My Struggle: Book Six Hardcover – September 18, 2018

We saw Knausgaard at the Brooklyn Book Fair in 2017. As we were waiting in line outside St. Ann’s Church, he entered wearing a weathered leather jacket matching his weathered appearance of someone who smokes too much and gets up too early to write. We sat in the balcony listening to his softly-spoken accented reading. Afterwards, we stood in the endless line and he signed two of my books. I explained quickly and gratuitously how we were inspired after his books to get around to our tour of Norway, visiting some of the locations in Bergen of Book Five, including the neighborhood around Absalon Beyers Gate (where there was a beautiful walk among the houses on the hill), and dinner at that bar/restaurant near the main square of Torgelmenningen, Café Opera. Maybe this was all just a little annoying for him to be listening to with that long line, and I should have kept my mouth shut. I had just then completed reading Book Five, I told him I thought it was the best one, and he auto-transcribed that statement into a simple dedication of ‘Best’, and signing his name in my Book One and Book Five. Then there was the next person in line for him.I remember the first time I saw the book a cute little blond girl was reading it sitting in a side seat near the door on the subway. I think I could guess from the subtle differences in her clothing that someone was likely European, maybe German or Scandinavian. Provocative title to read on the subway in New York City.I’ll give this review of the last book, but it stands in for the entire series. I must have spent about five years of my life non-exclusively reading all of it, waiting sometimes for the next volume to be published in translation. I took a break partially for this reason between Book Five and Book Six, the last appearing most formidable. Some reviewers had compared My Struggle to Remembrances of Times Past, and I took a year after Book Five (and the death of my mother) just re-reading all of those seven volumes of Proust, which I had not read in forty years – an amazing experience, looking through the layers of your memory thinking about the person you were then and all the experiences you have gained since then in reading it now. There is some of that in Knausgaard, too. People compare Knausgaard to Proust, but Knausgaard is not Proust. Proust is better, just at least in the density of the references he makes on each page, and of course it is all fiction. I appreciate now that Proust might be the best thing in my life I ever get to read. Still, My Struggle is the best thing I read in the decade from 2010 to 2020.It’s not really easy to explain why someone would want to read it, or why it’s good. Maybe it’s just a little addictive. The thing that got me in the beginning is reading about everyday life in Europe -- Northern Europe --, those countries that everyone always uses as models of the way societies should be, places where you think everyone is good looking. I traveled a fair amount in my youth backpacking in Europe, once a summer for three months, more recently staying in finer accommodations sometimes for up to a month, and I’ve always imagined what it would be like to grow up in Europe. Then there’s the idea that Knausgaard just sounds to be a pretty cool guy. There he was writing music reviews in high school, being in a band, of course trying to be a writer, and his relationships with girls and women. The author is about ten years younger than me, but there are the parallel experiences of all of us who grew up around that time, the music that was so important then (everyone dreamed of what it must be like to be a famous rock musician, whereas now it’s everyone on their phones or their computers), riding your bicycle, the open spaces of nature, and the specifics of a neighborhood you lived observed from a dependency relationship of a child.Books One and Two blur together for me a bit, but the hundred pages or so of cleaning up after his father’s death of course stand out in A Death in the Family, then a beer run to a party in the freezing cold one New Year’s Eve, unhappy walks with his wife and kids through Stockholm, and the beginning of his relationship with Linda in A Man in Love. Book Three begins a new chronology with his childhood, and his relationship with an angry father, which I can identify with, too. Book Four is just beautiful with its story of an adolescent taking a year before university teaching kids not much younger than he was in a small town in northern Norway, that high school feeling of being in a sea of love of young girls. (We traveled up north in Norway, and saw a number of small towns like that.) Book Five, as I told him, I thought was the best. It’s about him at university in Bergen, drinking excessively, just living a wild college life, as he tried to be writer, in a beautiful town. College years can be so epic.Book Six is different. There’s the conventional part at the beginning, where he is just taking care of his kids and the problems with his uncle over the story about his father. (If he had had any lawyer friends, I think they would have told him that he didn’t have anything to worry about, that his uncle never really had a case; maybe it was nice that he corrected some things anyway, but we all can obsess about things that may seem important at the time but turn out to be transitory.) Then there’s the similar part at the end, with the breakdown of Linda, and the story of the little vacation cottage in town. (We saw cottages like that on a walk through Sodermalm in Stockholm, and I had a vacation house and know their problems.) Book Six’s outer parts have more of a sense of living in the current moment, and not about memory. But, of course, the main part is the middle part of Book Six. Some reviewers say this is a four hundred page biography of Hitler, but I don’t think that’s accurate. The middle part is a meditation on a number of things, the Holocaust being the main subject, but there’s stuff about literature– Joyce, Faulkner, Zweig, Rilke, the Old Testament –, the art scene in Vienna, fifty pages analyzing one poem by Paul Celan, and a philosophical framework. Most of the six volumes appear to be premised on the existentialism of Heidegger, and maybe a bit of presentism. This one in particular gets into a conceptual framework of that with the Falling into the They and the Authenticity of Dasein. It can be slow-going. (I read an interview that someone did with Linda, and she said, ‘Skip, skip, skip’.) The author appears to have a variety of objectives in this. One is to try to provide some justification for the controversial title. Another is to show that the author is really a good human being, a European with sympathy for Jews, and is trying to make sure that people don’t misinterpret his title as from someone in an age of populism that is trying to revive racism or the Nazis. And a third might be to establish some intellectual credentials. I’m not sure if it’s all totally successful, but it’s a difficult subject to write about. Hitler’s life is described in its contingency as a real human being who actually produced some workmanlike paintings while living during his youth in hostels, and was not born a monster as he is popularly depicted – a stereotypical image which enables us to continue living and to not think too deeply about what happened, sort of like walking through the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and then going out to dinner. Knausgaard as good as admits that anyone else who was living there then might be likely to have gone along and become a collaborator with that revolution of the lower middle class due to generally bad living conditions that were exploited by the Nazis, sort of like Hamsun, and not have had the character to stand up at a crucial moment and be one of the resistance.Wikipedia says that Knausgaard has now divorced Linda, lives part-time in London and part-time in Stockholm. Similar sources say he’s worth maybe five million dollars (although who knows how accurate these things are) and maybe more by now. I suppose that when I began reading these books he was worth a lot less. It might be interesting to see how success changes him, if he gets married again, who takes care of his kids. He’s gone on to write more books including his Season’s Quartet, but I think I’ll take a break from him for a while. Sometimes I wondered reading these if he understands himself as well as he thinks he does, if he’s really that different from the father he is trying to escape, if he will begin drinking again, if his children won’t remember him as a bit of a mean parent, too. Those clichés that you always grow up and turn into your parents or into what you were most afraid you would be when you were a child come to mind. I wish him good luck. Maybe he did understand all of this and just wanted to write it all down quickly, or maybe all of us have blind spots that prevent us from understanding ourselves the way we really are.

I’ve read all of his books and each one is an amazing story of his life you’ve really got to bring all you have to read them but it’s well worth it

Something I’ve noticed a few times when reading well-known, successful authors is that the editors kind of blow off editing new books. They probably figure that these books will sell and they don’t need to cut anything or suggest changes. Or maybe the writer feels he or she has earned the right not to be edited. In any case, the final book in Knausgård’s My Struggle series is very tedious in the middle and it’s hard to see how the extensive passages on literary criticism and Hitler are relevant to the rest of the “novel.” (I put it in quotes because this series is more an autobiography/memoir than actual novel, in my opinion.) I skimmed a lot of this material. I’m glad I persisted though because the final part is very affecting, heartrending, actually. To be honest I feel very bad for Knausgård’s children. I worry how they will be affected by their father’s writing and their mother’s mental illness. I suppose that knowing how much they are loved will make up for the trauma. At least I hope so.

What a series and what a book! What I liked about this one is he peels back the layers of the onion even further giving us a glimpse of some of the struggles he goes through with trying to publish these books and exposing his family to every nuance and detail he writes about. Yes there is a big essay in the middle on Hitler which I thought was very well done. It's an insight into Hitler's life that many probably weren't aware of. In some ways it's an uncomfortable read...makes one think, 'how did such an ordinary small man turn into such an egomaniacal killer? ' Then the last part of the book deals with his wife's mental issues which again is both brave and awkward. But his writing turns the ordinary into the sublime. What is it about these books that makes the writing about ordinary events from a foreign country so alluring? I ask myself if the books took place in Minnesota or Nebraska or somewhere would they be just as compelling? Hard to say. Regardless, I loved these books and will miss them. The ended much the way they started...with a BANG!

If you have read Books 1-5, you do not need to read a review of Book 6; you have already read it. For the rest of you, please go and read the first five volumes. Book 6 will certainly make sense regardless — Knausgärd does an excellent job of effortlessly reminding us of the antecedent breadcrumbs — but living through the gestation of the author’s struggle will make the ultimate revelation richly rewarding.Knausgärd continues his high standard of lyrically delivering the quotidian, but it is his deft and academically impressive connection of his personal struggle to the biggest enigma of the twentieth century that makes Book 6 a surprise and a delight, albeit an emotionally complicated delight.By connecting his well-documented daddy issues with the thrall in which Hitler held interbellum Germany, Knausgärd makes the personal profoundly universal.And he continues to expose his personal torment up to the very moment he stops writing. The poignant postscript of his subsequent divorce from his complex and accomplished wife at the time of his writing illustrates just how committed Knausgärd is to his art.

This is not your typical memoir. Knausgaard is not detailing his incredible deeds and exploits, he is not polishing up his image to impress you. Instead, he takes you into his world, but primarily the world inside his head. He will start to tell his story, but like most people, one thought leads to another, and a flood of memories and associations collide and coalesce. Soon you are far from where you started, but back to where it all started. His brutal honesty about his own actions, shortcomings, and failures seems somehow courageous in a world that wants to airbrush and photoshop the messy reality that our lives often are.

This is really a beautifully printed and bound book. Chunky aspect ratio is cool.