My Struggle
I was trying to decide if I wrote an essay on this book, what would be the essay's title:
Engaged with boredom (but I did not find this book boring . . . so that's not really what I mean)
Meaning through the Mundane (how we seek meaning usually by looking for what stands out but it is in the everyday through which meaning comes--wouldn't Proust agree with that?)
Bearable unbearable (we often think life is unbearable because of the struggle of it even when that struggle is edged with boredom, but it is not (largely) unbearable. In fact, most of us bear it for decades)
Recognizing meaninglessness (Life is inherently meaningless from an existential perspective and yet we have to (or chose to bear it). Perhaps this book explores that tension
Why did I dislike Remembrance of Things Past so much but found My Struggle truly engaging? Is it that I like Karl and didn't like the character Proust presents?
Is the purpose of writing a memoir, of developing a narrative that makes sense of our lives so it doesn't feel so meaningless and random? Does Karl Ove discover through his writing that his life, while random, is not meaningless or is he caught on a really endless quest to make meaning out of that which is not meaningful.
Karl Ove is caught in the trap of wanting there
to be reasons, wanting to know why, when for the most part, such questions are impossible to answer and lead to frustration and the idea that life is unbearable.
And here he is living this meaningless and shameful life and yet he doesn't want to to die and is even afraid of death (isn't that the ultimate irony).
Zadie Smith says that life filled with practically nothing, if you are mindful of it, can be a beautiful struggle (NYRB, Dec 2013). But is Karl Ove's life filled with "practically nothing". Doesn't seem to be. No more than anyone else's. That IS life. Perhaps what Karl Ove shows us is that being fully present to life is a way to make sense of practically nothing, the sense is in the observation (not interpretation, not figure it out, but just being). Although, in his living, Karl Ove seems to be doing everything but being. Sometimes his nervous/anxious energy became almost palpable as I read. I felt like the energy was coming off the page--maybe this is why I was so engaged. Here is a guy living this mundane, humiliating life (at least that's how he perceives it) and still he has such energy (granted much of that energy comes from anger, but there are moments of happiness--in nature usually, away from people).
The given here is that Life IS a struggle for everyone no matter how mundane or how thrill filled that life. It is how one perceives that struggle that makes for good (or bad, whiny memoir--think Eat, Pray, Love, or Wild) reading.
"The life I led was not my own," he writes. "I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts." (Think of The Sea, John Banville, where the main character there also states, "I was a distinct no one whose fiercest wish was to be a distinct someone" (p. 160), and "I have ever had the conviction . . . that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal that is my life. . . .will be done and the real drama for which I have ever and with such earnestness been preparing will at last begin" (p. 137). Both of these men are trying to figure out what it is to live given that they are always waiting to do so. Meanwhile, they are living. . . what does that mean?
To what extent is the life we lead "our own"? How do we separate our "self" from all the pressures we take on to conform or to be different, to be liked, or rude to be perceived one way or another? Who is the "I"? Are we always in some unsatisfied withe "the life we led" in the sense that we perceive ourselves a certain way and we wish that perception were different? Or are only certain people in this predicament? Can we share with Ove the feeling of struggle even if the actual lived moments are quite different?
To what extent is Karl Ove attempting to understand why shame and his father so dominate his life (and his narrative?)? What would understanding give him? The shameful things he shares with us we may find shameful but some we don't. Some, it is Karl Ove's perspective. When he gives his Grandmother alcohol and gets drunk himself, that seems shameful to most readers, when he loses a sock at practice that does not. It's almost as if his every action might be shameful and what a way to live.
Called a novel because all writing, no matter what its name, is selective and unreliable. Karl Ove is just reminding us of that.
Is the absence of the sister and most absence of the mother a choice or something motivated by them; they did not want to be included?
Is it the reconstruction of the past that is interesting or how we chose to reconstruct it, which memories we chose to share, and how we develop those memories. In several places, Karl Ove acknowledges that he may not be remembering correctly or the event may not have even happened. . .
From The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/07/karl-ove-knausgaard-my-struggle-hari-kunzru
Engaged with boredom (but I did not find this book boring . . . so that's not really what I mean)
Meaning through the Mundane (how we seek meaning usually by looking for what stands out but it is in the everyday through which meaning comes--wouldn't Proust agree with that?)
Bearable unbearable (we often think life is unbearable because of the struggle of it even when that struggle is edged with boredom, but it is not (largely) unbearable. In fact, most of us bear it for decades)
Recognizing meaninglessness (Life is inherently meaningless from an existential perspective and yet we have to (or chose to bear it). Perhaps this book explores that tension
Why did I dislike Remembrance of Things Past so much but found My Struggle truly engaging? Is it that I like Karl and didn't like the character Proust presents?
Is the purpose of writing a memoir, of developing a narrative that makes sense of our lives so it doesn't feel so meaningless and random? Does Karl Ove discover through his writing that his life, while random, is not meaningless or is he caught on a really endless quest to make meaning out of that which is not meaningful.
Karl Ove is caught in the trap of wanting there
to be reasons, wanting to know why, when for the most part, such questions are impossible to answer and lead to frustration and the idea that life is unbearable.
And here he is living this meaningless and shameful life and yet he doesn't want to to die and is even afraid of death (isn't that the ultimate irony).
Zadie Smith says that life filled with practically nothing, if you are mindful of it, can be a beautiful struggle (NYRB, Dec 2013). But is Karl Ove's life filled with "practically nothing". Doesn't seem to be. No more than anyone else's. That IS life. Perhaps what Karl Ove shows us is that being fully present to life is a way to make sense of practically nothing, the sense is in the observation (not interpretation, not figure it out, but just being). Although, in his living, Karl Ove seems to be doing everything but being. Sometimes his nervous/anxious energy became almost palpable as I read. I felt like the energy was coming off the page--maybe this is why I was so engaged. Here is a guy living this mundane, humiliating life (at least that's how he perceives it) and still he has such energy (granted much of that energy comes from anger, but there are moments of happiness--in nature usually, away from people).
The given here is that Life IS a struggle for everyone no matter how mundane or how thrill filled that life. It is how one perceives that struggle that makes for good (or bad, whiny memoir--think Eat, Pray, Love, or Wild) reading.
"The life I led was not my own," he writes. "I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts." (Think of The Sea, John Banville, where the main character there also states, "I was a distinct no one whose fiercest wish was to be a distinct someone" (p. 160), and "I have ever had the conviction . . . that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal that is my life. . . .will be done and the real drama for which I have ever and with such earnestness been preparing will at last begin" (p. 137). Both of these men are trying to figure out what it is to live given that they are always waiting to do so. Meanwhile, they are living. . . what does that mean?
To what extent is the life we lead "our own"? How do we separate our "self" from all the pressures we take on to conform or to be different, to be liked, or rude to be perceived one way or another? Who is the "I"? Are we always in some unsatisfied withe "the life we led" in the sense that we perceive ourselves a certain way and we wish that perception were different? Or are only certain people in this predicament? Can we share with Ove the feeling of struggle even if the actual lived moments are quite different?
To what extent is Karl Ove attempting to understand why shame and his father so dominate his life (and his narrative?)? What would understanding give him? The shameful things he shares with us we may find shameful but some we don't. Some, it is Karl Ove's perspective. When he gives his Grandmother alcohol and gets drunk himself, that seems shameful to most readers, when he loses a sock at practice that does not. It's almost as if his every action might be shameful and what a way to live.
Called a novel because all writing, no matter what its name, is selective and unreliable. Karl Ove is just reminding us of that.
Is the absence of the sister and most absence of the mother a choice or something motivated by them; they did not want to be included?
Is it the reconstruction of the past that is interesting or how we chose to reconstruct it, which memories we chose to share, and how we develop those memories. In several places, Karl Ove acknowledges that he may not be remembering correctly or the event may not have even happened. . .
From The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/07/karl-ove-knausgaard-my-struggle-hari-kunzru
(quoted from My Struggle) I don't know what it was about these pictures that made such a great impression on me. However it was striking that they were all painted before the 1900s, within the artistic paradigm that always retained some reference to visible reality. Thus, there was always a certain objectivity to them, by which I mean a distance between reality and the portrayal of reality, and it was doubtless in this interlying space where it 'happened', where it appeared, whatever it was I saw, when the world seemed to step forward from the world.
(quoted from The Guardian) As a description of aesthetic realism, of how it seeks to function, this is very fine. The experience of reading My Struggle is that of the world seeming to step forward from the world. It is not the world mirrored or photocopied; its relationship to reality is less direct, less innocent. The book is the record of someone trying and failing (failing better, as Beckett has it) to make an accurate representation of himself; the gap between the world and that representation, between the world and itself, is the space where all sorts of questions about truth and personal identity arise.
So related to Horn's book, The Guide for the Perplexed". This notion of what can be captured and used to recreate our world (and always, always stuff is left out). Nothing we do can mirror our lives, not even close. What does it even mean to make an accurate representation of yourself, when? how do we even know if we've gotten close. And why do so many people bother to?
In some ways, this is a novel of manners in the style of Jane Austen or George Eliot, usually focused on women doing daily, mundane tasks that are not a worthy subject of novels. Even though (or perhaps because) that is how most of us live 99% of the time. Is the memoir then an attempt to take these mundane, boring and meaningless tasks and give them meaning through writing them down, through somehow making them symbolic or larger than life in a way? Like a painting (still life with breadcrumbs).
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