San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The long goodbye
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s war against brevity has yielded some big, engrossing books about death, parenthood and artistic ambition. But in the final volume of his sweeping autobiographical novel, his long-windedness becomes hard to justify. At 1,100-plus pages — almost a third of which are devoted to a frustrating digression about Adolf Hitler — “My Struggle: Book Six” is much more self-indulgent, and a lot less skillfully constructed, than any of its predecessors.
It’s a disappointing misstep from a writer whose maximalist brand of storytelling can be deeply satisfying. In previous entries in this series, he wrote with clarity and insight about his divorce and remarriage, his creative breakthroughs and his father’s fatal self-destructiveness. Knausgaard recognized that his experiences weren’t uncommon. But he believed that if he told his story with as much specificity as possible, he might hit upon something special.
This begat an unusually expansive — and, for some readers, addictive — narrative voice. Knausgaard dealt with universal themes but rejected forced epiphanies and predictable character arcs. He transformed ordinary incidents — hunting down beer as a teen in his native Norway; being a stay-at-home dad and suffering through a child’s endless birthday party — into improbably absorbing miniepics.
About 500 pages apiece, the first five “My Struggle” books were long, though not ridiculously so. The series, translated into many languages, became an unlikely international hit. It’s been 2½ years since the penultimate book was published in the U.S., and many of us have keenly awaited the finale.
Now it’s here, and unfortunately, it resembles a bloated first draft. Unlike its relatively eventful predecessors, “Book Six” has just one significant development — a serious health scare for Knausgaard’s wife, Linda — and it doesn’t arrive until we’re past page 1,000. Though this is surely the series’ least engaging installment, many fans will be happy to have a fresh dose of Knausgaard’s idiosyncratic ruminations. They might feel less enthused when confronted with acres of dense prose about Hitler.
Die-hard Knausgaardians knew this moment was coming. Several years ago, reports from abroad alerted us that Hitler would be a big part of “Book Six.” But why is he in there at all? Why is an autobiographical novel by a Norwegian born in 1968 so concerned with the Nazi leader’s youth, military service, abortive art career and speaking style?
Well, Knausgaard’s narrative project involves examining his own actions and consciousness — his “struggle” — as closely as possible. And because he chose a title that evokes the most infamous text of the 20th century — “My Struggle” translates as “Mein Kampf ” — Knausgaard feels compelled “to write a few pages about Hitler’s book.” He says this on page 492 and finishes with the Nazis in the mid-800s. Maybe “a few” means something different in Norwegian.
Knausgaard is particularly interested in the collective mind-set that elevated Hitler to power in the 1930s, and he’s reluctant to criticize the era’s average German citizen. He says that you or I would’ve been just as susceptible to Third Reich propaganda: “We know, every one of us knows, even though we might not acknowledge it, that we ourselves, had we been part of that time and place and not of this, would in all probability have marched beneath the banners of Nazism.”
This reads like the work of a writer who’s getting paid by the clause. It’s also one of several instances in which Knausgaard’s arguments are undermined by his wordiness and imprecision. “Every one of us”? “We ourselves”? As hypotheses go, this one’s broad to the point of meaninglessness. A few years ago, in another book, Knausgaard said writers should get “as close as you can to where all the broad sweeps, all the higher-level generalizations, no longer apply and are nowhere apparent.” (“Home and Away”) But what is his everybody’s-a-potential-Nazi theory if not a high-altitude generalization?
Though Knausgaard makes some valid points — Hitler, he says, realized “that emotions are always stronger than arguments” — they’re never quite original. Elsewhere in this section, Knausgaard writes some terrible sentences — “The misery into which he gradually sank was indeed misery,” he says of Hitler’s early 20s — and, as he always does, brings the whole thing back to himself: “Hitler’s youth resembles my own ... his desperate desire to be someone, to rise above the self.” It’s a prolonged, exasperating tangent.
He’s on steadier footing when focusing on domestic concerns. But compared with his earlier books, there’s not often a whole lot at stake. Gone is the sorrow that haunted his writing about his father’s alcohol-related death. Instead, Knausgaard spends a lot of this book avoiding an uncle who’s angry about the series’ candid depiction of their family. Later, he goes on about his press coverage after “Book One” and the time crunch he faced while completing “Four,” “Five” and “Six.”
The one major development in the Knausgaard household arrives in the final pages. When his wife falls into a deep depression, he cares for their children and takes her to a psychologist. He feels guilty for writing about her bipolar disorder earlier in the series and concedes that he’s no dream husband.
Linda complains “that I don’t see her,” Knausgaard writes. “This is not quite true, I do see her, the problem is that I see her more or less in the way you see a room you know well; everything is there, the lamp and the carpet and the bookcase, the sofa and the window and the floor, but … no mark is left on your mind.” Eventually, he recognizes his selfishness: “Her struggle had been very different from mine; hers had been life or death.”
Knausgaard tells us that he aims to “describe the world as it is, as opposed to the world” we’d like it to be. The last entry of “My Struggle” is as authentic as any of those that came before it, just not in the way he intended: It’s a self-portrait of a man who wrote five superb books before losing control of a sixth.
Kevin Canfield has written for Bookforum, Film Comment and other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com.