Marc's Reviews > My Struggle: Book 6

Re-edit of my review of 5 years ago
Again a very peculiar reading experience, this sixth and last installment of the “My Struggle”-series. In the first 400 pages of this book (a monster of 1081 pages), Knausgard really captivated me: only now did I see (or I think so) the meaning of his entire cycle. This part is about the period just before the publication of the first part of the series and the fear of the author for all kinds of juridical actions by the people that occur in the series (especially his uncle). That made me realise what Knausgard was aiming at all that time: to find and test what kind of a person he was, a result of that inner contradiction between an enormous inferiority complex and the ambition to become a great writer. The original thing is that Knausgard puts everything on the table, also the banal and trivial such as shopping or smoking a cigarette or playing with the children, in short, the "real" life. Unlike other great writers, with him that real life does not limit itself to profound introspections, musings or endless literary sophisticated descriptions: even the smallness of things had to be in it, and it is also there. In short: the 'whole man Karl Ove Knausgard' and his world.

But then suddenly, after 400 pages, the book turns into a series of essays: a particularly thorough analysis of a very hermetic poem by Paul Celan about the Holocaust, a personal assessment of how shocking that Holocaust was, a very long analysis of "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler and an analysis of the evil in the person of Anders Breivik, the extreme right-wing young man who in 2011 killed 77 people in Norway. As you read this, you are constantly wondering what these essays are doing in the otherwise very personal account of the almost banal life of an upcoming Norwegian writer. Automatically you start making connections (the authoritarian father of Hitler and of Knausgard for example), etc. Repeatedly, Knausgard himself gives the message that you should not confuse the young Hitler, no matter how eccentric, with the later Hitler, and that evil isn’t necessary there from a young age, not in Hitler, not in Breivik, and thus, and there we are – also not in the young Knausgard, an issue that has been discussed several times during the course of the cycle. Is that the key to read the whole work? Possibly.

Yet a warning: this essay part may formally stand like a pincer on a pig in this cycle, it really forms a coherent whole. Meandering from one angle to another it is clearly a reflection on two specific issues: first, about what the “I”, the “you”, the “we” and the "them” is, in particular in the ideology (Nazism) that has gone the furthest in the demarcation of those concepts, both in language and in practice; and secondly about the separate reality that it is the “now”, as the only real life. And thus Knausgard makes connections with his own writing project: that attempt to gauge what his own self is, whether there is real evil in him, how small or big, good or bad he really is. So in that sense there is absolutely a link with the rest of his cycle. And besides: these essays are not superficial musings, but profound philosophical, psychological, literary and historical reflections that are absolutely in-depth; they testify of an enormous erudition and a power to think things through into their concreteness, their authenticity, their uniqueness (just to follow Knausgards own jargon). Definitely a great, albeit sometimes very difficult read, though I suspect that Knausgard also included this essayistic part to show that he is not just the writer of the banal and the trivial, which he is sometimes is regarded as.

And then there is the last, relatively short part (250 pages) that initially returns to the banality of daily life, but in which ultimately the struggle of Knausgard's wife with her manic depression is discussed. The latter is quite hard and shows once again how difficult it is for someone with a very strongly developed inner self to confront the reality of the “now”. In Knausgard's terms it is the eternal struggle of the individual between the boundless and the bounded. I will come back to this in my global review of the My Struggle cycle (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Rating for this part: 3.5 stars