A brtually, cruellly honest novel: My Struggle

Karl Ove Knausgaard's series of novels, My Struggle, appears, from the first section of the first volume, A Death in the Family (not to be confused w/ James Agee's novel of same name) to be yet another male author Proust homage - in fact Knausgaard notes in one of the early passages that he has been not just reading Proust but completely absorbed in Proust: a man looks back on his life and tries to "recapture" his life in exquisite detail but not just as an act of recollection and memory but of bringing new life to the past by analysis, reflection, and transformation into present language. That said, the work is far darker in mood and more directly personal than Proust's, strongly influenced by the modern confessional mode and the memoir - in this case, almost painfully, obsessively honest. The novel begins darkly enough - this writer's Norwegian and, if the novel is to be trusted as factual to a degree, living in self-imposed exile in southern Sweden, so there's no doubt a trace of Bergman's dark spirit here and the pervasive Scandinavian angst - with a meditation on death: Knausgaard's thinking is odd and provocative, for example, he ponders why the dead are kept as close to the ground as possible (we cannot even imagine a funeral parlor at the top floor of a building) and why we conceal dead bodies from view, why we attend to them immediately - he imagines it might be fine to leave the body of a child struck by a bus by the side of the road, let the parents see the child as she looked at death. This is truly an astonishing statement and gives a window into the disturbances of his mind and to his unconventional style. As he goes to the past, he remembers one particular day when he told his father about something he'd seen on TV, and uses this is a vehicle to describe the tyrannical harshness of his schoolteacher father and the general absence of his mother. Then we jump to the present where he describes his family life - 2nd marriage, 3 young children - and again quite astonishingly describes off-handedly the horrible tantrums his children throw and the brutal and cruel behavior this provokes in him; he says he loves his children but loves his work more - his one goal in life is to write something great (he may have done so), yet he laments how writing has removed him from ordinary life: an anguish he shares w/ many great (and possibly not so great) artists, but expressed here more directly and unashamedly than I've ever seen - I can only imagine the horror his children will face on reading these words someday. But he doesn't (seem to) care. He is an amazingl daring writer - who else would even think of calling his work My Struggle (tr. Mein Kampf)