PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
Readers might be forgiven for fearing the worst from Some Rain Must Fall, the fifth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s fictionalized memoir. It’s natural, after all, for a writer to lose steam as a series progresses — for what once seemed riveting to begin to feel routine. With each volume of Knausgaard’s relentlessly self-focused My Struggle seemingly longer than the last, perhaps that self-focus must turn, finally, into self-indulgence.
For me, that trepidation started with A Man in Love, the second book in the sequence. Coming off the dizzying force of A Death in the Family, how could the sequel possibly measure up? It’s a feeling that has plagued me at the start of every subsequent instalment, including Some Rain Must Fall. Each time, however, I have been pleasantly surprised, and thrilled to have worried for naught.
While Some Rain Must Fall lacks some of the virtuoso stylistic play with time and voice that characterizes the first two books, and while it pulls back from the limited chronological focus of its predecessor Dancing in the Dark, it is as strong as the earlier books and may, in fact, surpass them in terms of its significance to both the structure of the series and to the questions that surround it.
Knausgaard foregrounds these key questions in the novel’s first passage: “The 14 years I lived in Bergen, from 1988 to 2002, no traces of them are left ... I kept a diary, which I have since burned. I took some photos, of which twelve remain.” The novel, which covers those 14 years, is more than 650 pages long, including scenes so detailed, so nuanced, as to beggar even the most exhaustive archives. Not for the first time, readers invariably wonder: where is the line drawn between autobiography and fiction in My Struggle? Where does memory end and fabrication begin? And, most crucially, does it matter? Published as fiction, though discussed largely as autobiography, the novels of My Struggle succeed because of how truthful they feel, regardless of how bound they are to the actual truth. While the extent of their factuality can be known only to Knausgaard himself ( and perhaps not even him, given the vagaries of memory and the act of reconstructing the narrative of one’s life), the novels capture fundamental truths about his character and his perspective on his life.
Some Rain Must Fall begins with Knausgaard hitchhiking back to Norway from a trek around Europe, newly liberated of his virginity, in love with Ingvild (whom he has met only once), and about to begin studies at the Writing Academy. He moves into a wretched bedsit, and sets about creating the sort of life he has long dreamed of. Then things begin to go wrong. It is no accident that one of the touchstones of Knausgaard’s Bergen years is James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, an earlier, more transparently autobiographical version of A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man: Some Rain Must Fall is, chiefly, an account of how Knausgaard becomes a writer — largely through setbacks and despair. Not only is his work dismissed as juvenile and hackneyed by his fellow students at the academy, he is forced to watch as his peers and younger friends go on to literary success while he — still pretending to a writerly persona — descends into self- doubt and lengthy periods without writing at all. It is only his approaching 30th birthday that ultimately forces him to write, giving it one last shot before giving up entirely.
Threaded through this chronicle of slow growth as a writer is a portrait of the artist as a young man, a callow, clueless, often cruel young man. For much of the novel, Knausgaard seems blissfully unaware of the effects of his actions on those around him. Though he certainly realizes that major transgressions — recurring infidelity, for example — hurt those whom he loves, he seems fundamentally unable to see himself as others see him. His frequent blackout drunks, for example — which often include acts of vandalism and theft — barely register for him, while the reader can see from the reactions of those around him just how troubling those incidents are.
Knausgaard’s unawareness dovetails with the reader’s increasing awareness of which areas of his life Knausgaard has chosen to focus on, and to what degree. Five books in, for example, we finally learn of the author’s first marriage, and of his first wife, Tonje. The entire relationship is treated almost as an afterthought: while their initial courtship is overladen with romantic superlatives (some of the weakest writing in the series, in fact, and likely deliberately so), their relationship occupies only a fraction of the space given to his ill-fated romance with Ingvild. It is left to the reader to wonder why this is so — a process that gives that marriage a significance it doesn’t have in the text — and to begin filling in the blanks which Knausgaard has surprisingly left.
With Some Rain Must Fall, the chronological structure of My Struggle comes full circle. The death of Knausgaard’s father, the catalyst for the first novel (and, implicitly, the series as a whole), occurs during Knausgaard’s Bergen years, and is detailed again — differently — in Some Rain Must Fall. What does that leave us for the sixth and final book, coming next year? Already I’m on edge, worrying it won’t be able to live up to what has come before, only vaguely comforted that Knausgaard hasn’t failed us yet.
BOOK REVIEW
Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgaard Knopf 672 pp; $37