Reading Note:
More Viking
26 June 2015
It’s a good thing that I regard this Web site as a sketchpad, a place for first drafts. Otherwise, I’d feel compelled to subject yesterday’s entry, about Book 2 of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, to severe edits. Writing about a novel that I’m not even halfway through is perhaps not the brightest idea, and it turns out that I was surveying the book from a point whose significance I didn’t grasp, whether I ought to have done or not. I was wrong about one thing, a mistake that I might not have made (I’m not sure) if I hadn’t let so much time pass between reading Book 1 and Book 2. As to that, by the time I began reading My Struggle, I had heard the cries of many reviewers, summed up best by Zadie Smith, who felt like addicts in need of a fix while they waited for the translation of the next volume to appear. Now that Book 4 is out in paper, I don’t have to worry.
I didn’t foresee, yesterday, that the steppe of time to which Knausgaard had regressed and to which I had advanced was foundation of the book’s big love story, Knausgaard’s relationship with Linda, his wife and the mother of his children. (I was wrong when I wrote that the narrator was unaware of Linda’s existence when he made his sudden move to Stockholm. Quite wrong!) It is a love story, however, as told to a shrink, a romance without a romantic arc. Linda and Karl Ove have their ups and downs. They have great times (which for the most part the narrator leaves to vague generalizations) and bad times (fights are often described in blow-by-blow detail). I was keenly aware that, if My Struggle were a traditional fiction — a fiction designed to smooth out and make sense of the world — a lot of the couple’s squabbles would signal their relationship’s doom. Surely two people who feel so completely unsympathetic (however momentarily) ought not to be together! But My Struggle is a contemporary fiction: the author is allowed, and even encouraged, to incorporate as much actual experience as he can manage. Complicating the zigs and the zags are (a) Linda’s history of mood disorders and (b) Karl Ove’s pig-headed belief (of which he appears to be unaware) that his Norwegian family, left behind by him in Norway, deserves extra-special sweetness from Linda whenever they all get together.
Some part of Knausgaard’s success must owe to his frank and ultimately engaging — ultimate, not always in the moment — inquiry into the makeup of modern masculinity. It might even be argued that this is the subject of the struggle of the title. Knausgaard comes equipped with a lot of traditional masculine equipment, but most of it is the negative stuff, the clutch of inarticulate habits of mind that allow and encourage men to overlook, ignore, patronize, and just not pay attention to their immediate domestic surroundings. Men whose minds work this way, one has to conclude, would be perfectly happy to live in a large doghouse out in the back yard and have their clothes washed every six months. Like dogs with their doggy interests, these men content themselves with their manny interests, casually, always prepared to move on to the next thing. (They have commitment issues on a microscopic scale.) Knausgaard, as I say, appears to have grown up with a full complement of these “skills.” Unfortunately for him, and hence the struggle, he is also a curious man. He is — a reader. And not a reader about manny interests only, or even primarily. By the time Karl Ove reaches Stockholm, in his early thirties, he is carrying around inside him a sophisticated man of letters. This is a problem because Karl Ove himself mistrusts sophisticated behavior and has little sympathy with men who like letters. At the same time, he is terrified of being a closeted Marcel Proust. See it from Marcel’s point of view: imagine being trapped in the body (and the local enthusiasms) of Johnny Knoxville.
Particularly as the care-giving father of toddlers, Karl Ove discovers what it means to be a man whenever he feels that his manliness has been taken from him, as it is in a very funny set piece involving something called Rhythm Time. The first thing to be said about Rhythm Time is that there was nothing like it, and not just in Norway, when Karl Ove was growing up. Karl Ove’s parents never took him to the library for an organized playtime for small children that required mothers (and the occasional fathers) to get into the act. And if there had been such a thing, it would have been presided over by a middle-aged dragon or a sports coach, not a young woman whom Karl Ove calls “attractive” three times in a dozen lines. “She had a light, fresh, spring-like presence.”
What he had was the load of extra weight that he had put on, caring for children.
Away we go, then,” said the attractive woman, pressing the PLAY button. A folk tune poured forth into the room, and I began to follow the others, each step in time to the music. I held Vanja with a hand under each arm, so that she was dangling, close to my chest. Then what I had to do was stamp my foot, swing her around, after which it was back the other way. Lots of the others enjoyed this, there was laughter and even some squeals of delight. When this was over we had to dance alone with our child. I swayed from side to side with Vanja in my arms, thinking that this must be what hell was like, gentle and nice and full of mothers you didn’t know from Eve, with their babies. When this was finished there was a session with a large blue sail, which at first was supposed to be the sea, and we sang a song about waves and everyone swung the sail up and down, making waves, and then it was something the children had to crawl under until we suddenly raised it, this, too, to the accompaniment of our singing.
When at last she thanked us and said goodbye, I hurried out, dressed Vanja without meeting anyone’s eye, just staring down at the floor, while the voices, happier now than before they went in, buzzed around me. I put Vanja in the stroller, strapped her in, and pushed her out as fast as I could without drawing attention to myself. Outside on the street, I felt like shouting till my lungs burst and smashing something. But I had to make do with putting as many meters between me and this hall of shame in the shortest possible time. (78)
All I could think of, while the big sail was making waves, was Vikings. This is what the vikings have come to. You can see why Karl Ove wants to break something. Right in front of really attractive young woman, he was obliged to play the eunuch. Even I’m obliged to say: Rhythm Time needs a re-think. More viking.