Parental advisory ‘
A Nordic star’s new series is unsettling yet fascinating.
Children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves.”
So asserts acclaimed Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard in the opening pages of Autumn, the first of a four-part memoir ( Winter is just out, Spring is imminent), ostensibly written for his unborn child.
I found it profoundly irritating, arrogant and wrong. Anyone who’s spent time with toddlers knows they do nothing but observe and poke sticky mitts at and ask endless questions about the world. That’s their whole job; it’s their raison d’être.
And this man has four children? What a strange, removed statement to make.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read the books that Knausgaard is best known for, the six-part autobiography that became a phenomenon in Norway in 2009 and saw him compared favourably to Proust. Perhaps if I had, I would have been more sympathetic to him; it would at least have informed reading of Autumn. But that series is called Min Kamp/My Struggle, which has some rather nasty Hitlerian overtones, so it’s a hard no from me.
To give him his due, the man has a keen eye and a mastery of words. He has broken this book into eclectic snapshotty chapters: cars, loneliness, piss, war, jellyfish. Best sentence, on badgers: “Its world is that of the low.” Perhaps the most striking observation in Autumn regards nostalgia – that as we have lost the prospect of the future as utopia, nostalgia has taken on even more power, though he puts it much better than that.
From a technical perspective, this is a fascinating read, full of lessons in how to look closer and better. Knausgaard is particularly adept at slipping into the skins of animals – the adder, the badger. But sometimes he just gets a bit carried away with his own cleverness. He writes of a game he used to play when his children were younger, creeping his fingers along the table and tickling them. Now, the game makes one daughter, who is nearly a teenager, “genuinely unsettled”.
What follows is a waffling, highminded, existential passage that I truly do not understand. What I do know is that any girl that age knows there are creeps in the world and wants her dad not to be one of them.
There are other WTF moments. Take this sentence, on labia: “For into these faintly urine-scented folds, wrinkled as elephant hide but infinitely softer, I often feel a wild longing to stick my tongue.” He expands on that, using the words “secretion” and “suckle”. Ugh, dude. Your child does not want to read this.
But this is not a book for his child. This is a book for Knausgaard. Such close and apparently honest selfinte-rrogation is the closest am an can get to preserving himself; he makes sure that his children know him and never forget him and that at any time some reader is seeing the world through his eyes.
It’s true there is something special about being let into such a private and primal interior chamber. But I’m glad my dad never wrote a book like this one.
Any pre-teen girl knows there are creeps in the world and wants her dad not to be one of them.