Trigger Warning
My Struggle
I fell under the spell of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard upon reading the first pages of the first volume of his six-part, 3,600-page ejaculation of auto-fiction named after the 20th century’s most reviled book, My Struggle. Even before that, when I came across the book in a Brooklyn bookstore in 2015, I experienced a strange attraction. Displayed along a table of inviting, enticing covers, there was Knausgaard staring at me with dark eyes and flowing Nordic dark hair, in a dark shirt, challenging me to pick up a copy. To handle his pain. To immerse myself in his struggle.
Knausgaard wastes no time establishing one of his trademarks: telling you one thing, then showing you otherwise. In the first line of My Struggle, he tells us, For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.
If only the life of the heart were so simple.
On the second page, another theme of his writing is introduced. The difference between being outside and inside of something. The moment life departs the body, it belongs to death.
The rest of the book, and the series, proceeds in the minutest of detail through the different stages of Knausgaard’s life, from the tragic death of his alcoholic father to the crude way he lost his virginity to the unhinged way he wooed his future wife; from his suburban childhood to the year he spent teaching in northern Norway to his sudden move to Sweden. By so intimately describing his passage through the world, he creates a mirror in which the reader is invited to revisit his or her own journey. I found the experience mesmeric and at times revelatory. There is nothing so notable about Knausgaard’s life that it demands Proustian consideration, and yet, the undertaking is worthwhile. What was so special about Proust’s life after all?
The only conclusion is that every life is worthy of such scrutiny; if only we could all write in the compelling, transfixing way that the Norwegian does. If only we were all capable of such introspection. At one point, Knausgaard laments his poor memory shortly before showing us otherwise. Going step-by-step through Knausgaard’s life invoked in me a childlike curiosity about my life — its inner and outer contours — that had been semi-dormant for years. An experience not unlike taking mushrooms. Perhaps most of all, My Struggle is a statement about what literature is capable of. Alongside Lonesome Dove and Gone with the Wind, it was my best (long) reading experience of the last decade.
Morning Star
So it was with great eagerness that I embarked on Knausgaard’s new Morning Star series, for which the third installment, The Third Realm, came out in English translation in the fall of 2024. Returning to his roots as a novelist, the series centers around the emergence of a bright star of undefinable origin in the sky. No one can explain where it came from, although everyone assumes there’s a good explanation for it. Told through multiple perspectives, Knausgaard demonstrates his ability to get out of his own head and into a variety of other heads, ranging from a matrimonially frustrated pastor to a bipolar artist to a famous architect to an extremely average funeral home director. He also continues to display his knack for writing long books, with each clocking in at well over 500 pages. I read a quote from him somewhere saying he can’t fast-forward through the mundane details of life — the meals, and conflicting thoughts, and wrong turns — just to arrive at the next scene. With Knausgaard it really is about the journey.
In the My Struggle series, much of the turmoil came from within Knausgaard. He struggled mightily to rise to meet the expectations he put on himself. This anguish emerges from him raw, as if he’s cut himself open and poured it onto the page. In the Morning Star series, the appearance of the astrological phenomenon is what creates tension, which in moments can have a Stephen King-like ominousness but overall is less riven with emotion.
The third book picks up about where the first book left off, the bright star settling into the sky and tinting everything with an eerie twilight glow. The second book, The Wolves of Eternity, the longest of the three, acts as a sort of prequel and, like the final installments of My Struggle, tests even the most devoted reader’s patience for digression. My Struggle: Book Six spends some 400 pages on Hitler’s metamorphosis from aspiring artist to a power-hungry, blood-thirsty despot. The Wolves of Eternity sets aside long passages for the investigation of biological phenomena, like how trees communicate with each other.
In The Third Realm, the funeral home director, named Syvert, hasn’t had any new business in a couple days. Nobody dying in his small town for a whole day is unusual, and when he looks into it, nobody in the entire country appears to have died since the Morning Star appeared. Syvert is a simple man, and he refuses to be drawn into any frightening implications. Instead, he stubbornly maintains that it must be a coincidence.
Meanwhile, there’s been a brutal murder of a death metal band in the woods, three of the four band members shorn of their skin and left on display like some ritualistic killing. Knausgaard follows a detective on the case but seems more focused on the affair he’s having than the clues to the murder. This isn’t because Knausgaard can’t write a police procedural, although at times one wonders, but because he’s engaged in a messier endeavor that resists elegant solutions. He is showing us how much we still don’t understand about the world. He is showing us how little we know, existentially, and how what we do know is based on a sort of faith. Even solving the murder wouldn’t make us any more aware.
One of the characters, a neurologist called in to the hospital to examine a man who should’ve died from his injuries but hasn’t, is writing a book about the nature of consciousness. When the doctor returns from the hospital to his hotel, he is restless. He visits a hotel room down the hall that he thinks is occupied by a prostitute. Instead, he finds a purveyor of mystical gems. He buys a gem and returns to his room somewhat ashamed and baffled, for his feeble pass at the woman was rejected.
Shortly thereafter, the doctor’s manuscript is excerpted in the text:
“If the consciousness somehow consists in the very experience of something, then the self is that which claims ownership of the experience. This exists, says the conscious mind. This is mine, says the self, and it too exists…The self conquers the inner mind, retaining its grip by laying down memories, much as an animal retains a grip on its territory by laying down markers in the form of its sprayed urine…
…Religious ecstasy is basically about one thing only, which is the dissolving of the self’s sense of ownership. What fills the conscious mind in that instance is a powerful sense of belonging not to the individual self but to the universal everything. Music too, and literature, are all about the dissolving of this same ownership. But there, in the realm of the unpossessed we are no one, merely a locus through which impressions pass, as a river runs through a plain, or cars will proceed along a motorway.”
In My Struggle, Knausgaard probed his consciousness to the extremes of self-definition, laying down memory after memory. In The Morning Star, he shifts perspective, exploring the boundary where the self ends and the unpossessed and unpossessable begins.