An Ordinary Phenom

Cult writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s powerful memory electrifies the mundane and turns it into the stuff of literary best-sellers

Critics and readers have devoured Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part series of memoirs, My Struggle, three of which have already been translated into English from Norwegian, attracting plaudits that have lasted. Knausgaard is a rising star in the global literary firmament. The Norwegian, now living in Sweden, is the author of two bestsellers prior to his latest book, Boyhood Island (Harvill Secker, 496 pages) out this summer. Along with worldwide praise, however, came snubs from his family; because he didn’t bother to write facts through fiction, as writers often do in the telling of inconvenient truths, he incurred the wrath of his close relatives.

His second wife, writer Linda Boström, told him, after reading the second book—A Man in Love (2013)— that he was free to leave her (the couple is still married). His mother asked him to stop writing after it came out. His uncle hit out at him in the media for the portrayal in the first book, A Death in the Family (2012), of Knausgaard’s strange relationship with his estranged, alcoholic father, who left the family when the writer was a teen.

The 45-year-old’s books reveal that he is a difficult man, someone who can’t be bothered too much with mundane tasks involved in raising his four children, though he tends to enjoy their company on and off. He doesn’t understand the idea of holidays because he tends to work seven days a week. In fact, he comes across as a real bore, a wife-baiter, anti-social, conceited, ideologically opposed to pushing prams carrying his child.

But nothing succeeds like success. And it isn’t an exaggeration to say the literary world seems to be divided between two kinds of people: those who have read Knausgaard and those who haven’t.

I asked a bookseller on Karl Johans Gate, Oslo’s main street—a stone’s throw from Norway’s yellow-brick Parliament—whether it was a sin not to have read Knausgaard. “He is a sensation now. Some people in this country say he was very hard on his own family by being ruthlessly frank. Buy it, you won’t regret it,” she replied, pointing to the book. On the back cover, it said: “fiction”. What an irony.

In Norway, a country with a population of 5 million, more than 500,000 copies of the My Struggle series have been sold so far. Some employers were forced to declare ‘Knausgaard-free’ days so that people don’t spend a lot of time talking about his works at office.

Earlier novels such as Out of the World (1998) and A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven (2004) began his career. The bearded, handsome writer whose English translations began appearing in 2012 (the original series was published between 2009 and 2011) has brought the power of memory back to literary fiction with a bang.

Knausgaard has been hard on himself, too, dwelling at length on his inferiority complexes, his fears, his failure as a father and a husband, his troubles with neighbours and misunderstandings with friends. He describes himself as someone who feels awkward in the presence of strong- bodied people.

“Once I had been to a party in Stockholm at which a boxer had been present. He was sitting in the kitchen, his physical presence was tangible, and he filled me with a distinct but unpleasant sensation of inferiority. A sensation that I was inferior to him. Strangely enough, that evening was to prove me right,” he writes in A Man in Love, referring to a situation, in his inimitable, addictive style—which seems to flow unhindered from a source of unending inspiration—in which his wife gets locked in a bathroom and the door has to be kicked open.

The writer also cracks a joke or two about well-meaning friends. He argues that people who do not have children seldom understand what it involves to invite a family with kids over to stay:

“We asked if she knew what it was like living with children, and whether she was really sure she wanted us there, but she was sure… the intention had been to stay there all the week, but three days later we packed all our stuff and headed south again, to Mikarla and Erik’s obvious relief.”

What is remarkable about Knausgaard is his honesty and his obsessions: he is enamoured of Fyodor Dostoevsky and gorges on The Brothers Karamazov, from which he seems to have imbibed great powers of literary intuition with which to negotiate back and forth with sub-plots. For a student of creative writing, taught to edit whatever he writes after short spells, the writer is an iconoclast who once said in an interview that he had started to trust in quantity of writing much more than quality. But he seems to have maintained a balance, and an excellent one at that.

In his most recent installment of the My Struggle series, Boyhood Island, which has taken Europe and America by storm—Knausgaard’s book readings in New York are reported to allow standing room only—he recaps his childhood with great innocence, leaving one to wonder how one could remember so much: the situations, the words uttered, the fun, the fear and the rage of the past:

‘I watched dad. Sweat was running down his forehead. I rubbed my palms against each other several times. He leaned forward. Just as he was grabbing the log and about to straighten up, he farted. Caught in the act.

“You said we should only fart in the toilet,” I said.

At first he didn’t answer.

“It is different when you are outside in the open air,” he said, without meeting my gaze. “Then you can, well, let your farts go free.”’

Readers may go red in the ears while the author tramples upon the intensely private details of others. In a sense, Knausgaard’s books are a classic case study for the debate on whether personal memoirs impinge on the rights of other characters in a narrative. These are real people after all. And they didn’t grow old, fall in love, become alcoholic, have children or fart in the open to be written about.

While that criticism on violation of privacy stands valid, even the boring bits of life get their due from Knausgaard, earning him comparisons to the literary genius of Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust. The My Struggle series are a tribute to Knausgaard’s own photographic memory. He himself writes about it in A Man in Love:

‘The schools, the swimming baths, the sports halls, the youth clubs, the petrol stations, the shops, my relatives’ houses. The same applies to the books I had read. What they were about was gone in weeks, but the places where the plot had taken place had stayed with me for years, perhaps forever, what did I know?’

In exploring childhood romance and adventures, the Norwegian goes Proustian and narrates, with ease, his first kiss; with so much passion that he takes reality into a realm of greater reality, using his micro-focus on detail. The teenaged Knausgaard asks his girlfriend whether he can time how long they kiss. She agrees. His aim: to beat his friend Tor’s record of 10 minutes.

‘Actually we didn’t need to continue for more than ten minutes and one second to meet Tor’s record. And that was now. We had beaten him now. But we could beat him by a large margin. Fifteen minutes, that ought to be possible. Five left then. But my tongue ached… ’

English language fans will have to wait for three more of Knausgaard’s My Struggle books to be translated. Their thoughts are best voiced by writer Zadie Smith in her now famous utterance: “I need the next volume like crack.”

Boyhood IslandKarl Ove KnausgaardOut of the World