Good literature shows us that the world we move through is of course not just one mass of clay formed into different shapes, but a blinding infinity of worlds all bubbling and seeping into one another. There is a world that the bugs in our gardens crawl through, peaceful and wriggling. There is a world that our planets spin through, rotating like a spirograph around our big heavy sun. And, somewhere in between these, is a world that we move through, commuting to work, falling in love, listening to a voice on the phone tell us that a loved one has died.

The job of good literature is to smear the lines between these worlds. To show us that there is a spectrum of perception where we had thought there was only a monolith. For every inner world that is so crucially important to us, there is a whole ocean outside of us which shapes that experience—an infinite hinterland that we can only glance for nanoseconds of grace. Outside of all of us there is a field of forces that we can only ever hope to trace out like a philosopher scribbling down observations that they see through a keyhole.

Karl Ove is one such philosopher. His hinterland is a mystical strange place called Bergen, late twentieth century. In volume five of this series he moves to the big city and the city becomes him. He becomes the city. He is shaped by all of the things in Bergen that he can only latch onto for an instant, but that impression is all it takes for a hinterland to infect us and be infected by us.

Though, perhaps more importantly, his hinterland is more ethereal than Bergen. It is Bret Easton Ellis. It is Knut Hamsun. It is James Joyce and Dante and Marcel Proust. And it is a horde of contemporary Norwegian authors whose names I only retained as long as it took me to phonetically sound them out in my head. Perhaps I will come back to My Struggle someday and slap myself on the forehead for not knowing all of the authors that dotted Knausgaard’s twenties with meaning. But I think maybe he would be forgiving of such retroactive gap filling. This book is a man in his twenties walking through the world decrying the fact that he knows so little about its details, while the man in his fifties calmly reflects on that strange youthful alienation, pats him on the shoulder, and describes the name of every tree that his naive eyes couldn’t classify.

He holds a lens up to everything in his life. The doldrums. The abyssal wailing sadness. The silent fist pumping glee. All in the pursuit of this beautiful alchemical transformation of detail and memory into time itself, literature itself, and life itself. With no detail spared. How can we show life if we don’t show the sweaty armpits or the hacking cough? The mushrooms growing beneath the shared apartment toilet? Knausgaard unbuttons his shirt and says “Listen to my beating heart!”

As that heart beats we are there with it. We watch him make terrible decisions, “wasting” his precious youth. And we (perhaps generously plural in the first person here) see ourselves in all of it. We see drunken missteps, hours spent futzing instead of studying or becoming, a brain that can review but not create, no matter how much we shovel into it and pray for something to leak out that we can be proud of.

But of course he isn’t wasting anything. He is living life. Like everyone else it takes some time for him to realize that after the fact. And his engagement with the world of literature helps him see that and explain it in a way that is so beautiful and gripping. It helps him put his young protagonist self in a Dantean moral geography or dance with a Proustian homunculus of Time-People-Names or sit in quiet awe of the Joycean cast of people who are places. All of it guided by the divine narrative voice of nostalgia that allows him to become the place where he became himself.

I have so much much that I’d like to say, so many more cryptic notes that will sit in my Notes App about this book, forever untranslated. But, even though for now I can only give a pinhole glance into Karl Ove’s work, it has become a great geological feature in my own hinterland. It is a part of me that dots my twenties. It has been a beautiful world to share with Karl Ove. He is not easy to know, but he is rewarding to get to know.

I have had fun watching him become Bergen and then move on from it as his train pulls out of the station. As I pass my own Bergen on the G train I slip my bookmark out from My Struggle Book 5 into My Struggle Book 6.

My Struggle Book Five

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My Struggle Book Five (2016)

My Struggle Book Five (2016)

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