A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009)
I’ve been really blindsided by how strong a reaction I had to A Death in the Family.
There’s a lot of fiction, Nabokov obviously, but also the Borges or Kafka or lots of other stuff, where I can just look at it and go “fair enough, I couldn’t do that, that’s incredible”.
But the Knausgaard is just thoroughgoingly ordinary – pages of unflashy prose from a pretty nice Norwegian man describing his sometimes comfortable, sometimes troubled childhood and his difficult relationship with his father and alcohol in the most straightforward, least romantic way he can. One reviewer described him as a “chatterbox” – the whole book is just digression after digression, all the kids at his school, what dinner tasted like when he was 8 years old. Someone else said “it’s boring, but I can’t stop reading it”.
I have literally been dreaming about the life of Karl Ove for the last week.
But I have literally been dreaming about the life of Karl Ove for the last week. It’s a real demonstration of a novel as an empathy machine. I’m having an interesting time working out quite what drew me to the it so much.
There’s definitely the Nabokov-like aim of trying to crystallize precisely what an experience was like. They both have the obsession with detail, strangeness and immediacy of experience and sense of place. For Nabokov, this is all tied up with his overarching project of seeing artistry as a guiding force in the world, of lost Russia and assassinated father, his humanism, and of life as a laugh and puzzle and play. I don’t think Karl Ove is reaching for the same things – he wants authenticity and to explode the privacy (or repression) that has otherwise been the story of his life.
But at times – they cash out in a really similar way. Knausgaard tells us he has a bad memory – then can describe the way the light fell through the window and the special way he ate the sandwiches his father prepared for him 25 years ago. He’s a man who tells us he has never initiated a conversation with a stranger, chattering affably away to us with endless digressions about everyone he’s every met.
If Death in the Family was a Nabokov novel, we might suspect Karl Ove of being an invented character (and an unreliable narrator). But even if he’s misremembering some details, I think he really is trying his best for accuracy and this is the unvarnished truth (might be why he got into so much trouble with his family…)
So in some ways I actually liked it even more when it was more boring. His life is kind of unremarkable, and it’s not like Southern Norway in the 90s is that exotic (when he describes listening to Massive Attack, sneaking around with beer and failing to get into parties he might as well have been describing growing up in Devon in the 2000s). I really like how fine-drawn he makes all the banal details. It’s like: they really were that important, really, all of them.
So maybe it’s just our similarities? We definitely share a (perhaps sentimental) fixation on the atmosphere of places, being a bit haunted by the memories of what a place was like. I can definitely relate to the feeling of being overburdened with sensory memories, of just sitting in a reverie working through them.
Style and signature
I’ve probably given the impression that the writing in A Death is always very plain, short sentences, not much figurative language, nothing flashy – but this isn’t quite right. When he’s recalling something that was intense at the time, you know, he can really bring it:
It is coming … it is coming … If you are sixteen years old all of this makes an impression, all of this leaves its mark, for this is the first spring you know is spring, with all your sense you know this is spring, and it is the last, for all springs pale in comparison with your first. If, moreover, you are in love, well then … then it is merely a question of holding on. Holding on to all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything. I walked home from school, I noticed a snowdrift that had melted over the tarmac, it was was as if it had been stabbed in the heart … I turned my head to the sky, it was so beautiful. I walked through the residential area, a rain shower burst, tears filled my eyes.
(those ellipses are in the original)
He’s in love with Hanne, with which he has a rather sweet platonic friendship:
Hanne was going to sing in a church that evening … her boyfriend would be there, so I didn’t make my presence know, but when I saw her standing there, so beautiful and pure, she was mine, no one else’s feelings could hold a candle to those I cherished. Outside the tarmac was covered with grime … she sang, I was happy. One the way home I jumped off at the bus station and walked the last part through town, although that did nothing to diminish my restlessness, my feelings were so varied and intense I couldn’t really deal with them. After arriving home I lay on my bed and cried. There was no despair in the the tears, no sorrow, no anger, only happiness.
But no luck for teenage Karl Ove:
The next day we were alone in the classroom. I told her that her singing had been fantastic, she was fantastic. She lit up as she stood packing her satchel. Then Nils came in. I felt ill at ease … he always laughed a lot, took the mickey out of everyone … now he started talking to Hanne. It was as if he was circling her … I would not have expected anything else of him, that was not what upset me, it was the way Hanne reacted. She didn’t reject him, laugh off his advances. Even though I was there she … laughed with him, met his gaze. [Nils] fired a disarming remark, raised a hand in salute to me and was gone. Wild with jealousy, I looked at Hanne, she had gone back to packing her satchel, though not as if nothing had happened.
What was it I had witnessed? … I was crushed. I, with all the notes I had sent her, all my simple hopes and childish desires, I was nothing, a shout in the playground, a rock in scree, the hooting of a car horn.
A rock in scree? Oh man – that’s real artistry, that’s not something you hit upon by accident.
But wait – is a rock in scree actually in the original Norwegian? Or could it be a stock Norwegian phrase? These intriguing possibilities were suggested to me, and I wanted to investigate.
Through some, er, non-standard use of Google books I managed to find the original passage in Norwegian. The relevant bit reads:
Jeg med aller sedler til hende, med alle mine diskussioner med hende, med alle mine simple forhåbninger og barnlige lyster, jeg var ingen, et råb i en skolegård, en sten i et dige, et dyt fra en bil.
which Google translate renders as:
I with all notes for her, with all my discussions with her, with all my simple hopes and childish desires, I was no one, a shout in a schoolyard, a stone in a dike, a jerk [?] from a car.
The translation is extremely literal until it isn’t! “Dige” seems to mean “ditch” or “dike” – and as far as I can see, this isn’t a common expression or stock phrase. But it is a fair bit different from “scree”! I wonder if the translator’s taken a liberty here?