"A Death in the Family" by Karl Ove Knausgaard

This is the first volume of a six volume autobiography? memoir? fictionalised Life? entitled Min Kamp, My Struggle.

I read it just after my own dad had died and before his funeral. So, given its subject matter, it was a strange experience.

It is amazing. After a page long paragraph in which he describes the scientific process of dying, Karl Ove (never Karl!) tells us about incidents in his life as a boy, and the relationship he had with his father, in incredible detail. This is a documentary look at life and every wrinkle is recorded (including the shape of his penis). I have not yet read A Las Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust but I believe it is equally detailed; certainly Karl Ove's obsession for chronicling the tiniest of things makes James Joyce's Ulysses seem like a crayoned drawing next to an etching. And Knausgaard's book is, or at least purports to be, utterly and starkly factual.

This of course makes the book difficult to read. It is exhaustive and exhausting. This isn't helped by some very long paragraphs. And of course it also means that Karl Ove has to select one or two incidents in his growing up on which he will report:

• Aged eight he thinks he sees a face in the water on the television news report about a drowning; he rushes to tell his father (whom he fears) about it and that night he has to secretly creep into the lounge where his parents are watching the news to see if they will see the face.
• As a young teenager he lives in a flat on town on his own, shopping, cooking and caring for himself, with occasional visits from and to parents and grandparents. This section of the book dealt with his early attempts at making out with girls, an abortive career as Norway's worst rock group, and a hilarious attempt to celebrate New Year at a 'meaningful' party with beer. This last episode acts as an interesting counterpoint to the end of the book; it also reveals that Karl Ove was rather selective in his friends and very concerned with his street cred status (not an unusual feature of adolescence); this also tells us that Knausgaard is prepared to reveal his own personality warts and all (or is this just a smoke screen?). There is a wonderful moment when he is with Hanne, a girl who is friends with him and nothing more (though he wishes she was; unrequited love!), and watches her as a bad boy, comes into the room: "Even though I was there she opened herself to him. Laughed with him, met his gaze, even parted her knees at the desk where she was sitting, when he went right up to her. It was as if he had cast a spell over her." (p 186)
• Then he is an adult, his father is dead and he goes to the house with his brother to take care of the funeral. His father was living with his grandmother, they were getting drunk every night and the house is full of bottles and filth, there is urine and faeces all over the place and some of the clothing is rotting. This is a nightmare image and Karl Ove and Yngve his brother set to work to clean. And although Karl Ove hated his father ("dad had got what was coming to him, it was good that he was dead, anything in me that said otherwise was lying." (p 265)) he is the one who repeatedly spontaneously bursts into tears.

There are other selected moments which are told more briefly.The contrast between the long blanks in between the episodes selected and the immense detail of the description of those episodes is huge and left many unanswered questions. This is, presumably, deliberate. It is as if Knausgaard is saying that a relationship (between himself and his father in this case) can be encapsulated and explained in a few well-chosen examples. Or perhaps he is saying that we are creatures with a very very selective attention span and we can only remember a very limited part of life and that it is this inadequacy that gives rise to the immense mysteries of our lives.

Selected quotes:

• "Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides." (p 32)
• "Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed heather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue waters of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids and bathing bodies." (p 183)
• "Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?" (p 261)
• "he would have to plough his own furrow, live his own life, die his own death" (p 268)
• "Had I ever initiated a conversation with a stranger?
• No, never.
• And there was no evidence to suggest I ever would." (p 278)
• "Feelings are like water, they always adapt to their surroundings." (p 288)
• "he could be more malicious to me than anyone else" (p 358)
• "This is what girls I have tried my luck with have seen in my eyes. Too much desire, too little hope." (p 365)
• "so young and no cleverer than three sparrows" (p 376)
• "He no longer poached air, because that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world." (p 389) 
• "Becoming smaller and smaller as far as the eye could see. But what happened behind what the eye could see? Did the images carry on getting smaller and smaller?" (p 401)
• "She was like a vampire that had finally got a taste of blood ... life was returning to her, filling her limb by limb." (p 435)

This is an astonishing book. It is so truthful and so meticulous that I am not sure that I know what to make of it.

My reading group considered the book on 14th March 2017. Three of us enjoyed it (though only one was looking forward to reading further volumes on the series; the other two found it hard going but appreciated the craft); one absolutely hated it. If we reached any sort of insight about this book it was that Knausgaard tends (and we were divided as to whether this was a deliberate technique or revealed Knausgaard's lack of emotional intellignece) to write about what happened rather than speculating on why it happened. For example, there was no attempt to explain why Knausgaard could simultaneously be glad that his father had died and yet burst into spontaneous bouts of weeping. Nor did we understand why his father aroused such feelings of animosity in Knausgaard; what precisely did the man do that was wrong? Nor did we understand his affection for a mother who appears more or less completely absent from his life. This then led to the thought that perhaps the book is more revealing in the things it does not say than in the things it did.

It was also interesting that we liked different parts of the book. I had most enjoyed the funny quirkinesses of Knausgaard's adolescence, the very part that the reader who most liked the book liked least.

One thing we could conclude from our long, at times intense, discussion: we had all been deeply impressed by the characters in the book whether we liked them or not.

March 2017, 490 pages

Selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best books since Time began (1923).

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog include:

• Memoir of the Bobotes: by Joyce Cary: a brilliantly written memoir of the author's time as a medical officer during the Balkan Wars (pre World War I): the writer became a novelist and his craft shows; full of humour and keen observation
• My Family and Other Animals (and the sequels) by Gerald Durrell: Beautiful descriptions and hilarious accounts of an eccentric family living on the Greek Island of Corfu between WWI and WWII
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: a well-written, frequently humourous account of Pacific paradise
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: the account of three years spent on the remote and at the time unspoilt Greek island of Symi: well-written, charming and amusing
• Surprised by Joy by C S Lewis: an account of the famous author's life, mostly from the perspective of his Christianity: beautifully written
• A Death in the Family by Karl-Ove Knausgard: the first volume of a series in which the author, in the guise of writing novels, portrays real people with real names: the writing is brilliant
• Beautiful People by Simon Doonan: The story of a young gay man: well-written with moments of marvellous humour
• Teacher Man by Frank McCourt: the third volume in the series that started with Angela's Ashes
• The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice by Polly Coles: a reasonably well-written account of a year spent living in Venice
• A Detail on the Burma Front by Winifred Beaumont: a nurse's story from one of the theatres of World War II: more compassion and humour: reasonably well-written
• Whatever Happened to Margo: Margaret Durrell's account of running a boarding house in Bournemouth: sometimes muddled but often funny
• Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two by Maggie Smith-Bendell: an interesting and reasonably well-written account of a Romani Gypsy childhood
• Not for the faint-hearted by John Stevens: the autobiography of a senior police officer; probably best for those most interested in this sort of story
• Forty Years Catching Smugglers by Malcolm Nelson: the memoirs of a senior customs officer; probably best for those most interested in this sort of story

"Death, desire and loss in Western culture" by Jonathan Dollimore

Dollimore's thesis is that, in western culture (and beyond?) eroticism is fundamentally bound up with the death wish. His starting point is a novel about a gay man who enjoys unsafe sex, contracts HIV, and then deliberately spreads it. Homosexuality, says Dollimore "is seen as death-driven, death-desiring and thereby death-dealing." (p xi). But this is not a modern phenomenon; for Dollimore it is intrinsic to western culture.

Western culture has always thrived on dualities and one of the most significant is that between "the world of appearances, the domain of unreality, deception, loss, transience and death" and "an ultimate, changeless reality ... said to be the source of the absolute, as distinct from relative, truth, and even of eternal life." (p xiii) eg the world of the Platonic ideal. Dollimore points out that Socrates committed suicide; later on he contracts the artistic Platonic love which the protagonist of Death and Venice believes in to the catastrophe when he falls in love with the smile of a boy.

He makes the point that carpe diem is over-optimistic since "time and change, driving us towards a horizon of oblivion, make it hard to seize anything, let alone the day." [My favourite version of carpe diem appeared as the name of a bar in Sorrento; presumably they believed that alcoholic stupor improves productivity.]


Greek love
"Male sexuality is especially and inherently insecure, always haunted by the prospect of failure and humiliation ('a flop is a flop'), and even when apparently successful it is inherently mutable, going from erection through orgasm to detumescence" (p xxv)

"The Greeks revered youthful beauty" (p 16) and mourned its passing even more than they mourned death: "To die young in battle weas not only to be immortalized as a hero, it was also to escape the decline and decay of old age." (pp 17 - 17)

"The Sirens are said to sing from within a flowering meadow [a Greek word also used for female genitalia]" (p 18) and seduce sailors with the "mortal (sexual?) desire for immortality. But these mouldering remains tell us that this overwhelming desire leads not to an exalted, immortalizing death ... but precisely to a death of the kind which the Greeks feared most: without funeral. without tomb, and rotting anonymously on the shore, indistinguishable from the other corpses in the pile." (p 19)

"For Lucretius ... sexual desire in the male is compared to dying, or at least injury, and warfare ... blood spurts out towards the source of the blow, and the enemy who delivered it, if he is fighting at close quarters, is bespattered by the crimson stream" (p 22)

The Bible is an early source of the idea that "death and loss simultaneously drive and frustrate desire" (p xix) since Adam and Eve's discovery of sex led directly to the loss of Eden and their condemnation to death. Ecclesiastes (which derives from "the so-called wisdom movement of the Near East; p 39) goes on about vanity which comes from the Hebrew word for "vapour - that which is unsubstantial, momentary and profitless, fleeting as a breath, and amounting to nothing." (p 36) Human life is like a shadow.  "It is as if an inscrutable God has deliberately created a universe devoid of himself; one in which there is no discernible moral law, and where eternity is ultimately the darkness of death and, more immediately, the permanent, restless yet monotonous movement of inanimate nature, whose immense scale only emphasises the brevity and insubstantiality of human life" (p 39)

Shakespeare
Dollimore asks whether Romeo had a death wish; certainly in Romeo and Juliet "an adult fantasy about adolescent desire ... adolescent sexuality contains a powerful erotic charge for the adult, regardless of sexual orientation" (p 109)the star-crossed lovers mingle sex with death. And Shakespeare makes Hamlet suggest that death is a "'consummation' ... the word is precisely significant, meaning both satisfying climax and being consumed or vanished into nothing" (p xxi). And in Measure for Measure Claudio is condemned to death for promiscuity.

More recently, Bataille said that "Eroticism is inseparable from repugnance ... this is not simply danger ... excessive horror paralyses desire ... What most repulses us is putrefaction" (p 253); "It is the fragrance of death which gives sexuality all its power." (p 254)

His analysis of the homoerotic Death in Venice is excellent: Thomas Mann the author had in later years become more and more aware of his attraction to male beauty, including his own son in swimming trunks. Aschenbach is Mann, trying to rationalize his passion in terms "by comparing the latter's physical beauty with his own art. Nature, like the artist, works with discipline and precision to create perfect form, and the boy's beauty is the physical counterpart of the spiritual beauty which is the artist's province. In pursuit of this idea, Aschenbach invokes its Platonic origins." (p 281) But the plague raging in Venice "works as a metaphor for the resurgence of the primeval in and through the decadent, and homosexual desire is its trigger." (p 290) And "Decadence was always there; Tadzio radiates a beauty which is said to be noble, and austere, yet almost immediately he is observed to have unhealthy teeth. ... Aschenbach reflects that the boy will not live to grow old ... the decadent and perhaps vengeful pleasure of realizing that the object of his desire will succumb to an inherent degeneracy." (p 289)

Not just sex and death
Dollimore is good about things other than just (?) death and sex. He tells us that "Thomas Browne speaks of the importance of knowing oneself but also of the difficulty of doing so." (p 84); that "Augustine [in the Confessions] suggests how individualism was from the beginning energized by an inner dynamic of loss, conflict, doubt, absence and lack, and how this feeds into our culture's obsession with control and expansion - the sense that the identity of everything, from self to nation, is under centrifugal and potentially disintegrative pressures which have to be rigorously controlled. This is a kind of control that is always exceeding and breaking down the very order it restlessly quests for, and is forever establishing its own rationale even as it undermines it."; and that "David Hume reconceptualized the self as completely mutable and entirely the prisoner of time. Even the meditation upon the self is pointless, according to Hume, since the kid of self which meditation presupposed is non-existent. ... during introspection one's attention is always caught up in the transient, fleeting impressions of consciousness itself. ... we are 'nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement' ... There is absolutely nothing within us that remains unalterably the same through flux and change - certainly not a soul, and not even an unchanging self. Nor does the mind have an unchanging nature or essence; it too is essentially discontinuous. We are nothing more than the movement and flux of consciousness." (p 93) [This made me think of Andy Clark's, Surfing Uncertainty]

Baudrillard sees "culture as a macro-conspiracy conducted by an insidious ideological prime-mover whose agency is always invisibly at work (rather like God)." (p 124)

"It is a function of myth ... to provide a disguised or obscure expression of what can no longer be said openly. Typically, the expression will conform to socially acceptable conventions - here, in the romance, chivalry is the convention - in order to explore an antisocial content." (p 65)

The lumpenproletariat are "not a class so much as a motley, uprooted and, in many instances, itinerant mass of people"; Marx included among them "decayed roues, vagabonds, discharged soldiers and jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, beggars ... 'scum, offal, refuse of all classes'" (pp 215 - 216)

A fascinating and beautifully written book. October 2016; 327 pages