“I was the tramp.” About halfway through the fourth installment in Karl Ove’s 6-part novel/autobiography/autofiction he gives the line that I think is the key to the cipher that he’s spent nearly a decade by this point working on. In a moment of drunken dancing he likens himself to Charlie Chaplin’s protagonist from Modern Times (1936). Both are battered by the strange humiliating comedy of finding a space to exist between the gears and mechanisms of the modern world.

Knausgaard’s oscillating path in the world throughout this book moves between the poles of numbed alcoholism and overstimulated premature ejaculation; between childish rebellion and bourgeois responsibility. He has moments that seem to give great meaning to his life and clearly stick with him to the time of writing, and also moments of supreme bare-chested embarrassment. He discovers literature and colors his skeptical love of art with his constant interactions with books and music. A soundtrack featuring Talking Heads, the Church, and Talk Talk weaves through a young man’s public discovery of his own taste. He writes reviews for local papers, alienating as many as he can along the way while he figures out how to describe what music means to him, all while squarely in the public eye.

Beyond his taste in music we’re treated to a short bibliography of books that he reads and references throughout his adolescence. But the fun kicker is that it seems like almost all of them are likely fabricated by the man in his 40’s writing the book rather than truly remembered from the brain of the 18-year-old protagonist. He mentions at one point having to re-read The Lord of the Rings after 2 years in his youth because of his inability to remember almost anything from it. This in the midst of dozens and dozens of literary references that seem to draw on specific plot points of books he claims to have read decades ago in his youth.

What a fantastic tool for the autofiction author: an artificial intellectual world that he creates and populates with his young dumb self. In the path of this young man he places a carefully curated list of books that represent the themes and emotions of his life. In this list also lies Knausgaard’s themes for the overarching story that we’re reading. He explicitly mentions disliking how Milan Kundera espouses his worldviews at the expense of the action of his characters. He mentions how ridiculous it is that a character is forced into stasis while the voice of the author spends time bloviating about The Eternal Return or some such while the character can do nothing but stare out the hypothetical window. And then he contrasts this with the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Knut Hamsun, and One Thousand and One Nights (ah we’ve found our Proust throughline here haven’t we—he used the same artificial reference in his own life book). And just like that Knausgaard discovers the strange evolutionary allure of postmodern thought. Where Kundera and other authors might proselytize with a single frustrated plot, these other strange new authors create worlds in novels that writhe and burst with plots and subplots that only give a story shape in an aggregated fractal that can only be enjoyed up close and parsed from a distance. And, like Scheherazade, Knausgaard continues to weave themes and characters into the story of his life to extend it as long as he can. Only, his fairy tales come in the form of uncles perfectly summarizing the ideas of Heidegger or a fellow teacher mentioning Knut Hamsun.

I really could keep talking about this book for hours—it was a perfect blend of extreme readability combined with glancing allusions to deep heavy themes that can be pondered as much or as little as one wants while reading. There is interiority/exteriority, the scale of one’s world vs the scale of the universe, existence’s relationship with the mind, and a near-infinite list of others that writhe and burst within just the fourth out of six. I’m glad to be welcomed so warmly back into Karl Ove’s world, perilous though it might be.

My Struggle Book Four

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My Struggle Book Four (2015)

My Struggle Book Four (2015)

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