Just the start of his long Struggle

My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgård


A couple of things to get out of the way first: although this paperback edition from Vintage calls itself “Fiction” on the back next to the price, the blurb, just above, says “Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his life with painful honesty.” And so it seems: on page 27 we learn that “I, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and at the time of writing I am 39 years old. I have three children - Vanja, Heidi and John - and am in my second marriage, to Linda Bostrom Knausgaard.” Wikipedia agrees on his date of birth, which makes him 50 now and says that he left Linda in November 2016, when they had four children.

Second, you might not be particularly notice the title of Knausgaard’s series, My Struggle, of which this is the first volume if you didn’t realise that in its original Norwegian, it’s Min Kamp, and in German, Mein Kampf. Well, it’s certainly a story of struggle (with life).

When this volume was published in Knausgaard’s Norway, if Wikipedia is correct, it sold almost half a million copies in a country of five million people. That’s one for every ten people. And there are five more books in the series, leaving another 3000 pages to read after this one. Great for those long, dark Norwegian winter nights maybe.

There’s a certain prurient fascination to Knausgaard’s unflinchingly honest writing which may partly explain its popularity: it’s like hearing absolutely everything going on in your neighbours’ house without them knowing that you’re listening. The sheer openness of the writing is compelling. Readers talk about it as “addictive”. It’s like being with a person - well, actually, more than that: it’s like being a person, being Karl Ove in fact. Against that, the story moves slowly, at the pace of life or the pace of thought it seems. There is drama, there’s tension, there are surprising events, but they happen, as in life, as exceptions in a world where looking out of the window, making coffee or popping down to the newsagent for a can of Coke fills most of daily consciousness - or at least, one can imagine, that of a 39-year-old, not yet successful Norwegian writer.

But I don’t want to sound unenthusiastic. Reading the book was like finding a new best friend - albeit one who goes on a bit, mainly about the tragic life and death of his father, and who is a complex mix of open and unexpectedly private (“I no longer drink. I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me.”)

So what’s it about - apart from the particulars of its author’s life? Well, it’s about life, death and families. But the way it’s written, as a moment by moment account of the play of the thoughts in the author’s consciousness, it’s also about memory. And more particularly, about how memories fit into our experience of the present. So it flits between current activities and thoughts about times past, or at least, solidified memories, which may be more like myths: “apart from one or two isolated events that Yngve [his brother] and I had talked about so often they had almost assumed biblical proportions, I remembered hardly anything from my childhood.” That thought casts doubt on the lovingly-detailed episodes from childhood that make up the start of the book.

This difference between memory and events as they actually happened is a theme: there’s what happened, there’s what you can remember, there’s how you felt about it then and now, and there’s those all distinctions transposed into the world of dreams, which are a kind of mirror image of the waking world: “when conscious, I hardly remembered anything from my childhood, and the little I did remember no longer stirred anything in me, which of course, created a kind of symmetry between past and present, in a strange system whereby night and dreams were connected with memory, day and consciousness with oblivion.”

Reality and our memory of reality is always filtered through the passage of time, giving the impression of greater understanding as one grows older, but, along with that, an uneasy awareness of a kind of illusion:

“In recent years the feeling that the world was small and that I grasped everything in it had grown stronger and stronger in me, and that despite my common sense telling me that actually the reverse was true: the world was boundless and unfathomable, the number of events infinite, the present time an open door that flapped in the wind of history. But that is not how it felt. It felt as if the world were known, fully explored and charted, that it could no longer move in unpredicted directions, that nothing new or surprising could happen. I understood myself, I understood my surroundings, I understood society around me, and if any phenomenon should appear mysterious I knew how to deal with it.”

Knausgaard’s fascinating gift is to be able to keep stepping back, starting with the recording of mundane daily realities, presenting them through the lens of his consciousness, and then leading us with pin sharp clarity into ever deeper levels of abstraction as he articulates what seem like universal truths about what it’s like to be a person, and what a person can and can’t know. This was also Tolstoy’s gift.

His special subject is the tension between how subjectivity makes own experience overwhelming while our intellect taunts us with our own insignificance - as he remembers when gazing idly at the crowds at an airport: “in twenty-five years a third of them would be dead, in fifty years two thirds, in a hundred, all of them. And what would they leave behind, what had their lives been worth? Gaping jaws, empty eye sockets, somewhere beneath the earth.”

I suspect that Knausgaard’s is a deceptively simple art: it looks as though he just has to keep typing while he thinks and he’ll have a book. It must be much more than that, because for all the unsparing descriptions of kettles boiling, random cars passing in the street and cigarettes being rolled, I was rarely bored. I’m not sure I’m ready for the next 3000 pages. I will probably return at some point. Knausgaard’s achievement is to leave me feeling he’s someone I know, someone with whom I deeply sympathise, someone who’s taken the trouble to share his best thoughts with me. But he’s someone I need a little break from.

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Drawn together by our unhappy endings

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

If you know nothing about Exit West before you read it, you’ll have a surprise about what kind of novel it is on page 99 (out of 229 in my edition). You may be pleased or confused by the author’s audacity or you may feel a little cheated. I felt cheated - well, at least that the writer had given up on providing a powerful insight into the experience of the breakdown of civil society in favour of something more fanciful. But after a few pages, I got used to the way the novel was turning out and was back on board, as gripped as I had been before Hamid whisked me off into a different kind of world.

Hamid writes in long but simple sentences, without much dialogue and with a sense of biblical universality which is disorienting when the subject matter is so vividly real. (Does he use an unusually high proportion of single syllable words?) The reader is constantly flipping between consuming the story as reportage and responding to the cadences of allegory or fable.

I saw Hamid talk about the book, saying he thought the author only has to write “half a novel” (or maybe it was “only half-write a novel” – which is better): the other half is provided by the reader. Indeed, while that makes sense for novels generally, it feels especially true of his book. Although he sketches his characters and incidents with precision, he doesn’t colour in all the detail: that’s up to you.

About the lack of dialogue, he said that with movies and television being specialists in dialogue - in seeing events “from the outside” - he prefers his novels to do what only they can do, which is telling a story from the inside of their characters’ minds. He thinks “books should be more bookish”.

There are many contemporary themes: mobile phones, immigrants, relations between generations, the fragility of order in society. But they are set against a timeless backdrop of human relations, prayer and, especially, mortality. In his talk, Hamid said that our shared humanity rests on a shared sadness about inevitable death, and that we are all immigrants, in that we are constantly arriving at new and different stages of our own lives where we find ourselves strangers, even to ourselves. We construct a narrative about ourselves, but it isn’t always plausible (such as when we try to exclude an incident from it by explaining that “I wasn’t myself”).

Only the two main characters have names and the city they come from isn’t named either - although Hamid says he was imagining his home, Lahore. But London and US locations are given names, some quite specific. Palace Gardens Terrace in Notting Hill, for instance, is described, with its cherry trees in blossom; but its big houses are not how their owners would like to see them. Sausalito, near San Francisco is also in a bad way.

In his talk, Hamid referred to the magic of his phone, as a portal to the world, a tool that confuses us about where we are and who we’re with. It blurs allegiances and ideas of belonging - which is why it’s also central to emotions around immigration. “Nativists” is one of his favourite words – meaning both ‘original residents’ and people with a defensive attitude to those outside of their group. The book was written before the vote for Brexit or the election of Trump but might have been inspired by both. Hamid find the same issues in Pakistan, where signs of being loyal to religious groupings are the equivalent of nationalist and racial group identities.

But this isn’t a tract; it’s a gripping story that might make you cry. Hamid revealed (or at least that’s how I saw it) that his novel compresses time, to show us what the Western world will be like in a couple of centuries. Even though it’s only made of paper (if you’re using old-fashioned technology), the book, like the phone, is a portal to a world that you can step into and step out of, a world where your identity is mixed with that of a writer you’ve probably never met. But I imagine he’d say it’s the reader and the writer who provide the magic, not the technology.

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Over-trained by the BBC

Today my BBC email has been switched off, a week after I took voluntary redundancy from my staff job as a Senior Broadcast Journalist at the BBC Academy. It's the cutting of my last official link with the Corporation.

Leaving wasn't a difficult decision. Having worked in London, mostly for the BBC, for more than 30 years, my department was moved to Birmingham three years ago. We were all offered the choice between taking redundancy, having help to relocate or claiming subsidised travel for 18 months. I chose the latter, but to reduce the commuting, I was also allowed to go part-time, spending initially two and later one day a week writing and making videos for a startup in London.

Now my department is being reorganised again, with another redundancy programme, and this time I accepted. The only other option would be turning up in the Birmingham office much more often, perhaps every day.

In the past three years, I've spent more time than I ever expected to on trains between London and Birmingham. These are tickets from just some of the journeys (for most I used a phone app instead of a printed ticket):

If you need to take the train from London to Birmingham, I'd recommend using Marylebone instead of Euston. It's slower than the Virgin service from Euston but Marylebone and the trains are both much more peaceful than the Euston alternatives - as I discovered after a year or so. Sitting in an almost empty carriage in the morning with good free wifi and a view of the passing countryside was one of the pleasures of my Birmingham life.

I haven't decided what to do next, but it's only been a week. I've printed some business cards, made a website, applied for some jobs and to study for a masters - probably too many ideas. I have a strong desire to find something locally, preferably no more than a bike ride from home. That worked when I looked for a startup to escape too many Birmingham trips, so maybe it will again. If anyone in South West London has any ideas, please let me know.

My exciting new website: bit.ly/charlesblairmiller