In six volumes about himself and his loved ones, “My Struggle” by Karl Ove Knausgård has become the longest novel in Norwegian history. Read on and learn more about the struggle of a Norwegian writer.
In six volumes of books published in English, Karl Ove Knausgård talks candidly about laying himself and his family bare on the page, and his interest in black metal and transhumanism.
In Norway, the author has become a literary phenomenon with the publication of his autobiographical novel “Min Kamp (My Struggle)“. Published in six volumes in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, it has been an astounding success, with more than half a million copies of one of the titles sold in Norway, which means, one book for every nine adult inhabitants. Since then, the series has been available in 35 languages. The most demanding critics do not shy away from comparisons with Proust, Joyce or Virginia Woolf.
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“The story is written in a closed room and that is really the only place where what is said can be said. I was like an animal caught in floodlights,” the most famous Norwegian writer since Henrik Ibsen wrote after the books were published.
Syvert is the novel’s narrator for 400 pages. The book is fully Knausgaardian: here are family struggles, difficulties with girls, and extensive digressions into football and the frying of fish. But there’s something else. Syvert dreams of his father, killed in a car crash nine years ago – a dream that provokes a conversation with his mother. This, in turn, leads to some letters from a woman his father had been in love with before he died, and the revelation that he had a daughter with her: Alevtina, who narrates most of the book’s second half.
In English, My Struggle is more than 3600 pages or as audio-book version, superbly interpreted by Edoardo Ballerini, more than 133 hours of listening. The “My Struggle” books have made Karl Ove Knausgård an international star. He has received awards all over the world. He is interviewed by the biggest newspapers and magazines and has even started his own publishing house (Pelikanen).
But, in fact, he didn’t plan to write “My Struggle”. But when he was studying in Bergen in the 90s, there were some devil worshippers, black-metal musicians, more extreme than punk. Some were incredibly destructive. They burned churches, there were murders. “They were in the same city as me, the same age as me, but I didn’t really pay attention. Later, I started to get interested in the music and in the whole attitude, because in Norway, when I was growing up, there was nothing going on. There was only one TV channel. It’s a kind and gentle society, and then you have these violent outbursts, and I wondered where it came from. I thought that one day I’d like to write about it”.
The radical thing about “Min Kamp” is that Knausgård tells his whole life story, at length, with details that at first sight seem trivial and banal. How he makes a cup of coffee or tea, goes out to smoke a cigarette on the balcony of his apartment and watches the neighbors, has to juggle three children and a stroller to get them to the nursery without having a nervous breakdown (and every now and then he does). When and how he meets, falls in love with, but also quarrels with Linda, his Swedish second wife (“A Man in Love”, volume 2).
Karl Ove was very nervous before the revelations in “My Struggle.” Has that changed since then? Has he gotten thicker-skinned?
“Yes,” he answers, adding that he has also accepted the consequences. However, he doesn’t read reviews of himself.
The Struggle of a Norwegian Writer, written by Tor Kjolberg
Feature image (on top): Karl Ove Knausgård, in cover detail of “My Struggle: Book 1” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)