Andre Løyning

In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel A Time for Everything, the narrator says that if we are to understand his character, a sixteenth-century Italian named Antinous, it won’t come from charting the inner landscape of his life. “Antinous was, first and foremost, of his time, and to understand who he was, that is what must be mapped.” Our tendency to interpret all external events by the way they shape the dark crevasses of the psyche is a modern one, he asserts, a paradigm ushered in by Freud, and it would be a fatal mistake to presume that people back then were anything like us, that their thoughts and feelings were shaded by a common consciousness, since “our world is only one of many possible worlds.”

This approach to literature might seem antithetical to Knausgaard’s more famous project, his six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, the fifth installment of which has now been translated into English. My Struggle is best known for its obsessive devotion to one life, the intimate rendering of the quotidian events that mold it, and the tacit proposal that the universe, in its entirety, is but what passes through the prism of a single being. Toward the end of Book Three, which is devoted to his childhood, Knausgaard awakes in a hospital after a fainting spell to the sound of Roxy Music playing in the distance. The song’s lyrics—“More than this / There is nothing”—combine with the “pale, bluish summer night” to produce in him a feeling of elation. The lyrics are, in the most direct sense, about life’s finitude, suffused here with the euphoria that accompanies convalescence. But in another sense they spell out a dominant theme in Knausgaard’s work—that there is nothing more than this sky, this song, this moment, this awareness of ourselves in the world.

The idea that the world is confined to our senses, that it dies when we die, has a long history, finding its fullest expression in Knausgaard’s principal inspiration, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In it, the character Bergotte, dying before Vermeer’s 1662 painting View of Delft, regrets that his writing was unable to match the vivid intensity of the painting’s “little patch of yellow wall,” a scene that speaks to Proust’s own emphasis on meticulously recreating subjective experience so that it remains forever fixed beyond the earthly ravages of time. But even Proust did much more than embellish his patch of wall, weaving historical elements such as the Dreyfus affair and the intricate hierarchies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain into his novel about perception and memory.

In contrast, across the first four books of My Struggle, contemporary Norway has been notably absent. There’s an opaque comment about immigration here, a reference to the country’s oil economy there, scattered between hundreds and hundreds of pages devoted to 1980s indie rock, drunken mishaps, sexual yearnings, an emotionally abusive father, the finer details of parenting, and, above all, the great struggle to make art. Knausgaard’s resistance to a grand novelistic architecture, and his refusal to be tyrannized by topicality, are partly what make his book so attractive. But a diary, no matter how compelling, is not a novel; and a life, no matter how rich, is not autonomous from the backdrop against which it is set. It is in Book Five that Knausgaard’s epoch finally heaves into view, providing his granular foregrounding with its context. It is here that we get a fuller sense of this one of many possible worlds.

That My Struggle is actually a commentary on contemporary life in the West, a sweeping novel of ideas in the tradition of Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoevsky, is foreshadowed in the title, which links the modest travails of one man on the northern periphery of the European continent to the preeminent historical figure of the twentieth century. But its ambition has always been belied by what amounts to Knausgaard’s philosophy about literature, which is that whatever truth the novelist has to convey comes not from ideas, but from emotions. “The heart is never wrong,” he writes in Book Five. Everything stems from what he has felt, what he has experienced in its utmost immediacy, as if to say there is greater truth nestled in the black folds of jealousy than in the work of Karl Marx or Immanuel Kant. There are certainly no flamboyantly verbose characters, à la Mann’s The Magic Mountain or Dostoevsky’s Demons, who stand for schools of thought and political theories. If we are to have ideas, they will have to flow through the radically narrow perspective that Knausgaard has established, floating alongside the rest of life’s flotsam: all those cigarettes smoked, all those feelings hurt, all those books read.