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My Struggle Volume 2 (2000)

by Karl Ove Knausgård(Favorite Author)

4.35 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

series

Min kamp

review 1: I liked this a bit better than the first volume, although it is less intense and perhaps less memorable. It is certainly less difficult to read, I imagine, for his friends and family. He does not really explain his apparently sudden decision to leave his first wife and country and move to Sweden with no particular plans, or, indeed, anywhere to live. Still not sure what I think about the whole project (in terms of privacy, the line between fiction and autobiography, &c.) but it is compelling even when nothing much is happening. Oh, and I do sympathise with his mixed feelings about being at home with small children (wanting to do it but also bored and frustrated and feeling that it gets in the way of the creative process). (I wonder why the translator didn't use "Rhyme time... more" for the library parent-and-baby sessions with guitar?)
review 2: I gave the first volume of Knausgaard’s memoir/novel 2 stars and wrote a fairly scathing review. I don’t usually write reviews for books I rate below three stars because critiquing anything these days makes you a target, and I don’t use this site for anything other than calm, sedate conversation about literature. However, I felt I should review the first volume because it provoked such a very strong response in me, more so than most books I don’t particularly like. Something was going on in this book that touched a nerve. I found the craftsmanship and structure quite mediocre. You could sense the hurried composition on the page, the redacted simplicity. And what was worse, this scribbled monotone quality seemed to have been intentionally done. Meaning it had been planned!!! A few other things irked me as well. For starters, there’s not one funny thing in the whole novel. Why is this significant? Well, these novels are supposed to be about ordinary life. In my life, I laugh all the time. I see humour as a sign of creativity. So what am I supposed to do about a book that isn’t ever funny and purports to recreate ordinary, every-day experience? Laugh, I guess. The other thing is the essayist asides which pop up interminably in the text. In the second volume, these asides get a whole lot more interesting, but you still have to wonder what their purpose is. Think about it: if you’re writing literature, you don’t come right out and say, ‘Hey, I think the world’s really sucks right now because I have inherited this puritan ascetic consciousness from my forefathers which makes everything seem like crap, and all my friends get down on me for it, but hey I’m a famous writer, I love my family, and I’m not my dad, but still, what’s the point…?’ Well, the point is to create an artful tapestry which cries out for the reader's own intelligence and imagination to intervene. But this gets back to the hurried composition and style of Knausgaard’s memoir/novel. When you’re writing about your life as you would in a blog (yes, I’m bringing back this analogy!) the temptation to get it all down is right there in front of you. The harder work of re-imagining what has happened to you and picking out from all the minutiae what is striking and can stand for more than what its mere parts represent—that’s when you’re stepping out onto the terrain of literature. These are my central gripes about what Knausgaard is doing. It affects how one evaluates the work as a whole because the polemical aspects dominate over most of the narration, which must needs polarize readers: either you really dig what he’s saying or you think he’s a spoiled crybaby. That’s distracting and a poorer art in my opinion.And I don’t think Knausgaard would necessarily disagree with me. This book (vol. 2) is all about personal morality, about integrity, about living up to an ideal. It’s also about neuroses and artistic compulsion, and how one man’s compulsive personality becomes exemplified in the very process of writing about that neurosis. This is where I find the most strength in his work (the second volume at least): in that it carefully depicts the internal master-slave dialectic of modern consciousness: the egotistical struggle to be independent while living in a hyper-critical, herdminded world towards which one can only feel absurd insecurity and doubt. Knausgaard would like to be Faust (ie a tragic hero) but simply knows better than to sign away his soul. Everything that is created today is doomed to become mediocre: he says this and his writing style, his essayist asides—they all seem to say: I can’t completely give in so I will forge the best compromise I can between the two gods warring in my skull: the forces of high and low culture, the forces of history and the forces of the present. In this respect, his discussions with his friends, in particular with Geir, are all dialectical, all pared down to reflect active self-understanding. Only Knausgaard does not ever change, not really. He gets married to the love of his life, and has his first child, but you never feel that he has really developed or changed. He just distracts himself for a spell and moves away from his neurotic need to write—of course, until the urge to write finally compels him to drop everything and shut himself in a room and write. The reason why these books are so infectious to read is because they demonstrate the compromised, begrudged existence modernity has made endemic. We’re told to achieve great things, but what is considered great in the popular domain is almost always second-rate: so what are we supposed to do with our instinct for the good, for greatness, for self-mastery? You can either grow forgetful of it through distraction or work ceaselessly to avoid its harassing sting. In the interim, the best that can be hoped for is that the sublime peeps through on occasion to remind us of greater possibilities. That seems to be the message Knausgaard has for us. I am now more interested to read the remaining volumes of this work, just to see whether he does indeed ever change. less

Download links for: My Struggle Volume 2

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