'My Struggle: Book 3: Boyhood'
On
Page 92 of the slate-gray third volume of the six-part Norwegian novel
“My Struggle,” by Karl Ove Knausgaard — an autobiographical work that
offers detailed accounts of events like the teenage Karl Ove trying to
sneak alcohol to a New Year’s party (Book 1), the paternal Karl Ove attending a children’s birthday party (Book 2) and the
child Karl Ove eating, on two different occasions, cornflakes (Book 3) —
we learn that the headmaster of Karl Ove’s grade school was a diver who
discovered a slave ship sunk off Norway’s coast in 1768.
“To
me, someone who held diving in greater esteem than anything else,”
Knausgaard writes, “he was the greatest man I could imagine.” But one
day this headmaster comes to speak with the students about the ship, and
young Karl Ove finds himself “a tiny bit disappointed when it turned
out the wreck lay in waters that were only a few meters deep. . . . I
had expected a depth of say a hundred meters, . . . extreme pressure, . .
. an overwhelming darkness, . . . perhaps even a little submarine or
diving bell. But on the seabed near the coast, right beneath the feet of
bathers, within the range of any boy with flippers and a diving mask?”
We
shouldn’t be. That wrecked slave ship from 1768 remained undiscovered
in those shallows for centuries; the depth of the water isn’t the way to
measure the achievement. Consider, for example, that in the nearly
1,500 pages of “My Struggle” to appear so far in English
translation, I would estimate that not more than a few dozen days are
detailed, and those days not fully. We sit through a couple of New Year’s Eves, talk about art with his friend Geir, watch the birth of
one child, prepare for a funeral, listen to records, sneak candy into
the house — in total, a very tiny fraction of the 16,000 or so days of
the main character’s life to date, and those not even in order, yet we
feel we have been this guy’s constant companion. What at first appears
to be the problem of how we as readers have patience for so much
information reveals itself, upon inspection, as the problem of how it is
that, with so little information, we feel we have witnessed an entire
life.
As
in other very long books, something is inevitably being revealed about
time, and about memory. “Around us, on all sides,” the narrator says of a
quiet dinner with his father and brother, “it is the ’70s.” There
follows a discussion about a pineapple and cream dessert, who eats it
and who doesn’t. In and out of the book, Knausgaard repeatedly claims to
have a weak memory, a claim one might argue the book belies, but I
believe him. Knausgaard forgets most everything (which is very different
from everything) the way we all forget most everything, and he might
forget even a little bit more than the rest of us. His grandfather tells
him a story about having once joined a rescue mission for a plane that
crashed in nearby mountains. No one survived, the grandfather says, but
he remembers seeing the captain’s head: “His hair was perfect! Combed
back. Not a strand out of place.” It’s a kind of gruesome metonymy for
memory itself: So much life gone, and this one head in the snow
is what remains in the mind’s eye. The past returns to us like light
almost entirely obscured by a heavy, dark screen in which memory has
made a few pinholes; we see very little, really, yet we look upon it as
if at the starry vault of the heavens.
But
it’s not only the past we can barely see. In Norway, we learn from this
book, there is a special kind of ghost, a vardoger — a spirit that
arrives before its resemblant person does, so that when the person
actually does arrive, it feels as if we have already seen and heard and
smelled him or her. Book 3, with its focus on Knausgaard’s childhood on
the Norwegian island of Tromoya, captures especially well how life in the
present tense has the character of a vardoger, how it is most spectral
while it is actually going on; events begin to seem more substantial
only later, paradoxically, in reflection. “The book he read was about an
old woman in the wilderness, impossible to understand, not a word,”
Knausgaard says, recalling an early teacher but also evoking — with that
seemingly nonsensical book — the undercurrent of all of his childhood
experiences. A soccer game reads like a convocation of shades; the
Knausgaard who is in the scene (as opposed to writing it) often misses
the essence of what is happening. The project of noting what you’d think
need not be noted — this and then this and then that, we get it —
begins to make sense: What we are seeing right now, we can’t yet
actually see.
We
might wonder why, right now, we as readers are able to see Knausgaard
pretty well. If “My Struggle” — which is arguably most engrossing when
it describes the care of children in what feels like minute-to-minute
detail — were written from the point of view of a woman, would it be the
literary sensation it is? I don’t think it would be. But this points to
blindnesses outside the book, not in it. That cultural norms are obtuse
about men and women in such different ways is an essential part of
Knausgaard’s predicament; he changes diapers, he cooks dinner, he is
said to be pretty good-looking, he doesn’t talk about sex all that much —
he often feels perceived as too feminine. This runs deep. One of his
very few childhood memories of his mother involves her buying him a swim
cap with flowers on it, and one of the most hilarious moments in the
novel so far comes at a party when Knausgaard realizes no one expects him
to be the guy to break down the door behind which his own pregnant wife
is trapped. The female mirror of “My Struggle” would arguably not be a
woman’s detailed domestic diary — we are all too comfortable seeing that
situation as wholly normal, and therefore not seeing it at all — but
instead a kind of virago story. Perhaps the vardoger that preceded “My Struggle” is that work by another Norwegian great, Henrik Ibsen — “A Doll’s House.”
MY STRUGGLE
Book 3: Boyhood
By Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated by Don Bartlett
427 pp. Archipelago Books. $27.
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