stop the book from being published, and the accompanying legal process.
For me one of the highlights of the whole series is a section where he describes an imaginary court case between him and his uncle that plays out in his head. Knausgård describes to the judge why he wrote these books: because there is simply no similar work out there where the human experience is laid out and explored in this way. I think that is exactly right; no other piece of fiction or nonfiction across any art medium lift’s the everyday experience of life up into the light in the same uncompromising and elaborate way. No moment, feeling or relationship is too small or commonplace to explore in detail.
Furthermore, Knausgård has drawn criticism for expressing a sexistic world view. Again, I think the headline critique misses a lot of nuance. He describes his feelings and experiences growing up as a teenage boy in the 80’s. While one might call him sexist, he also tells many stories of how he’s being bullied and is deeply insecure because he is too feminine and starts crying easily. Not to mention his late sexual debut and anxiety around that. It takes a lot of courage to present these things without censoring yourself. It’s a window into a different time and culture. While he does explain how he looked at women and which thoughts were running through his head, the books are by no means a Hollywood story of a masculine womanizer - quite the contrary.
My Struggle is an exceptionally brave piece of art. Just the title itself is probably the most tainted and loaded book title of all time; it was the title of Hitler’s infamous book. And beyond that unbearably heavy luggage the title carries, simply writing about your own life that you are right in the middle of and calling it a struggle is also a brave display of vulnerability for a white middle-aged Norwegian male in the 21st century. He goes places and explores his own, frankly human, deficiencies in an excruciating way few other artists would dare to do.
While the vast majority of the series is about his own recollections and experience of his own life, about half of the massive book six is about Adolf Hitler himself. This was a fascinating section to read because he investigates Hitler’s life in an remarkably intellectual honest way. I’m rather uncomfortable simply mentioning Hitler in this very post, while Knausgård spends several hundred pages exploring the most explored person in history, and he does so in an original and insightful way.
He, of course, condemns Hitler’s legacy as much as any other sane person, but he dares to explore questions like: what happens if we try to understand the early life of Hitler without seeing him through the lens of being the most evil person that ever lived? What life did he live before he gained power? What web of historical events, political ideas and art shaped Hitler to become the most brutal man that ever lived?
I learned that Hitler was a deeply troubled and lonely man growing up in a more or less extreme poverty. Kanusgård analyzes and traverses several books directly and indirectly related to Hiteler. For instance “The Young Hitler I knew”, written by Hitler’s only childhood friend, August Kubizek. This book together with historical accounts of the wars, Proust and several other historical, political and poetic accounts makes for an incredibly interesting reading. For instance, several years in his early twenties Hitler was homeless and there are essentially no records of where he was or what he did beyond visiting a homeless shelter every now and then. That is pretty remarkable for one of the, if not the, most scrutinized human beings that ever lived! I certainly learned a lot about the ideas and emotions that were flowing through the world in the early 19th century way beyond what I’ve learned from typical accounts of the First or Second World War.
Luckily, the books are not all controversial and struggle. Knausgård writes as poetically beautiful as Proust mixed with the rawness and directness of Hamsun’s Hunger. The books are full of the wonders of life. From discovering your own identity while listening to The Smiths, to the chaos and beauty of having kids, to breaking away and suddenly moving to a new city. Along with countless deep, deep reflections and explorations of death, the meaning of a name, cultural integrity, self-doubt, literature, music, our wider culture, ambition, and beyond.
Never before have I read something as uncompromising and illuminating as My Struggle 1-6. Over and over I’ve been floored by the sheer ambition, novelty, beauty and power of these books. They have given me a deeper connection and awareness of my own life and relationships. It’s certainly not a short read, but I’d highly recommend it.
PS. This conversation between Tyler Cowen and Karl Ove Knausgård on literary freedom is my favorite podcast episode of all time (I’ve heard it 5 times over). It’s a deep exploration of some of the above-mentioned controversies, along with Knausgård’s perspective on where he sits within the literary tradition, both internationally and the Norwegian. The Norwegian mix of humbleness and self-doubt that is present throughout the book can be seen in the conversation, even though this was recorded long after he became a global best-selling author. Tyler’s impressive intellectual capacity and breadth is also on full display here.
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