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

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Thursday, November 15, 2018

Some ominous elements in Knausgaards My Struggle Book 6

Continuing with yesterday's post re some observations on Karl Ove Knausgaard's style: Aside from the attempt by his uncle to block publication of KOK's My Struggle Book 1, KOK has faced criticism across the first 5 volumes of his work because of his somewhat laughable attention to minute detail - not in the Proustian manner of dwelling on a moment or sensation and eliciting all of its evocations of feeling and memory - such moments are rare in KOK's work - but in recounting specific details of daily life that, seemingly, have no bearing on the overall theme of his work (his "struggle" to become a unique artist while - same time - also to be a person accepted by society and loved by others), such as what cereal he ate for breakfast on a given morning. IN Book 6, we begin to see the reason for this attention to detail: In this book, which begins with account of the publication of the first book! (the novel swallows its own tail), he emphasizes the need for veracity throughout the volumes; he is trying to tell his story w/ complete and total credibility - a defense of course against the "deniers," such as his uncle Gunnar. It's all an illusion - he could have made up his cereal brand of course, let alone creating vast stretches of dialog that he could not possibly recall verbatim - but the attention to detail is a shield, his way of saying that this work is as true to fact as one could make it - nothing omitted or dropped aside as irrelevant. I also begin to wonder - about 1/4 through book 6 - whether the excessive attention to his caring for his three young children (now we got not only what KOK had for breakfast but also what each of his kids had!) is setting him up for a fall. There are a few ominous tones and hints; is everything OK w/ his relationship w/ wife, Linda? He is extremely patient as she goes off on a jaunt w/ some friends leaving him with all the kid-duties, but there's a sense that he's just barely got it in control and that he might explode at any time; ditto for Linda - their phone conversations when she's away are so bland, so restricted - checking up on the chores and things - that I begin to wonder whether she's going to make a break for freedom or for a new relationship. The other cloud on the horizon, so to speak, is the fact that, as all readers of reviews know, he will devote several hundred pp later in the novel to a biographical sketch of Hitler. What's that all about? KOK has said some highly politically incorrect things about the immigrant population in Sweden, but that doesn't make him a national-socialist, at least I hope not. What's the fascination w/ Hitler, and how does he pivot the narrative to lead to that weird digression. I'm uneasy.

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