My Struggle, vol. 6: Joshua Keating, November 12
Washington, D.C.
Dear fellow strugglers,
A wave of nostalgia hit me as I finished Book Six of My Struggle after midnight on a sweltering August night. While I had inhaled the first five books rapidly, utterly engrossed, and had grabbed a galley of the sixth volume the moment it appeared on the review pile at my office, I found this one to be tougher sledding. It took me a few weeks to get through, which could mean that either I'm busier these days or it just wasn't as good as the others. Either way, when I finished, I immediately pulled the other volumes off the shelf to reread some memorable earlier passages. As I opened Book 5, two torn out blank pages, one with a small needle hole poked through the center, fell out.
The two pages had been tucked into the book since the summer of 2016, a few months after the book came out in the United States. My wife and I had been traveling around Indonesia—a last big international trip before having kids—and were meeting up with our Jakarta-based friends in Bali.
It turned out to be a strange time to visit the island. The Balinese Hindu New Year's Day, or Nyepi, is a sort of combination Mardi Gras and Yom Kippur. The night before Nyepi, specially constructed demonic statues, each built by a village or neighborhood, are paraded through the center of the large town as a way to represent human evil and purify the natural environment before the New Year. They are nightmarish—multi-headed ogres with dozens of breasts dripping with blood, a king of fanged four-armed Mickey Mouse carrying a handgun. It's all very festive and good-natured, though.
The day of Nyepi itself is a time for silent reflection, fasting, and meditation, mandated by law. You can be arrested for going out on the street, and that includes tourists. As such, better-informed tourists than us avoid the island during Nyepi. We were locked into a pretty rigid itinerary, so rather than try to reschedule, we opted to check in—at a remarkably discounted rate—to the sort of all-inclusive beach resort we'd normally never stay in. If we couldn't explore Bali, we thought, we could at least lounge by the pool—in my case, lounge by the pool reading about the frustrations of Karl Ove Knausgaard's early literary career, as detailed in Book Five.
Making the atmosphere even eerier, Nyepi that year coincided with a solar eclipse in Indonesia. The full eclipse was only visible from the island of Sulawesi, to the Northeast of us. On Bali, it just felt as though someone had turned down the dimmer switch slightly. We probably wouldn't have noticed if we didn't know it was happening.
Following some online instructions, I made a "viewer" for the eclipse by tearing two blank pages out of My Struggle and poking a hole in one with a pen tip. If you held the two pages at the proper angle, the sun would shine through the hole and you could see the circle waxing and waning on the other sheet.
***
Finding the eclipse viewer after concluding My Struggle seemed almost too fitting. My mind slipped, as his narrative so often does, from present to memory, a moment just before my own life was dramatically changed by the birth of my son and the writing of my own first book. My memory also tracked with one of the more memorable sequences in Book 6, Knausgaard and his family's stay at an all-inclusive resort in the Canary Islands—a memory quite a bit less serene than my own.
Like many devoted readers, I feel like I've spent the last few years getting to know the thoughts, habits, opinions, and obsessions of a middle-aged Norwegian novelist better than those of some of my best friends. After having come so far, it's hard not to read Book 6 as a rebuke, a reminder of the limitations Knausgaard's project.
In the first section of the book, Knausgaard more or less throws himself under the bus, acknowledging via his feud with his uncle that he can't fully vouch for the reliability of his memory in the reconstruction of the events in the previous five books. This is self-evident—nobody's memory is that good—and Knausgaard has insulated himself against charges of fabulism by labeling the book a novel rather than a memoir, but given the accolades Knausgaard has won on the basis of his radical self-exposure, it feels like a cop-out to confess that the man we've known from his teenage beer-buying escapades through the frustrations of fatherhood may—or may not—be a partially fictional character.
The much derided "Hitler" section of the book undermines any interest we might have had in him as a commentator on politics or history. All this time, I'd been assuming that the Mein Kampf-echoing title was a punk rock provocation, but apparently he really means it. I've been a little skeptical of Knausgaard's political insights since a 2015 New Yorker article in which he. dismissed mass murderer Anders Breivik's racist, right-wing ideology as so self-evidently idiotic and childish that it's of little use in understanding the motivation for his 2011 massacre. This was a dubious argument then and hasn't gained credibility in the years since, as political leaders with ideologies only a few degrees removed from Breivik's have gained power and influence throughout the west, including in Norway and Sweden. Knausgaard ultimately isn't much interested in politics or history beyond the recurring question of how an artist should operate in bourgeois, liberal, 21st-century European society.
In the final section, Knausgaard indicts the morality of the book we're reading by detailing the toll it took on his family, particularly his wife. At the end, his readers are forced to wonder if the book they've become so invested in is any more than an act of amoral exhibitionism, a kind of high-brow Scandinavian Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
I can say that reading all six parts of this alternately thrilling and aggravating book has changed the way I observe the world around me and think about my own memories, which is more than I can say for the vast majority of books I've read. But the final volume reminds us that even an autobiography this long, extensive, and self-critical is selective. We don't really know who Knausgaard is, and the view into his struggle that we've gotten is as limited as looking at a partial solar eclipse through a tiny pin-hole in a sheet of paper.
I tucked my eclipse viewer back into the book for safekeeping and put all six volumes back on the shelf.
Best,
Josh
ALSO IN THIS SERIES:
The Slow Burn, v.2: Welcome Back
The Slow Burn, v.2: An Introduction
My Struggle, vol. 1: Cecily, June 6
My Struggle, vol. 1: Diana, June 9
My Struggle, vol. 1: Omari, June 14
My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, June 17
My Struggle, vol. 2: Omari, June 24
My Struggle, vol. 2: Cecily, July 1
My Struggle, vol. 2: Sarah Chihaya, July 5
My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, July 12
My Struggle, vol. 2: Diana, July 16
My Struggle, vol. 2: Jess Arndt, July 18
My Struggle, vol. 3: Omari, July 25
My Struggle, vol. 3: Ari M. Brostoff, August 1
My Struggle, vol. 3: Dan, August 4
My Struggle, vol. 3: Jacob Brogan, August 8My Struggle, vol. 3: Diana, August 12
My Struggle, vol. 4: Katherine Hill, August 25
My Struggle, vol. 4: Omari, September 1
My Struggle, vol. 4: Dan, September 2
My Struggle, vol. 4: Diana, September 15
My Struggle, vol. 5: Omari, September 27
My Struggle, vol. 5: Diana, October 3
My Struggle, vol. 5: Dan, October 13
My Struggle, vol. 6: Omari, September 25
My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, September 28
My Struggle, vol. 6: Stephanie, October 5
My Struggle, vol. 6: Cecily, October 9
My Struggle, vol. 6: Emily Tamkin, October 10
My Struggle, vol. 6: Diana, October 15
My Struggle, vol. 6: Rachel Greenwald Smith, October 23
My Struggle, vol. 6: Katherine Hill, October 26
My Struggle, vol. 6: Omari, October 31
My Struggle, vol. 6: Jess Arndt, November 6