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4.1 AVERAGE
4.1 AVERAGE
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Gemengde gevoelens...
Ik heb echt geprobeerd om het essay over kunst, Oostenrijk in het interbellum en Hitlers jeugd in zijn geheel te lezen, en ik vond het erg interessant om over Hitler als gewone arme sloeber te lezen, maar ik haak af als we te diep de kunst in duiken.
Maar daarna weer door met zijn leven en het is toch wel erg apart als hij beschrijft hoe zijn leven was op het moment dat ik zijn boeken aan het lezen was (bij wijze van spreken, want de nl vertalingen waren natuurlijk wat later).
Toch had ik voor het eerst dat ik af en toe dacht: "dat weet ik nu wel" of "deze episode is niet zo boeiend". Een teken dat het met 6 delen wel klaar is.
Al met al was Mijn Strijd een overweldigende reeks !
Ik heb echt geprobeerd om het essay over kunst, Oostenrijk in het interbellum en Hitlers jeugd in zijn geheel te lezen, en ik vond het erg interessant om over Hitler als gewone arme sloeber te lezen, maar ik haak af als we te diep de kunst in duiken.
Maar daarna weer door met zijn leven en het is toch wel erg apart als hij beschrijft hoe zijn leven was op het moment dat ik zijn boeken aan het lezen was (bij wijze van spreken, want de nl vertalingen waren natuurlijk wat later).
Toch had ik voor het eerst dat ik af en toe dacht: "dat weet ik nu wel" of "deze episode is niet zo boeiend". Een teken dat het met 6 delen wel klaar is.
Al met al was Mijn Strijd een overweldigende reeks !
Tätä lukukokemusta on vaikeaa ”tähdittää”, saati tyhjentää sanoiksi.
Jätin Taisteluni-sarjan hautumaan pitkäksi aikaa, kunnes viimein luin viimeisen, yli 1200-sivuisen osan muutamissa intensiivisissä päivissä. Sanottakoon, että kokemus oli hyvin kiinnostava, mutta matka varsin epätasainen. Parhaimmillaan Knausgård analysoi kirjallisuutta kiinnostavasti, kuvaa perhesuhteitaan ja ensimmäisten Taisteluni -romaanien tuomaa julkisuutta ja painetta, kuvaa viiltävän kirkkaasti vaimonsa romahtamista,pohtii kirjailijan etiikkaa ja moraalia sekä pahuutta, erityisesti sitä, miten se ilmeni Hitlerissä ja natsi-Saksassa. Pahimmillaan taas hän kirjoittaa klassisia, löysän itseriittoisia ja puolivillaisia etuoikeutetun keski-ikäisen miehen ajatuksia mm. siitä, kuinka feministit ja pyrkimys tasa-arvoon on mennyt Ruotsissa liian pitkälle tai väärään suuntaan... Onneksi jälkimmäisiä oli kuitenkin vähemmän.
Tästä on vaikeaa vetää oikeastaan mitään yhteen, etenkin, kun tuntuu, että pitäisi puhua teoksen sijaan koko teossarjasta. Välillä ajatusten ja tekstin virta tuntui saivartelevalta ja puuduttavalta, välillä taas suorastaan timanttiselta. Joka tapauksessa arvostettava suoritus ja ehdottomasti lukemisen arvoinen teos (jonka loppu on kyllä huikaiseva).
Jätin Taisteluni-sarjan hautumaan pitkäksi aikaa, kunnes viimein luin viimeisen, yli 1200-sivuisen osan muutamissa intensiivisissä päivissä. Sanottakoon, että kokemus oli hyvin kiinnostava, mutta matka varsin epätasainen. Parhaimmillaan Knausgård analysoi kirjallisuutta kiinnostavasti, kuvaa perhesuhteitaan ja ensimmäisten Taisteluni -romaanien tuomaa julkisuutta ja painetta, kuvaa viiltävän kirkkaasti vaimonsa romahtamista,pohtii kirjailijan etiikkaa ja moraalia sekä pahuutta, erityisesti sitä, miten se ilmeni Hitlerissä ja natsi-Saksassa. Pahimmillaan taas hän kirjoittaa klassisia, löysän itseriittoisia ja puolivillaisia etuoikeutetun keski-ikäisen miehen ajatuksia mm. siitä, kuinka feministit ja pyrkimys tasa-arvoon on mennyt Ruotsissa liian pitkälle tai väärään suuntaan... Onneksi jälkimmäisiä oli kuitenkin vähemmän.
Tästä on vaikeaa vetää oikeastaan mitään yhteen, etenkin, kun tuntuu, että pitäisi puhua teoksen sijaan koko teossarjasta. Välillä ajatusten ja tekstin virta tuntui saivartelevalta ja puuduttavalta, välillä taas suorastaan timanttiselta. Joka tapauksessa arvostettava suoritus ja ehdottomasti lukemisen arvoinen teos (jonka loppu on kyllä huikaiseva).
(Still gathering my thoughts and notes on this one. Review to come.)
I read the sixth and final book of Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical My Struggle, which was far longer and less cohesive than its predecessors.
The first part of the book is meta, and not necessarily in a good way. The previous books were about his life, but now he has caught up and his life is centered on the reception of the books. So you end up in a loop as people you've already read about now themselves read the same for the first time and respond to Knausgaard. His uncle is apoplectic, which worries him. That got old for me fairly quickly, though Knausgaard is just so good at capturing emotion that I was still drawn to it.
Since the book came out so long ago in Norwegian, I knew there was a long middle part about Hitler. Knausgaard was trying to figure out whether he, in the midst of his own struggle with life, could have ended up the same way as Hitler if placed in the same context. So he reads Mein Kampf (it's a bit of "I read Mein Kampf so you don't have to"). Hitler as a youth was into art and did not stand out in any particular way, then as he matured figured out how to give a "we" to people that he could manipulate. I actually found this part interesting mostly because of our current political situation than as a connection to Knausgaard. Since it was written so long ago, it is totally unrelated to the fascism (or proto-fascism) that we face today but it's still relevant. People search for meaning and fascism gives it to them, with ready made enemies.
As he tries to explain his feelings about his own place in the world, and how he wants to relate to it, he tends to fall back on what to my untrained eye feels like literary theory jargon, citing novels, poems, and paintings (sometimes densely packed together in a string) and using words like "intertextuality" in sentences that seem never-ending. Here, in the middle, the book slowed to a crawl for me.
"Explanation is anathema in these texts, all meaning must be extracted from the events portrayed, which are not relative, only unfathomable" (p. 682).
That gets old. Hundreds of sometimes overwrought pages bring us to his conclusion that we find "we" in being human. "I am you" (p. 830). It took me weeks to get through it. The "I" vs. "we" permeates his life after the first volume of My Struggle was published, because writing alone about your life is "I" but as soon as it is published, the "I" becomes "we" since so many other real people are portrayed and, more importantly, hurt. That is where all the angst comes in.
After the Hitler digression, Knausgaard returns to his life, but again it is primarily about being the author of a biographical novel. Unlike all the other books, I can't connect to this. The previous books all had universal qualities (at least, I hasten to add, to a cisgender middle aged white male who grew up in the 80s), parts of growing up that I could see in myself. That was not so often the case with this book. But he is still such evocative writer that I enjoyed it, albeit less on a personal level. The same goes with his discussion of his wife Linda, with whom he seems perpetually annoyed and who he seems not to be in love with at all. He describes her manic episodes, both high and low, in detail that must be awful to her. He loves his children but not her so much. It is sad to read and clear that they will not be married much longer (they are divorced now).
I'm glad in a way. With the five previous books, I wanted to read the next one immediately. Now the narrative is done and that feels right.
From http://weeksnotice.blogspot.com/2018/11/karl-ove-knausgaards-my-struggle-book-6.html
The first part of the book is meta, and not necessarily in a good way. The previous books were about his life, but now he has caught up and his life is centered on the reception of the books. So you end up in a loop as people you've already read about now themselves read the same for the first time and respond to Knausgaard. His uncle is apoplectic, which worries him. That got old for me fairly quickly, though Knausgaard is just so good at capturing emotion that I was still drawn to it.
Since the book came out so long ago in Norwegian, I knew there was a long middle part about Hitler. Knausgaard was trying to figure out whether he, in the midst of his own struggle with life, could have ended up the same way as Hitler if placed in the same context. So he reads Mein Kampf (it's a bit of "I read Mein Kampf so you don't have to"). Hitler as a youth was into art and did not stand out in any particular way, then as he matured figured out how to give a "we" to people that he could manipulate. I actually found this part interesting mostly because of our current political situation than as a connection to Knausgaard. Since it was written so long ago, it is totally unrelated to the fascism (or proto-fascism) that we face today but it's still relevant. People search for meaning and fascism gives it to them, with ready made enemies.
As he tries to explain his feelings about his own place in the world, and how he wants to relate to it, he tends to fall back on what to my untrained eye feels like literary theory jargon, citing novels, poems, and paintings (sometimes densely packed together in a string) and using words like "intertextuality" in sentences that seem never-ending. Here, in the middle, the book slowed to a crawl for me.
"Explanation is anathema in these texts, all meaning must be extracted from the events portrayed, which are not relative, only unfathomable" (p. 682).
That gets old. Hundreds of sometimes overwrought pages bring us to his conclusion that we find "we" in being human. "I am you" (p. 830). It took me weeks to get through it. The "I" vs. "we" permeates his life after the first volume of My Struggle was published, because writing alone about your life is "I" but as soon as it is published, the "I" becomes "we" since so many other real people are portrayed and, more importantly, hurt. That is where all the angst comes in.
After the Hitler digression, Knausgaard returns to his life, but again it is primarily about being the author of a biographical novel. Unlike all the other books, I can't connect to this. The previous books all had universal qualities (at least, I hasten to add, to a cisgender middle aged white male who grew up in the 80s), parts of growing up that I could see in myself. That was not so often the case with this book. But he is still such evocative writer that I enjoyed it, albeit less on a personal level. The same goes with his discussion of his wife Linda, with whom he seems perpetually annoyed and who he seems not to be in love with at all. He describes her manic episodes, both high and low, in detail that must be awful to her. He loves his children but not her so much. It is sad to read and clear that they will not be married much longer (they are divorced now).
I'm glad in a way. With the five previous books, I wanted to read the next one immediately. Now the narrative is done and that feels right.
From http://weeksnotice.blogspot.com/2018/11/karl-ove-knausgaards-my-struggle-book-6.html
-passage about the trifecta of good writing
Karl Ove is so delightful. He is alarmingly honest, but almost as if it's a call to arms, it's making me wonder why we all aren't this honest. It creates this open space that holds so much magic.
He's been my greatest friend these last few months when I needed him most.
Karl Ove is so delightful. He is alarmingly honest, but almost as if it's a call to arms, it's making me wonder why we all aren't this honest. It creates this open space that holds so much magic.
He's been my greatest friend these last few months when I needed him most.
In the first part of this final volume of "My Struggle" we encounter the same Knausgård who has been holding our interest for so long in the previous volumes. The focus here is on the extremely angry objections of his uncle Gunnar to how Karl Ove wrote Volume 1.
The publication date for Volume 1 is imminent but Gunnar has intervened, with very heavy emails and letters, to object that Karl Ove's description of his father's harshness, and then of his descent into alcoholism, and finally of his death and funeral, are all completely incorrect, figments of Karl Ove's twisted imagination, etc. He vows that he is going to bring in the lawyers and stop the book from being published. This is a major crisis; Karl Ove turns to his brother and his friends, particularly his old mate Geir, for advice and reassurance.
This is interspersed with scenes from his family life with really touching, affectionate descriptions of getting the children up in the morning, making their breakfast, and taking them to the nursery before returning to face this big problem with Gunnar. Karl Ove's publisher stands up for him and the book goes ahead, but with far-reaching revisions to change names and events. This is the book we now have as Volume One of his "Struggle". He goes on trips to publicise it; these are all described in detail; fascinating to read, as usual.
But then without warning, in the second part of this Vol 6. he suddenly stops talking about his book and his family life and embarks on an endlessly long, tedious, meandering quasi-intellectual rumination about the nature of writing and thinking, along with what he intends to be in-depth analyses of everything from James Joyce to Adolf Hitler.
Here it becomes evident - embarrassingly so - that Karl Ove Knausgård is not one of the world's great thinkers. He is undisciplined and directionless, and the reader has no idea what the purpose is. It all seems to have been sparked off by the Gunnar episode: it's a looking inwards, an amateurish effort to become a philosopher. It's so tedious, unstructured, and painful to follow that I ended up speed-reading through it.
At the end of this middle part of the book (which is a massively thick volume) I paused to read the reviews of it here on Goodreads, as well as on Amazon and elsewhere because before launching into the final part of this Volume, I was in a state of shock caused by the really bad writing in the middle part. I wanted to know what was coming next. Would we finish on a note of hope? Had the overall experience of reading the whole series been an uplifting one? The reviews warned me to expect an account of his wife Linda's mental breakdown, so I was not optimistic and I considered not finishing at all - to just stop here. But there was the book lying on my sofa, unread, and there had been so many magic moments in the previous volumes. So I cautiously decided to go on to the end.
The last part of the book is more of the now-familiar, and very readable "scenes from family life": keeping the children amused and maintaining some semblance of family life, whilst still trying to write but tussling with the exigencies of the publishing world and the need to play the Famous Writer at all manner of public events. There is an increasing stress between what Karl Ove wants to be, and what the world (the world of other people) expects. He has become more and more introverted and given to quasi-philosophical ruminations that are not as profound or interesting as he probably intended them to be.
He is bedevilled by the same stress that has dogged him ever since the beginning of Book 1 of the series. He was only really happy when he was a young boy, going on adventures in the local area and discovering the world. He has now turned into a tortured chain-smoking slave to his own thirst for celebrity; the stress of keeping up a family life and staying on good terms with his wife Linda seems to also have affected her.
The last pages of the book are an account of her mental breakdown and the treatment she's given in what seems to have been a very third-rate mental hospital. As Knausgård describes it without understanding what is going on, this simply overlays Linda's deep-seated troubles with very heavy medication that alters her behaviour in alarming ways. What a terrible ending to this long saga. I don't know if I'll read any more Knausgård. It has all added up to not very much.
To sum up this whole series in a few words: compared to other writers, Knausgård's prose isn't elegant, or witty, or beautifully constructed. It doesn't fly. It plods.
Above all, thanks to all the other reviewers and their excellent comments, which chime with my own feelings. In the unlikely event that Karl Ove ever reads this review, let me just add that he completely failed to understand how bad the psychiatric treatment was that Linda was given. If he had bothered to do some research into antipsychiatry, instead of wasting his time writing all that drivel about Celan, Hitler, etc. his life (and this book) might have turned out very differently. He could, for instance, have read Joanna Moncrieff's book The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment.
The publication date for Volume 1 is imminent but Gunnar has intervened, with very heavy emails and letters, to object that Karl Ove's description of his father's harshness, and then of his descent into alcoholism, and finally of his death and funeral, are all completely incorrect, figments of Karl Ove's twisted imagination, etc. He vows that he is going to bring in the lawyers and stop the book from being published. This is a major crisis; Karl Ove turns to his brother and his friends, particularly his old mate Geir, for advice and reassurance.
This is interspersed with scenes from his family life with really touching, affectionate descriptions of getting the children up in the morning, making their breakfast, and taking them to the nursery before returning to face this big problem with Gunnar. Karl Ove's publisher stands up for him and the book goes ahead, but with far-reaching revisions to change names and events. This is the book we now have as Volume One of his "Struggle". He goes on trips to publicise it; these are all described in detail; fascinating to read, as usual.
But then without warning, in the second part of this Vol 6. he suddenly stops talking about his book and his family life and embarks on an endlessly long, tedious, meandering quasi-intellectual rumination about the nature of writing and thinking, along with what he intends to be in-depth analyses of everything from James Joyce to Adolf Hitler.
Here it becomes evident - embarrassingly so - that Karl Ove Knausgård is not one of the world's great thinkers. He is undisciplined and directionless, and the reader has no idea what the purpose is. It all seems to have been sparked off by the Gunnar episode: it's a looking inwards, an amateurish effort to become a philosopher. It's so tedious, unstructured, and painful to follow that I ended up speed-reading through it.
At the end of this middle part of the book (which is a massively thick volume) I paused to read the reviews of it here on Goodreads, as well as on Amazon and elsewhere because before launching into the final part of this Volume, I was in a state of shock caused by the really bad writing in the middle part. I wanted to know what was coming next. Would we finish on a note of hope? Had the overall experience of reading the whole series been an uplifting one? The reviews warned me to expect an account of his wife Linda's mental breakdown, so I was not optimistic and I considered not finishing at all - to just stop here. But there was the book lying on my sofa, unread, and there had been so many magic moments in the previous volumes. So I cautiously decided to go on to the end.
The last part of the book is more of the now-familiar, and very readable "scenes from family life": keeping the children amused and maintaining some semblance of family life, whilst still trying to write but tussling with the exigencies of the publishing world and the need to play the Famous Writer at all manner of public events. There is an increasing stress between what Karl Ove wants to be, and what the world (the world of other people) expects. He has become more and more introverted and given to quasi-philosophical ruminations that are not as profound or interesting as he probably intended them to be.
He is bedevilled by the same stress that has dogged him ever since the beginning of Book 1 of the series. He was only really happy when he was a young boy, going on adventures in the local area and discovering the world. He has now turned into a tortured chain-smoking slave to his own thirst for celebrity; the stress of keeping up a family life and staying on good terms with his wife Linda seems to also have affected her.
The last pages of the book are an account of her mental breakdown and the treatment she's given in what seems to have been a very third-rate mental hospital. As Knausgård describes it without understanding what is going on, this simply overlays Linda's deep-seated troubles with very heavy medication that alters her behaviour in alarming ways. What a terrible ending to this long saga. I don't know if I'll read any more Knausgård. It has all added up to not very much.
To sum up this whole series in a few words: compared to other writers, Knausgård's prose isn't elegant, or witty, or beautifully constructed. It doesn't fly. It plods.
Above all, thanks to all the other reviewers and their excellent comments, which chime with my own feelings. In the unlikely event that Karl Ove ever reads this review, let me just add that he completely failed to understand how bad the psychiatric treatment was that Linda was given. If he had bothered to do some research into antipsychiatry, instead of wasting his time writing all that drivel about Celan, Hitler, etc. his life (and this book) might have turned out very differently. He could, for instance, have read Joanna Moncrieff's book The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment.
Knausgaard’s final installment is more meta than any of his previous books. Starting with the fallout of the publication of book 1 and then book 2, we learn of KOK’s inner turmoil, regret and doubt when it comes to constructing the path through his memory and through what actually happened.
His longest book, the entire middle third of the book is dedicated to the name and the number, an in depth analysis of a poem (the slowest part of the whole series), musings about names and objects, a brief history of Hitler and the rise of Naziism, and the failure of Hitler as an artist, the weakness of his soul and how language can dictate some of the most evil events in human history.
More than ever, this book explores all previous book’s publications, what he thought went well and didn’t, and gives us more of KOK’s struggle: his all-out effort to provide everything – mundane, or not – to the reader, in an artistic attempt to tell the truth and exercise a certain reality of his interior and exterior worlds.
The final 150 pages is a testament to this experiment, showcasing the vulnerable Linda at her lowest point, as the project seems to destroy KOK as he tries to finish it and accomplish what he set out to do: in this way, he encounters the danger of his experiment, its difficulty and his inability to forgive himself for what he put his family through. It’s a struggle to put things on the page, to write, to tell the world a story so intimate and close, but though his experiment may have failed in his eyes, KOK’s meditation on life, its meaning, the memories and the relationships that shape us, puts a final mark of punctuation on a 3600 project that I hope to come back to another time in my life.
His longest book, the entire middle third of the book is dedicated to the name and the number, an in depth analysis of a poem (the slowest part of the whole series), musings about names and objects, a brief history of Hitler and the rise of Naziism, and the failure of Hitler as an artist, the weakness of his soul and how language can dictate some of the most evil events in human history.
More than ever, this book explores all previous book’s publications, what he thought went well and didn’t, and gives us more of KOK’s struggle: his all-out effort to provide everything – mundane, or not – to the reader, in an artistic attempt to tell the truth and exercise a certain reality of his interior and exterior worlds.
The final 150 pages is a testament to this experiment, showcasing the vulnerable Linda at her lowest point, as the project seems to destroy KOK as he tries to finish it and accomplish what he set out to do: in this way, he encounters the danger of his experiment, its difficulty and his inability to forgive himself for what he put his family through. It’s a struggle to put things on the page, to write, to tell the world a story so intimate and close, but though his experiment may have failed in his eyes, KOK’s meditation on life, its meaning, the memories and the relationships that shape us, puts a final mark of punctuation on a 3600 project that I hope to come back to another time in my life.
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Re-edit of my review of 5 years ago
Again a very peculiar reading experience, this sixth and last installment of the “My Struggle”-series. In the first 400 pages of this book (a monster of 1081 pages), Knausgard really captivated me: only now did I see (or I think so) the meaning of his entire cycle. This part is about the period just before the publication of the first part of the series and the fear of the author for all kinds of juridical actions by the people that occur in the series (especially his uncle). That made me realise what Knausgard was aiming at all that time: to find and test what kind of a person he was, a result of that inner contradiction between an enormous inferiority complex and the ambition to become a great writer. The original thing is that Knausgard puts everything on the table, also the banal and trivial such as shopping or smoking a cigarette or playing with the children, in short, the "real" life. Unlike other great writers, with him that real life does not limit itself to profound introspections, musings or endless literary sophisticated descriptions: even the smallness of things had to be in it, and it is also there. In short: the 'whole man Karl Ove Knausgard' and his world.
But then suddenly, after 400 pages, the book turns into a series of essays: a particularly thorough analysis of a very hermetic poem by Paul Celan about the Holocaust, a personal assessment of how shocking that Holocaust was, a very long analysis of "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler and an analysis of the evil in the person of Anders Breivik, the extreme right-wing young man who in 2011 killed 77 people in Norway. As you read this, you are constantly wondering what these essays are doing in the otherwise very personal account of the almost banal life of an upcoming Norwegian writer. Automatically you start making connections (the authoritarian father of Hitler and of Knausgard for example), etc. Repeatedly, Knausgard himself gives the message that you should not confuse the young Hitler, no matter how eccentric, with the later Hitler, and that evil isn’t necessary there from a young age, not in Hitler, not in Breivik, and thus, and there we are – also not in the young Knausgard, an issue that has been discussed several times during the course of the cycle. Is that the key to read the whole work? Possibly.
Yet a warning: this essay part may formally stand like a pincer on a pig in this cycle, it really forms a coherent whole. Meandering from one angle to another it is clearly a reflection on two specific issues: first, about what the “I”, the “you”, the “we” and the "them” is, in particular in the ideology (Nazism) that has gone the furthest in the demarcation of those concepts, both in language and in practice; and secondly about the separate reality that it is the “now”, as the only real life. And thus Knausgard makes connections with his own writing project: that attempt to gauge what his own self is, whether there is real evil in him, how small or big, good or bad he really is. So in that sense there is absolutely a link with the rest of his cycle. And besides: these essays are not superficial musings, but profound philosophical, psychological, literary and historical reflections that are absolutely in-depth; they testify of an enormous erudition and a power to think things through into their concreteness, their authenticity, their uniqueness (just to follow Knausgards own jargon). Definitely a great, albeit sometimes very difficult read, though I suspect that Knausgard also included this essayistic part to show that he is not just the writer of the banal and the trivial, which he is sometimes is regarded as.
And then there is the last, relatively short part (250 pages) that initially returns to the banality of daily life, but in which ultimately the struggle of Knausgard's wife with her manic depression is discussed. The latter is quite hard and shows once again how difficult it is for someone with a very strongly developed inner self to confront the reality of the “now”. In Knausgard's terms it is the eternal struggle of the individual between the boundless and the bounded. I will come back to this in my global review of the My Struggle cycle (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2377332478). Rating for this part: 3.5 stars
Again a very peculiar reading experience, this sixth and last installment of the “My Struggle”-series. In the first 400 pages of this book (a monster of 1081 pages), Knausgard really captivated me: only now did I see (or I think so) the meaning of his entire cycle. This part is about the period just before the publication of the first part of the series and the fear of the author for all kinds of juridical actions by the people that occur in the series (especially his uncle). That made me realise what Knausgard was aiming at all that time: to find and test what kind of a person he was, a result of that inner contradiction between an enormous inferiority complex and the ambition to become a great writer. The original thing is that Knausgard puts everything on the table, also the banal and trivial such as shopping or smoking a cigarette or playing with the children, in short, the "real" life. Unlike other great writers, with him that real life does not limit itself to profound introspections, musings or endless literary sophisticated descriptions: even the smallness of things had to be in it, and it is also there. In short: the 'whole man Karl Ove Knausgard' and his world.
But then suddenly, after 400 pages, the book turns into a series of essays: a particularly thorough analysis of a very hermetic poem by Paul Celan about the Holocaust, a personal assessment of how shocking that Holocaust was, a very long analysis of "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler and an analysis of the evil in the person of Anders Breivik, the extreme right-wing young man who in 2011 killed 77 people in Norway. As you read this, you are constantly wondering what these essays are doing in the otherwise very personal account of the almost banal life of an upcoming Norwegian writer. Automatically you start making connections (the authoritarian father of Hitler and of Knausgard for example), etc. Repeatedly, Knausgard himself gives the message that you should not confuse the young Hitler, no matter how eccentric, with the later Hitler, and that evil isn’t necessary there from a young age, not in Hitler, not in Breivik, and thus, and there we are – also not in the young Knausgard, an issue that has been discussed several times during the course of the cycle. Is that the key to read the whole work? Possibly.
Yet a warning: this essay part may formally stand like a pincer on a pig in this cycle, it really forms a coherent whole. Meandering from one angle to another it is clearly a reflection on two specific issues: first, about what the “I”, the “you”, the “we” and the "them” is, in particular in the ideology (Nazism) that has gone the furthest in the demarcation of those concepts, both in language and in practice; and secondly about the separate reality that it is the “now”, as the only real life. And thus Knausgard makes connections with his own writing project: that attempt to gauge what his own self is, whether there is real evil in him, how small or big, good or bad he really is. So in that sense there is absolutely a link with the rest of his cycle. And besides: these essays are not superficial musings, but profound philosophical, psychological, literary and historical reflections that are absolutely in-depth; they testify of an enormous erudition and a power to think things through into their concreteness, their authenticity, their uniqueness (just to follow Knausgards own jargon). Definitely a great, albeit sometimes very difficult read, though I suspect that Knausgard also included this essayistic part to show that he is not just the writer of the banal and the trivial, which he is sometimes is regarded as.
And then there is the last, relatively short part (250 pages) that initially returns to the banality of daily life, but in which ultimately the struggle of Knausgard's wife with her manic depression is discussed. The latter is quite hard and shows once again how difficult it is for someone with a very strongly developed inner self to confront the reality of the “now”. In Knausgard's terms it is the eternal struggle of the individual between the boundless and the bounded. I will come back to this in my global review of the My Struggle cycle (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2377332478). Rating for this part: 3.5 stars