'Boyhood Island' by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Review)

After a month of female writers, it was inevitable that I'd be getting through a few more testosterone-filled books in September, and who better for that than the king of confessional male writing?  Time for another slice of the life of a certain Mr. Karl Ove Knausgaard - and this one takes us right back to the start of it all...

*****
Boyhood Island (translated by Don Bartlett) is the third in the series of Knausgaard's six My Struggle tomes, the latest to make it into English so far.  The book starts off with his parents' move to the small island of Tromøy, with little baby Karl Ove in tow.  What follows in the next 490 pages is the story of a boy growing up, with the book ending (for now) with his departure from the island at the age of twelve.

Much of the story follows young Knausi as he roams free through the landscape of both Tromøy and his youth.  He runs wild, spending sunny days in the fields and at sea, enjoying a free-range, sepia-tinted childhood, with football, sweets, music and girls as his main distractions.  It's a wonderful life, but there is one, inescapable, shadow hanging over his otherwise perfect days - his father....

I'd heard some less flattering things about Volume Three of the series, and many reviews and comments felt it was weak compared to the first two books in the series.  According to Wikipedia, Volumes Three to Five were written during the initial My Struggle uproar in Norway, and the writing of these parts was supposedly a little rushed.  Initially, I agreed with that view.  The book was great to read, and I zipped through the whole thing in no time, but the first half, in particular, felt at times a bit like Topsy and Tim go to Norway...

There's a lot more to Boyhood Island than that, though.  The simple tone is deliberate, with Knausgaard's style mirroring the simplicity of the child's thoughts, the adult writer keeping out of the child's head as much as possible.  In fact, as the story progresses, and Karl Ove grows up, the style does gradually become a little more complex, and it's a wonderful description of a boy emerging from childhood.

Knausgaard is only five years or so older than me, and there's a lot here that reminds me of my own childhood.  Quite apart from the physical escapades, his weaknesses bring back painful childhood memories.  He has irrational fears, terrified by the sounds the pipes make in his house; he's unable to swim a few yards over the deep water, even though his father is right there; he's deeply affected by childish teasing (there are lots of tears...).  And, of course, then there's the complexity of relations with the opposite sex...

As he grows up, Karl Ove becomes more self aware, getting over many of his earlier behaviours.  He also gradually realises his flaws, or at least the character traits which are seen as such by his classmates at school.  To an outsider, he's a geeky, bookish, slightly effeminate cry-baby.  Still, it takes him a while to realise why he's not really as popular as he'd thought (and hoped).

This was, of course, a very different time, and the young Knausi was able to roam free, pretty much at will.  He disappears for hours at a time, only coming back for food, a young boy enjoying climbing, skiing, swimming, boating:

"That was everything.  That was the world.
 But what a world!"
p.15 (Harvill Secker, 2014)

One of the biggest realisations I had while reading Boyhood Island is how different Karl Ove's childhood (which, as noted, was fairly similar to mine) is from that of the current generation who, for many reasons, are not given half as much freedom to explore the outside world.  My daughter is seven and I'm not sure if she's ever actually left the house alone...

What makes the book, though, is not the portrayal of an idyllic outdoor lifestyle, but the portrait of Knausgaard's father.  Calling him the shadow over Karl Ove's childhood is a fair understatement:

"The sole really unpredictable factor in this life, from autumn to winter, spring to summer, from one school year to the next, was dad.  I was so frightened of him that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to re-create the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close." (p.287)

The father is an irrational power which Karl Ove can do nothing about - as a young boy, he is absolutely powerless and at the mercy of his father's moods and whims.  And if those moods are usually bad ones...

Unfortunately for Karl Ove, the father is a tyrant who cannot be gainsaid.  He's a school-teacher of the old-school variety, a strict task-master who brooks no opposition, handing out unfair punishments, devoid of any sympathy.  The poor son is frequently punished for events beyond his control:

"What are you doing?" dad said.  "Are you completely stupid?  You don't stack wood like that!"
 He bent down and scattered the logs with his big hands.  I watched him with tears in my eyes.
 "You lay them lengthwise!" he said.  "Have you never seen a woodpile before?"
 He looked at me.
"Don't stand there weeping like a girl, Karl Ove.  Can't you do anything right?" (p.145)

It's an amazing, sobering picture of the helplessness of a child in the face of adult antagonism, one for all parents to think very closely about.  While it may seem like a harmless release of frustration, it's actually a highly damaging attack on a fragile soul.

The scary part of Boyhood Island is, as I keep saying, how similar it is to my own childhood.  Like Karl Ove, I spent a lot of my time running free, playing football and setting fires (I've matured - a bit- since then), and I, too, was an indiscriminate and voracious reader, a boy without many friends.  A Man in Love having also struck a chord, in these books Knausgaard seems to be showing me my past and present - and as he's five years older than me, I have a nasty feeling that I've also seen some of my future...

It might not be quite as good as the first two in the series, but Boyhood Island is a book that definitely grew on me.  While initially fun, but a little plain, the dark side of the story involving Karl Ove's father saves it from being a dull read.  Again, though, as was the case with A Man in Love, I'd have to wonder whether it's a boy thing: will women connect with his childhood as much?  Part of the beauty of the series so far is how much the books speak to me, but do they speak to everyone?  Will Karl Ove's clumsy, distant views of girls ring as true with female readers as they do with men?

Do let me know if you have any answers to these questions;)

IFFP Guest Post by Jacqui Patience - 'A Man in Love' by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Of the Shadow Panelists for this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, only Jacqui (@Jacquiwine) does not have her own blog, so when she asked if she could post the odd thought or two here at my place, I was happy to oblige.  Here, then, is her take on one of the favourites for this year's prize - a big book from an old friend...

*****

A Man in Love (translated by Don Bartlett) begins by pitching us straight into the action, into a bit of a ‘domestic’ in fact, as we join Karl Ove Knausgaard in the middle of a summer holiday in Tjorn, near Gothenburg. The time is July 2008, and these opening scenes paint a candid picture of the reality of Karl Ove’s family life with Linda, his second wife, and their three children (Vanya, Heidi and John). All the tensions of trying to occupy and manage the needs of their three young children are centre stage:

…so twenty minutes later we found ourselves on a high, narrow and very busy bridge, grappling with two buggies, hungry, and with only an industrial area in sight. Linda was furious, her eyes were black, we were always getting into situations like this, she hissed, no one else did, we were useless, now we should be eating, the whole family, we could have been really enjoying ourselves, instead we were out here in a gale-force wind with cars whizzing by, suffocating from exhaust fumes on this bloody bridge. Had I ever seen any other families with three children outside in situations like this?

p.5 (Harvill Secker, 2013)

It’s a compelling opening, and one that immediately captured my interest.  The book starts at this point and returns to these scenes towards the end. In between these bookends, a number of other strands run through the narrative, all of which come together to form the crux of Karl Ove’s story.

In one sense – perhaps unsurprisingly given the book’s title – this is a story of how Karl Ove falls in love with Linda. At this point the timeline flips back to the early 2000s. Having suddenly upped and left Tonje, his wife and partner of eight years, Karl Ove moves from Norway to Stockholm and reconnects with Linda, a writer he first encountered at the Biskops-Arno writers’ workshop. They meet several times for coffee, the occasional drink in a bar, and while it’s clear they are attracted to one another, they seem unable to express their real feelings in order to move beyond mere small talk. Unable to deal with this paralysis any longer, Karl Ove decides to pour out his heart in a letter to Linda:

I wrote down what she meant to me. I wrote what she had been for me when I saw her for the first time and what she was now. I wrote about her lips sliding over her teeth when she got excited. I wrote about her eyes, when they sparkled and when they opened their darkness and seemed to absorb light. I wrote about the way she walked, the little, almost mannequin-like, waggle of her backside. I wrote about her tiny Japanese features. I wrote about her laughter, which could sometimes wash over everything, how I loved her then. I wrote about the words she used most often, how I loved the way she said ‘stars’ and the way she flung around the word ‘fantastic’. I wrote that all this was what I had seen, and that I didn’t know her at all, had no idea what ran through her mind and very little about how she saw the world and the people in it, but that what I could see was enough. I knew I loved her and always would. (p.194)

I won’t reveal exactly how the couple get together, but clearly they do. Here’s Karl Ove in the glow-zone of the first flushes of love:

For the first time in my life I was completely happy. For the first time there was nothing in my life that could overshadow the happiness I felt. We were together constantly, suddenly reaching for each other at traffic lights, across a restaurant table, on buses, in parks, there were no demands or desires except for each other. I felt utterly free, but only with her, the moment we were apart I began to have yearnings. (p 201)

As time passes, however, the heightened intensity of the first flushes of love fades away. Children arrive and A Man in Love taps into Karl Ove’s search for meaning in his everyday existence:

Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, not something that was meaningful or made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change nappies but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it, and always had done. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts. (p. 59-60)

In some sense, I think part of what Knausgaard is trying to do here is to find a way of navigating normality, those flat periods between the peaks of intensity that life throws his (and our) way. We experience periods of extreme emotional sharpness in our lives. Our teenage years where everything is hyper-intense, falling in love, the birth of a child, the adrenaline rush from moments of success, a death in the family. But it’s trying to find meaning and fulfilment in the everyday that presents a challenge for Karl Ove, despite the fact he clearly loves and feels great tenderness towards his family:

At the traffic lights across from us a car was revving, and when I turned my head I saw the sound was coming from one of those enormous jeep-like vehicles that had begun to fill our streets in recent years. The tenderness I felt for Vanja was so great it was almost tearing me to pieces. To counteract it, I broke into a jog. (p. 54)

For Knausgaard, perhaps the key to all this is being able to free up sufficient space and time for his work as a writer… and this topic forms another strand within the narrative. Here, an interview with a journalist causes him to reflect on his frustrations as a writer, and difficulties in being able to devote sufficient time to his calling:

I had one opportunity. I had to cut all my ties with the flattering, thoroughly corrupt world of culture in which everyone, every single little upstart, was for sale, cut all my ties with the vacuous TV and newspaper world, sit down in a room and read in earnest, not contemporary literature but literature of the highest quality, and then write as if my life depended on it. For twenty years if need be. (p. 459)

And yet the minutiae and demands of his family life are stopping him, and he lays bare his feelings for the reader to see:

But I couldn’t grasp the opportunity. I had a family and I owed it to them to be there. I had friends. And I had a weakness in my character which meant that I would say yes, yes, when I wanted to say no. no, which was so afraid of hurting others, which was so afraid of conflict and which was so afraid of not being liked that it could forgo all principles, all dreams, all opportunities, everything that smacked of truth, to prevent this happening. (p. 459-460)

This is my first experience of Knausgaard and I found it utterly compelling and addictive. I’m reading this year’s IFFP longlist (along with Stu, Tony, Bellezza, Tony and David) and as I didn’t have time to start with A Death in the Family – My Struggle: Book 1, I pitched straight in with A Man in Love.

I’m finding it a little hard to pinpoint exactly why I found this book so gripping, but I think a large part of it has to do with the sense that these are real people Knausgaard is showing us here. Real people with real names and real lives, that’s how it appears to me. And he’s laying himself and his emotions bare with extreme candour. Nothing is held back, flaws and all. Even though he internalises many of his own emotions and avoids conflict in social situations, we, the readers, gain access to his innermost thoughts right down to their essence.

Maybe there’s also an element of my recognising many of the demands and challenges he describes in raising three small children all very close to one another in age. I’ve seen the exhaustion and mix of emotions this can trigger in friends and family in similar situations and can empathise.

Part of the appeal (for me) also stems from the way in which the narrative unfolds. It doesn’t follow a conventional narrative arc and as a reader there’s the allure of not knowing quite where Karl Ove is going to take us next. Alongside the story of Karl Ove and Linda’s family life, children’s parties and wandering around Stockholm with a buggy, he spins off into topics including existential discussions on the meaning of Hölderlin’s poems, the value in innocence and purity, cultural differences between Sweden and Norway and many more. We meet various friends and family members, all vividly painted in such a way that conveys their distinct personalities and demeanours.  There are flashes of painful humour, too; the acute embarrassment and humiliation Karl Ove feels when dancing with Vanya at baby Rhythm Time class, his irritation at Swedish middle-class parents for plying children with wholesome vegetable crudités at a toddler’s party and his encounters with the neighbour from hell. It’s all here.

This is my fifth book from the IFFP longlist and while I’ve yet to read the other ten I’d be surprised if A Man in Love doesn’t make the shortlist.  Once I’ve worked through the remaining books on the longlist I’m sure I’ll read A Death in Family along with forthcoming instalments as they appear… I suspect I’m in for the long haul now.

'A Man in Love' by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Review)

Back in March, during my IFFP reading for this year, I tried the first part of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, A Death in the Family, a book which looked at parts of the writer's life in minute, painstaking detail.  Today, we're back for part two - it's a touch lighter than the first instalment, but still very, very personal...

*****
A Man in Love (translated by Don Bartlett) starts with our friend on a summer trip with Linda, his second wife, and his three kids.  Knausgaard playing happy families?  Not exactly...

"The situation infuriated Linda, sitting at the other end of the table - I could see it in her eyes - but she bit her tongue, made no comment, waited until we were outside and on our own, then she said we should go home.  Now.  Accustomed to her moods, I said she should keep her mouth shut and refrain from making decisions like that when she was in such a foul temper.  That riled her even more of course, and that was how things stayed until we got into the car next morning to leave."
p.5 (Harvill Secker, 2013)

Three pages in, and he's at it already.  Knausi (as I like to call him) paints a detailed picture of a man who loathes family life...

Then we go back in time, witnessing the writer's arrival in Sweden, overweight and depressed.  Despite his literary success, he's not a happy man:

"All the music around me, all the literature around me, all the art around me, it should have made me happy, happy, happy.  All the beauty in the world, which should have been unbearable to behold, left me cold.  That was how it was, and that was how it had been for so long that I could no longer stand it and had decided to do something about it.  I wanted to be happy again.  It sounded stupid.  I couldn't say it to anyone, but that was how it was." (p.136)

Having walked out on his first wife, Tonje, he's decided that what he needs to kickstart his life, and his writing, is a new start in a new country.

Having escaped from his past, the world is now his oyster.  He sets himself up in an apartment in Stockholm and decides to spend his time focusing on writing and unwinding.  That is, until he catches up with Linda, a poet and dramatist he once met at a writing workshop, and falls suddenly and violently for her.  One evening, after being entranced by an Ibsen play, and by her company, he has a sudden realisation:

"After we parted company and I was trudging up the hills to my bedsit in Mariaberget I realised two things.
 The first was that I wanted to see her again as soon as possible.
 The second was that was where I had to go, to what I had seen that evening.  Nothing else was good enough, nothing else did it.  That was where I had to go, to the essence, to the inner core of human existence.  If it took forty years, so be it, it took forty years.  But I should never lose sight of it, never forget it, that was where I was going.
 There, there." (p.184)

The trouble is that when we get what we want, it rarely seems to be how we imagined it...

In terms of plot, A Man in Love is the story of how Knausgaard fell in love with Linda, and the progress the two make from friends to lovers to married with children; of course, that plot could be written in twenty pages.  However, this is Knausgaard we're talking about, a man who (as a friend jokes) could write ten pages about going to the toilet and make it fascinating.  The book contains the usual minute detail, descriptions of absolutely everything that happens in his life.  Stories branch off into other stories, one memory leads to another.  Somehow, it all works.

On one level, it's the story of a man looking for his place in society and life.  The writer is a foreigner, a boorish, drunken Norwegian in a land of mineral-water-sipping health freaks.  In a country where everything is done by the book, and where, instead of sweets, veggies are served at kids' parties, the chaotic, confused Knausgaard feels even more adrift than he did back home.  He's made to feel low-class and provincial, and his new start threatens to turn sour.

Another view of the novel is the story it tells of the frustration of the writer, when life and absolutely everything gets in the way of what you really want to do - which is write!  He agrees to interviews he really doesn't want to do (and which often go spectacularly wrong), but it is his family life which really angers him.  He resents any time stolen away from him by his wife and kids, loathing his feeling of being a 'feminised house-husband'.  Knausgaard behaves like a 19th-Century man in a modern, equal society - one he hates.  On a side note, I've seen lots of praise and understanding for the book recently from bloggers and reviewers like myself - men, in their mid-thirties, married with small kids...

One name that gets bandied about frequently when discussion turns to Knausgaard is that of Proust, and there seem to be two opposing camps here.  The first, mainly consisting of publishers and blurb writers, is effusive in its Proustian comparisons; the second, comprising critics and grumpy bloggers, slams this as a lazy comparison.  Personally, I'm somewhere in the middle (sitting on the fence, picking out splinters).  Language-wise, there's absolutely no comparison.  Knausgaard uses fairly ordinary language, and he rarely sweeps the reader away by force of expression or beautiful Proustian imagery.  Story-wise though, they are definitely more similar.  Knausgaard's style of slowly, laboriously describing events is obviously Proustian, but there's also a sense of Proust's handling of memory, with recounts going off at tangents, and smells and images evoking long-forgotten memories.  Admittedly though, there are probably better comparisons out there - just ones I haven't encountered yet.

A Man in Love is a little different to A Death in the Family.  It seems even more internal, reflective, and self-flagellating, and there is a deeper sense of something amiss, the writer's madness bubbling to the surface.  Linda herself has a mental illness, and Knausgaard's first attempt to attract Linda's attention, an attempt which ends in a bloody, stunning mess, shows that the writer has (how can I put this tactfully...) 'issues'.  It's painful to read at times, incredibly close to the bone, and this is the genius of Knausgaard, his ability to say the unsayable, the unthinkable... I.  COULD.  NOT.  DO.  THIS. (never - not even in my head).

All in all, I enjoyed it a lot more than I did the predecessor, and I do hope that the other four books in the series get translated at some point (even if I suspect that this may be the high point of the series).  As mentioned above though, this is a book which hits very close to home for thirty-something men with kids, trying to balance writing with family duties (ahem...) - and I haven't heard much praise from women...

Anyone?

'A Death in the Family' by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Review - IFFP 2013, Number 6)

The next stop on our IFFP magical mystery tour is Norway, where we'll be looking at a book that has provoked a lot of discussion in literary circles.  It is different, a little unusual, it seems to have been very popular as well - but is it any good?  Let's find out...

*****
A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated by Don Bartlett - from Harvill Secker)
What's it all about?
A Death in the Family is the first part of Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, a cathartic, six-volume, autobiographical novel.  Knausgaard is a family man, living with his second wife and their three children in Sweden.  Approaching middle age, he feels the pressure of needing to come up with a work of art and is frustrated that his family life may well be depriving him of this opportunity (so far, so creepily familiar...).  So he decides to write about his life - in great detail...

This initial volume is divided into two parts.  In the first, the focus is on Karl Ove's childhood, a rather unusual one spent shuttling between a physically-absent mother and a mentally-absent father, one who appears to be shutting himself off from the world.  The second is centred on the father's death at a young age, an alcohol-fuelled demise which turns out to be messier and more damaging than you could ever have imagined.  In a very Proustian style of writing, Knausgaard examines the aftermath of his father's death in laborious detail, exposing the reader to many things they would rather not see - in a good way, of course.

We sense that Knausgaard is using his writing to try and make sense of his life.  A repeated idea is that childhood is a golden age, where all is new and the possibilities are endless.  However, once we move into adulthood, and particular middle age, the end is nigh, visible on the horizon, and despite knowing this, we are doomed to repeat the same tedious days over and over again until the grave.  While we are supposedly individuals, in the grand scheme of things we are merely anonymous parts of the machine, interchangeable and completely replaceable.  He's a cheery soul, is Karl Ove...

The dominant figure of the novel is, of course, Knausgaard's father.  He is a strange character, a man seemingly trapped in a marriage and family he cares little for, spending as little time with his 'loved ones' as possible.  It is inevitable that he will eventually go off the rails (although only the biggest pessimist could have predicted the manner of his spectacular demise), and it is every bit as inevitable that his son will wear the scars from his relationship with his father.

You see, another Proustian connection here is that Karl Ove (just like Proust's fictionalised Marcel) is not a particularly nice person.  When you paint a complete picture, warts and all, that can hardly come as a surprise, but the writer comes across as an arrogant, selfish (expletive deleted).  He prioritises work over his family (at one point leaving his heavily-pregnant wife in bed at five in the morning to go off and do - or not do - some writing).  As he says near the start of the book:

"I have always had a great need for solitude.  I require huge swathes of loneliness, and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the past five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.  And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way, my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape."
p.28 (Harvill Secker, 2012)

I suppose his success has justified his methods, but still...

A Death in the Family is definitely a fascinating work, but I'm not sure it's for everyone.  While some bits are enthralling (including the infamous seventy-page section where Karl Ove and his brother attempt to erase the squalid signs of their father's last days), others are equally dull.  One part I found extremely tedious was the story of a New Year's Eve party Karl Ove attempted to attend in his teens, a good chunk of my life I won't be getting back.

Another question I have about the book is what it actually is - is it even fiction?  As far as I can tell, it's completely autobiographical and as honest as it gets, so what actually makes this fiction?  The style of writing?  A clue to the answer to my question may lie in a comment the writer makes when talking about paintings:

"Thus there was always a certain objectivity to them, by which I mean a distance between reality and the portrayal of reality, and it was doubtless in this interlying space where it 'happened', where it appeared, whatever it was I saw, when the world seemed to step forward from the world.  When you didn't just see the incomprehensible in it but came very close to it." p.199

Knausgaard's version of reality is not reality itself, but a close copy, one that allows us to see reality more clearly.  It may be art, but I'm sure it has come at a cost - Knausgaard's family reunions must be a lot of fun ;)

Do you think it deserves to make the shortlist?
I'm really not sure.  It definitely deserved to be recognised in the longlist, but it is a little patchy (inevitable for the kind of style Knausgaard attempts), and as I mentioned above, I'm not even sure if it is really a work of fiction.  I didn't recommend last year's Proustian effort (Peter Nádas' Parallel Stories) for the shortlist, and I think this one will be just outside my top six too.

Will it make the shortlist?
How could it not?  This is the book that everyone seems to have read, and I feel that there is an expectation that it will still be around when the main prize is given out.  Having been longlisted for both the IFFP and the BTBA (the American equivalent), it's a book which will give some weight and glamour to the shortlist - so it'll probably make it :)

*****
That's all from Norway.  Next time we'll be heading south and west, with a brief stop in the Netherlands before reaching our next destination - Wales.

No, really, Wales.  Honest...