Knausgaard takes on new struggle
Mini-essays aim to describe Earth to author’s unborn child
Over the course of his massive autobiographical novel My Struggle — whose sixth and final volume won’t be published in English until next year — Karl Ove Knausgaard has tried to make sense of his life by bearing meticulous witness to it, stockpiling and scrutinizing his memories in hopes of gaining perspective on how they all add up.
In his latest book, though, he shifts the focus to the world around him. Written while awaiting the birth of his fourth child, Autumn — the first of a planned quartet based on the seasons — is intended as a random field guide to life on Earth for the newest addition to his family. It contains dozens of mini-essays on the different things his child will encounter. These include apples, wasps, plastic bags, the sun, loneliness, chewing gum, cars, lice, Van Gogh, Flaubert and various other features of the landscape, society and what goes in and what comes out of the body. It’s a diet plan version of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a solitary book that is ultimately about the need for others.
It is also a work consumed by the same question that haunts the author’s voluminous life story. “What makes life worth living?” he asks his prenatal correspondent. “No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: Whether it is good or bad makes no difference.” It’s up to Knausgaard to take up the task himself — to go back to the beginning, to break life down to its simplest parts.
For a writer, this poses an interesting challenge. At some level, the book is a series of writing exercises or prompts. Choose a word and see where it takes you, assume no one has ever written a definition for it, try seeing something for the first time. A mouth, for instance, “is made up of the lips, two relatively long and narrow pads which lie horizontally against each other on the forward-facing side of the head, in the lower part of the face, below the nose.”
Collectively, these ruminations disclose a larger vision, which is that we live in a bountiful world that nourishes life but is also indifferent to it, and where human beings — no less than lower forms of life — are ignorant of any environment but their own.
Knausgaard sounds this note whenever the subject of animals comes up. Bees think only of the hive, adders aren’t aware of sound, flies care only for flies, badgers stay close to the forest floor, and we can’t relate to jellyfish at all. But then, people are also remote, “familiar with and foreign to ourselves and the world we are a part of.”
Certainly, it’s true of him. He thinks of his late friendless father, ponders his limitations, considers how time is passing and who he has become: “a white middle-aged man with a frozen inner self.”