This whole book was gorgeous and it's so interesting to watch the author realize in realtime what he wants this sprawling auto-fiction/memoir/novel to really /be/. But one passage in the book stood out to me more than most. Very suddenly, about a quarter of the way through, the book breaks the stream of narrative with a multiple page monoparagraph description of Knausgård's interpretation of Dostoevsky.

He claims that, before Dostoevsky, literature dealt with the unattainability of the Christian ideal. Characters moved through the secular world in pursuit of a Christlike perfection. In their pursuit of this perfection though, they were of course doomed to fail. They fall to the banality of the all-too-human world and all of its allures away from the path of righteousness. But Dostoevsky flipped this idealism on its head. He had characters steep themselves in the utterly banal--had them seek the secular as an ideal. Dostoevsky's characters gamble away inheritances, commit murders, cheat one another, and generally engage in the pursuit of a pure form of nihilism, trying to turn their faces away from the divine. And, curiously, just like previous characters who had sought the Christian ideal, they fail.

Raskolnikov kills to give stake to his belief in great man theory and is rewarded with soul-rending internal torture in the wake of his sins. Ivan Karamazov spends an entire book demonstrating the tenets of his personal atheistic worldview, only to be consigned to visions of intellectual sparring with the literal devil. These characters, in their attempts to block out all light of the divine in their lives, have done little more than to create a stark background for the light of divinity to show the more clearly in contrast when it appears.

But Karl Ove notes with poignant sadness that our modern world has completed this closing off from the divine--this totalizing of the secular through omnipotent equalizing, commercial forces of banality. He (pointedly) quotes Ernst Jünger: "Little by little all areas are brought under this single common denominator, even one with its residence as far from causality as the dream." Then he gives his own interpretation, tying together Dostoevsky's inverted Christian idealism and the narrowing powers of modernity, "In our century even our dreams are alike, even dreams are things we sell. Undifferentiated, which is just another way of saying indifferent. That is where our night is."

These ideas clearly obsess Knausgård, at least as he wrote the second volume of My Struggle, if not during the actual events depicted. Throughout the whole book he is reportedly carrying around a copy of The Brothers Karamazov as well as working on a novel about angels. So clearly the pervasive aspiration towards the divine is a burden that he has felt himself to be shouldering. But one final quote from the Dostoevsky passage, I think, lends his own interpretation to what this says within the narrative of his life:

"For who brooded over the meaninglessness of life anymore? Teenagers. They were the only ones who were preoccupied with existential issues, and as a result there was something puerile and immature about them, and hence it was doubly impossible for adults with their sense of propriety intact to deal with them. However, this is not so strange for we never feel more strongly and passionately about life than in our teenage years, when we step into the world for the first time, as it were, and all our feelings are new feelings. So there they are, with their big ideas on small orbits, looking this way and that for an opportunity to launch them, as the pressure builds. And who is it they light upon sooner or later but Uncle Dostoevsky."

This is such a fascinating inflection point to highlight in the intellectual lives of young men. Who can make it through a whole life as a modern man without looking up at least once at the glaring neon buzz of Times Square and asking "is this it?" How many of us look to Dostoevsky to help guide us through the struggle for meaninglessness when we reach a certain age in this strange world.

And then who was Dostoevsky's first fan in the philosophical community if not Nietzsche, the second name that many young men reach for on a dusted shelf after Dostoevsky has opened up their minds to both nihilism and divinity? Nietzsche himself enters the dialogue with Knausgård in this book in the form of his friend Geir who met Navy Seals in Baghdad and wrote a book on boxing. A man who helps him make sense of the masculine in literature and his own life.

And here we come back to the central questions at the heart of all of Knausgård's introspection. How can a young man safely search for meaning in the world of literature and ideas? Is it wrong to find beauty and meaning in ideas that others have used to justify atrocities? Is it regressive in and of itself to read Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and Hölderlin and Heidegger when many Nazi thought leaders pointed to these very same individuals as their inspiration? Perhaps Knausgård's acquiescence to the paradoxes that these questions provoke within himself lends itself to his answer. He calls his magnum opus "My Struggle" or, in the Norwegian "Min kamp".

Along with this desperate and perilous search for meaning come beautiful meditations on the importance of loneliness in the creative process and in the interpretation of art. Knausgård's interrogation of Anselm Kiefer's Varus particularly left me in awe as he places a mental scene with the painting and Ibsen's quote that "he who stands along is strongest." Knausgård's second volume is a wonderful painting of the snow that covers his deep personal forest.

"I was depressed as I left, I was so incredibly sick of having everything inside me, being unable to say the simplest thing to anyone."

"Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone."

Anyway, enough of me trying to experience the art of this book collectively. Back to being unable to say the simplest thing to anyone.

My Struggle : Book 2

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