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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Saturday, November 24, 2018

Passing judgment on Book 6 of My Struggle

I'm nearing the end of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle - 90% through Book 6 - and it's maybe a tad too early to pass judgement but I have to say that the final book is a let-down, and I say that as a huge fan of Books 1 through 5. One way to make this assessment is to think about each book as a novel in its own right (as you can, say, with Search for Lost Time, Dance to the Music of Time, the Patrick Melrose novels) and in fact each can stand alone as terrific autofiction or semi-autobiographical novels; and in fact you could probably read them in any order, as KOK does not tell his story in straight chronological sequences. That said, the books increase in power and scope if we read them all, and in sequence, as the books relate to each other and the later volumes build on and expand themes (and characters) that appeared in the earlier works - and all go toward the literary delineation of the author. But book six? In my view there is no way it can stand alone, although some of its passages would read well out of context; but the entire vision of the novel concerns the publication of the 1st volumes - particularly volume 1- and their effect on the life of the author, who finds himself the most awkward and self-conscious literary celebrity ever and who also finds that the publication of these highly personal novels threatens (and maybe wrecks?) his marriage. It's really a coda to the first five books, and would have been more powerful had he set aside the long middle section on Hitler and on his thoughts on various writers. I come away, or will soon, with great respect for KOK and with sympathy as well. He adopted a stance at the outset of this massive project - to tell his life story as true to the facts as he can manage - and finds that various social pressures forced him not only to change names and topical details so as to protect the privacy of those depicted (and to avoid threatened law suits) but also to eradicate various episodes and passages that would be too controversial or embarrassing - not to him, the impervious one, but to others - and his eradications and altering of facts leads him to think some of the books are "failures." What a strange attitude - he's writing a novel, not a memoir, but choice, and by presenting the work as fiction he has bought himself right to make whatever changes and deletions, or inventions for that matter, as he would like. Anyway, my view as I near the horizon is that My Struggle remains a fantastic and engrossing work of fiction that would have been stronger in its conclusion if the final volume were a much briefer coda on the publication and reception of the first volumes and the effect on KOK's life.

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