Alcohol and death in Knausgaard's My Struggle

Part two of Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Death in the Family (volume one of My Stuggle) jumps from where we left the narrative - KOK at about 16 and welcomes as a fellow-reveler by his dad and dad's girlfriend, Unni, in a house party shortly after the divorce, his feeling of estangement from his difficult father, puzzlement at his suddenly solicitous attitude, and discomfort at finding these adults gather socially at his generally lonely and isolated house. He'd matured - but into what? In part 2 we see him - as we did for a few passages in part one - as a contemporary, a novelist hard at work on his second novel, in Stockholm with 2nd wife, awaiting birth of their first child, full of anxiety and self-doubt, which leads to much highly intelligent commentary on the nature of art and writing: we don't write to create, he opines, we write to destroy. Yes that is true!: to bring back memories and to break them apart into nothing but language and thereby to free ourselves, if only momentarily. He hasn't yet quite found his vocation - the six-volume My Struggle is years in his future - and interestingly he suggests that he has no memories of his childhood and school days. We know this isn't true, having read the exquisitely detailed part 1 - and he begins to reflect back on the death of his father, which happened some 10 years previously I think?, and how this moved him to tears that surprised him, given his rage against his father. He describes the death, how he and his brother, Yngve, dealt with the funeral arrangements (an interesting comparison possibility here w/ volume 2 of the Patrick Melrose cycle?) - the most shocking part being the discovery of the conditions in which his father died: a house left entirely in ruins and shambles, filled with empty cans and liquor bottle, rotting and feces-stained clothing, the stench of urine everywhere - and their grandmother, in a stage of dementia, sitting in the midst of this, smoking. We see again the weight that alcohol carries in these novels: KOK seems perhaps to have moved beyond his dangerous propensity for binge drinking of his teens, but the alcohol has entirely destroyed his father - and we suspect that this may have been going on long before KOK became aware, drinking may have had something to do with his father's moodiness and the breakup of the marriage. Death in the novel: in his guiding light, Proust, the death of characters, notably the beloved grandmother, is sorrowful and deeply mourned, here it's bitter and agonizing and steeped in squalor.