What is it about Karl Ove Knausgaard that is
so fascinating? It’s not that, stylistically, he’s such a wonderful writer, as
far as one can tell from an English translation. There are some marvellous
passages – the description of clearing out his father’s house in A Death in the Family, Linda’s giving
birth in A Man in Love, and a lot of
the writing about nature and the weather.
But there’s a lot (a lot!) of stuff like this:
I got up, put a tea bag in a cup, poured the
steaming water over it, went to the fridge to get a carton of milk, then sat
down.
Or
I switched on the light, sorted the clothes
into four heaps, coloureds forty, coloureds sixty, whites forty, whites sixty,
and shoved two of the piles into the two big machines, poured powder into the
detachable drawer on the control panel and switched it on.
In fact this minute attention to mundanity
is part of Knausgaard’s project. He observes himself, his everyday actions and
his feelings as a primate keeper might observe the behavior of his chimps. And
yet he is not detached. The primate keeper is the observer, but he is also inside
the chimp’s mind and heart, the mind and heart of a writer, a lover, a parent,
a house-husband, a son, a friend, a displaced Norwegian. This is what it’s
like, really like, to be all those things at once. Above all there is the furious
will of the self to survive, no matter what the demands of love may be.
