For years I casually mocked a book I sometimes walked past in my local independent bookstore. The book was My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard; what was funny was the title combined with the size of the thing, actually a series of six thick volumes, an encyclopedia of struggle with the author’s haggard face on the cover of each book. Good grief, Karl, I would think. It can’t be that bad, can it?
My casual acquaintance with the book suddenly became more serious when, due to a misunderstanding, my boyfriend presented me with the first volume at Christmas. “I know you’ve been interested in it for a long time!” said my thoughtful, earnest boyfriend. “I thought about getting all six, but then I thought it might be better to start with one.” Though I hadn’t previously had any intention of reading it, once I own a book, I feel an obligation to at least give it a try, so I started on book one in January.
To address the elephant in the room – if you google this series, you might see something about Nazis. The title, My Struggle, is Min Kamp in the original Norwegian, and yes, that’s a deliberate reference to Mein Kampf. Furthermore, while most of the series is autobiographical, the middle of book six randomly derails into a long contemplative essay about Hitler’s childhood and psychology. This isn’t because Knausgaard is a Nazi; he just has a scholarly interest in World War Two and apparently couldn’t resist using this platform to air his thoughts on it. I’m not going to talk about this part of the book because it doesn’t really have any connection to anything else in the series, and because I just didn’t find it that interesting.
Back to book one. Surprisingly to me, I was hooked at once – though it took me a while to decide if the book was actually any good. What’s immediately gripping about this book is its reality-TV quality; Karl Ove (he uses both names) writes about himself, under his own name, and his real family, friends, and acquaintances. Nothing seems to be off limits, and no detail is spared; he tells us about his social awkwardness, his most embarrassing failures with women, his physical insecurities, and his petty day-to-day annoyances with his wife and children. It’s fascinating in a lurid, slow-motion trainwreck kind of way: I can’t believe he said that. I felt a little guilty reading it, and suspected that I was drawn to it by the same impulse that would make me pick up, say, a People magazine in the checkout aisle. But before I finished the first book, I bought the next two.
At least initially, the spectacle of reality helps compensate for the brutal lack of plot. Each of these books covers a phase of Karl Ove’s life, not in order; in book one he’s a young adult, book two a younger adult, book three a child, book four a teen, etc. For large swaths of each book, nothing happens – or, nothing plot-worthy. Rather, they have the tempo of real life; more time is spent waiting for something noteworthy to happen, or wondering if anything is ever going to happen at all, than actually experiencing plot points. We follow Karl Ove through long, boring days; he reads books, listens to records, makes himself a sandwich, wanders around town. Sometimes, as in real life (or at least, in my life), some tension seems to build, a feeling that something is coming up, something is going to change soon – but, as in real life, most of the time nothing does.
These books can be really challenging in their over-exposition (and I say this having also recently finished In Search of Lost Time). Karl Ove can easily stretch an hour over a hundred pages, not because anything is happening, but because “no detail spared” applies to the mundane as well as the lurid. If he’s checking out at the grocery store, we’re going to hear about the loaf of bread in his basket, and why he chose it, and how it reminds him of the bread he ate as a child, but is sliced a little differently, and also everything the person in front of him is buying, and how that makes him feel, and the look on the cashier’s face, and on and on ad infinitum. At one point he tells us his actual pin number as he’s punching it in.
What’s the point of all this? On one level, the “plot” is the plot of a typical human life – growing up, falling in love, establishing a career, marrying and having children. As I read on though, another overarching theme slowly, slowly seemed to emerge. By the time I rounded the corner on book four, my take was that if the books are “about” anything – besides a level one primer on what it’s like to be a human being – they’re about Karl Ove’s relationship with his dad. None of the books are primarily about this, but it hovers in the background, it’s the shadow (the “struggle”?) that links the stories together.
The dad, we understand, wasn’t a very nice guy. The primary impression Karl Ove conveys is of fear. Especially as a kid, he’s terrified of his dad, never knowing what mood he’ll be in today, or what mistake of Karl Ove’s (a lost sock, a few drops of juice spilled on the floor) will trigger his temper. In one scene, a ten-year-old Karl Ove quietly eats a bowl of cereal with spoiled milk because he’s afraid to ask for something different. As Karl Ove gets older, he continues to cope with his dad via utter submissiveness, gritting his teeth and getting quietly drunk whenever he visits in adulthood. Things never come to a head, but go on the same way until his dad’s death from alcoholism. But when, some time later, Karl Ove’s first child is born, his dad is still looming as large as ever in his psyche, inspiring all kinds of worries about what kind of father he’s going to be, and whether he’s even capable of being a good father.
I revised my original judgment – this wasn’t just some skin-deep tabloid voyeurism. A difficult parent-child relationship is a complicated phenomenon worth exploring: the mix of empathy and loathing we can feel for a person who has been closer to us than almost anyone else, who both hurts us and suffers in their own right.
But I was wrong again – that’s not what these books are really about either. The next turning point comes in book six, which takes us back to Karl Ove’s present. He’s 40, married to the love of his life, living hectic days with three children under five. At this point the series becomes self-aware for the first time: book one is about to be published, and Karl Ove is in the process of contacting each of the real people he’s written about. He does this with trepidation, afraid that someone is going to be angry; he reflects on his lingering fear of conflict:
“I couldn’t undo what I’d already done. Not only had I made the decision that it was what I wanted, but I’d also worked under the banner of that decision for more than a year…
That was what I thought. But it wasn’t what I felt. I felt like I did when I was a little boy and had done something wrong. I was afraid Dad was going to come and be angry with me. There was nothing worse…”
Enter Karl Ove’s worst nightmare: his uncle Gunnar. Gunnar is his dad’s younger brother, and acts as a kind of dad reincarnate, reacting to the manuscript of book one with violent anger. Karl Ove receives an email with the subject “verbal rape”, in which Gunnar condemns Karl Ove, and his brother, and his mother, and her entire family. He accuses Karl Ove of being a pathological liar, and demands the book not be published, or if it is everything about the dad and his family has to be removed, or if it’s not then Gunnar’s going to sue. “I’d imagined all kinds of things, but not this,” says Karl Ove. “It was as if he were standing there screaming.”
At this point we’re wondering if Karl Ove is going to crumble under the pressure, or if he’ll grow a backbone and try to defend himself. But he does neither; instead, he immediately steelman’s his uncle’s case in the strongest terms possible. “In Gunnar’s eyes,” he begins, “everything was different.” Then he jumps back to the beginning and gives a dense three-page summary of his life story so far from Gunnar’s point of view.
For Karl Ove, his dad was a terrifying figure, emotionally and sometimes physically abusive, who eventually abandoned his family and drank himself to death. For Gunnar, the dad is the victim, first caught in a loveless marriage and then having his own children poisoned against him by their mother, until now his son is airing their dirty laundry in public, pretending to be an artist but really just looking to make a buck from his family’s misfortune.
At this point Karl Ove establishes himself as a master of epistemic humility. He’s written five books about his own perspective on his own life, but as soon as he presents his uncle’s point of view, he believes that story just as much as his own. He doesn’t say Gunnar misunderstood or saw things differently, he says that for Gunnar, everything was different. When he explains it, we believe it too: the story that Gunnar tells is a true, fair representation of Gunnar’s actual experience. Karl Ove believes in both stories, and he’s tortured by the dissonance. How can he tell his story, from his perspective, when for his uncle it’s not true? What right does he have to tell it – particularly if it causes someone else pain?
You might say, how can Karl Ove be so wishy-washy about his own experiences? How can he not have the confidence to tell his own story from his own perspective? After all, isn’t that all any of us can ever do?
Karl Ove says,
“Perhaps because I have always had such a weak ego, always felt myself inferior to all others, in every situation. Not only the brilliant individuals I have met, who, with their charisma, intelligence, and talent have outshone all others, but also taxi drivers, waiters, train conductors, in fact every kind of person one can possibly meet out there. I am inferior to the man who washes down the stairs and corridors in the building in which we live, he possesses an authority greater than mine in that situation…”
At this description, I felt a flash of recognition. Maybe it’s because I also grew up in a family where, as Karl Ove says “part of the person I was had to be hidden.” For me, this wasn’t about having one difficult parent, but rather two parents with a lifelong dedication to living in separate worlds. Though they never got divorced, they lived as far apart from each other as possible within one household: separate vacations, separate interests, even separate rooms of the house. They almost never had an interaction that wasn’t logistical, or bitter; I don’t remember them ever having, for example, the kind of conversation that starts with “How was your day?” The times they rode in the same car together with me I can count on one hand, pretty accurately since they were each so memorably uncomfortable.
For me, the upshot of this was that I grew adept at moving between their disparate worlds. Though they were irreconcilable, even as a child I recognized that neither was right or wrong; both were just as right from their own perspective, and just as wrong from the other. I believed in each of their points of view equally, as was necessary to love both of them. With my mom I was one person, the person who could understand and relate to her; with my dad, though still myself, I was in some ways a different person, the kind of person who could understand and love him.
Why am I telling you about my parents’ marriage in a book review? Because context is everything: this review comes from me, and my own story informs my perspective on everything including this book. I grew up in a house where the definitions of “right” and “wrong” shifted depending on who you were talking to, and where my own opinion usually mattered least of all. And maybe that’s why I loved Karl Ove’s wishy-washyness about his own experiences, his willingness to fully take on the perspective of a seeming enemy, putting it on an equal footing with his own story. What truth is there besides what we see, each of us, from where we stand?
Context is everything; that’s my point and that, finally, is what My Struggle is actually about. Karl Ove tells us everything about himself, gets us as close as possible to the lived experience of his life, and the result is just this: we understand his perspective. In the end, he doesn’t even ask us to believe it. He hardly believes it himself – Gunnar’s story is just as true! He’s not trying to prove anything, not saying “this happened and not that”. All he says is “this is how I saw it, this is what happened for me.”
Karl Ove spends most of the rest of the book (besides the Hitler part) doing a deep dive into this. He quickly moves beyond the specific conflict between himself and Gunnar and into a revery on how one can ever be “right” about anything that happens, or whether one can at all. How can a person be right when none of us can ever give an account of anything without bias?
“How can reality be represented without adding something it doesn’t have? What does it “have” and what does it not “have”? What is authentic and what is not authentic? Where is the line between what is put on and what is not put on? Does a line even exist?”
In other words, whenever we tell a story, what we describe is inevitably something different, more or less or just different-flavored, than objective reality. We cannot be objective; any story we can tell about anything is necessarily ensconced in our limited point of view. Just choosing what to say and what not to say, which details to include and which to leave out, builds our bias into every story. My Struggle pushes against the limits of this law by including thousands of unnecessary, seemingly neutral details, but in the end this story is just as biased as any other. And of course, that bias is the very thing that makes it interesting and meaningful. But it also means that the whole story can be told from a different perspective, giving the same set of events a wholly different meaning, and be just as true.
We’re living on the internet in 2023, where the opposite ideology prevails: every opinion or perspective is either Right or Wrong. Most of the time, the closest we get to open-mindedness is to admit that the people who disagree with us might not be doing it maliciously, might just be too dumb to understand that they’re wrong. But they’re still wrong. And I get that. But I’m a bigger fan of radical humility, and it’s what I loved most about My Struggle, this epic, multi-volume odyssey that in the end says nothing except: “for me it was like this, for me it was like this, for me it was like this.”