tag:theconversation.com,2011:/nz/topics/karl-ove-knausgaard-14500/articlesKarl Ove Knausgaard – The Conversation2023-12-19T19:01:35Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2157002023-12-19T19:01:35Z2023-12-19T19:01:35ZKnausgaard’s ambitious new novel imagines Europe’s last decades – ending with an ominous star and the return of the dead<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566457/original/file-20231219-27-g8m1rc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=29%2C37%2C4962%2C3697&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Karl Ove Knausgaard</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sam Barker/Penguin Random House</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is a 21st-century literary phenomenon. Talked up as a <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/167921/will-win-2022-nobel-prize-literature">contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature</a>, he has been compared to some of the greatest writers of all time: Fyodor Dostovesky, Marcel Proust, Roberto Bolaño. His work challenges conventional assumptions about content and form, and resonates with readers across the world. </p>
<p>Knausgaard’s magnum opus – the six-volume, 3,600-page autofictional epic <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-death-in-the-family-9780099555162">My Struggle</a> (<em>Min Kamp</em>) – has been translated into 35 languages. It’s sold half a million copies in Norway alone – a remarkable statistic, as Norway’s population is roughly five million.</p>
<p>Cultural commentator <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/12/26/completely-without-dignity-an-interview-with-karl-ove-knausgaard/">Jesse Baron</a> summed up its impact: </p>
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<p>Knausgaard has written one of those books so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary. Before, there was no My Struggle; now there is, and things are different. </p>
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<p>In 2020, Knausgaard followed up his “revolutionary” bestseller with <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-morning-star-9781784703301">The Morning Star</a> (<em>Morgenstjernen</em>), the first in a new cycle of novels. </p>
<p>By turns didactic and entertaining, the action of this enormous novel revolves around the sudden appearance of a massive new star in the sky, which may or may not herald the arrival of Lucifer on planet Earth. The dead seem to be coming back to life. Norwegian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_metal">black metal</a> might have something to do with it all. (And yes, you did read that last sentence correctly.) </p>
<p>Knausgaard’s new, unabashedly formidable novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-wolves-of-eternity-9781787303362">The Wolves of Eternity</a> (<em>Ulvene fra evighetens skog</em>), is set in the same fictional universe. In terms of plot, however, this only becomes fully apparent near the end, when the mysterious star appears in the sky – and it’s revealed there haven’t been any registered deaths in Norway for three whole days. </p>
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<p><em>The Wolves of Eternity – Karl Ove Knausgaard (Harvill Secker)</em></p>
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<h2>Early joy at ‘being able to write’</h2>
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<p>Knausgaard, who is arguably the most famous Norwegian writer since <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henrik-Ibsen">Henrik Ibsen</a>, was born in Olso on 6 December 1968. He was raised on Tromøy, the largest island in southern Norway, and studied at the University of Bergen. </p>
<p>As a student of creative writing, Knausgaard was taught by <a href="https://theconversation.com/jon-fosse-wins-the-2023-nobel-prize-in-literature-for-giving-voice-to-the-unsayable-215143">Jon Fosse</a>, the 2023 Nobel Laureate. After graduating from university, he taught at high school in northern Norway and spent time working in a psychiatric hospital. He also had a stint labouring on an oil rig.</p>
<p>In 1998, after moving to Sweden, Knausgaard released his first novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/420071/out-of-the-world-by-karl-ove-knausgaard/9781846558269">Out of the World</a> (<em>Ute av verden</em>). In part concerned with Knausgaard’s relationship with his alcoholic father, this autobiographically inflected book was a hit in Norway. It received the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature: the first time in the award’s history a debut novelist walked away as winner.</p>
<p>Knausgaard is now critical of his first novel. “It is the work of the beginner,” <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/so-much-longing-in-so-little-space-9781787300545">he says</a>, “and it is blemished by an at times obtrusive self-infatuation, the joy of being able to write.” </p>
<p>He is much fonder of his second book, which appeared to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/08/karl-knausard-time-every-purpose">mixed reviews</a> in 2004. In <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-karl-ove-knausgaard-cant-stop-writing-1446688727">Knausgaard’s words</a>, A Time for Everything (<em>En tid for alt</em>) is a novel “about angels, like angels do exist, they really were around. The mystery in the book is where did they go? It’s a retelling of the stories in the Bible.” </p>
<p>Yet he readily concedes “nobody else is interested in [it] because it’s the most fictional” of his novels.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/jon-fosse-wins-the-2023-nobel-prize-in-literature-for-giving-voice-to-the-unsayable-215143">Jon Fosse wins the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature for giving 'voice to the unsayable'</a>
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<h2>My Struggle changed the novel</h2>
<p>Knausgaard is nodding in the direction of My Struggle, which launched him into the literary stratosphere. This <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-name-your-book-after-hitlers">provocatively titled</a> autobiographical novel cycle spans six books, published between 2009 and 2011. Taken together, it is the longest novel in Norwegian history.</p>
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<p>Academic <a href="https://sunypress.edu/Books/K/Knausgaard-and-the-Autofictional-Novel">Claus Elholm Andersen argues</a> this monumental work “has become the preeminent example of autofiction and has changed how we conceive of novels”.</p>
<p>Knausgaard has been <a href="https://electricliterature.com/opening-a-world-an-interview-with-karl-ove-knausgaard/">candid</a> about the fact that My Struggle, which traffics in the minutiae and rhythms of daily existence, “came out of a great frustration” in his life. </p>
<p>The writer, who had recently become a father, was suffering from a severe case of writer’s block. Knausgaard was also stuck in what he <a href="https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-light-behind-the-bookshelves/">subsequently characterised</a> as a midlife crisis:</p>
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<p>Another thing is that when I turned forty it was kind of like I was dead. I thought “This is it and it’s going to be like this for the rest of my life”. And the only way for me to deal with that was through literature. It’s difficult to explain but I had to attempt to get closer to life, which is a stupid thing to do but that’s what I was trying to do, to avoid all the structures and forms of the novel.</p>
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<p>Knausgaard realised he had to change his approach to writing in order to get closer to life. Speed of composition became “the most important thing” for Knausgaard. He recalls that speed served a practical function</p>
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<p>because I am a perfectionist in my writing, in my way of thinking, and I want to make it into real art, real literature. But I had to fight against that thing in me because I became so critical of my own writing, and I needed to get over that, and the only way I could do it was by speeding up because then you don’t have time to be critical at all. </p>
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<p>The goal he set himself was to write a specific number of pages every day. “In that way I simply wouldn’t have time to think, to plan or to calculate,” <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300248517/inadvertent/">Knausgaard explains</a>, “I would have to go with whatever appeared on the screen in front of me.” </p>
<p>The number of pages per day soon started to go up. Five, ten, twenty. <a href="https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-light-behind-the-bookshelves/">Knausgaard holds</a> that this allowed him </p>
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<p>to escape the notion of knowing what to write. If you know what you’re going to write then that’s death for me, then nothing is happening. If I plan something it’s just dead. And almost everything I write is dead in that sense really, but if I speed up then something, all of a sudden, is happening because I can no longer control it.</p>
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<p>But this new method came with risks. Quality control was an issue. Knausgaard is the first <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThCB9lFvzhY">to admit</a> there is “a lot of bad writing” on display in My Struggle, which deliberately privileges quantity over artistic quality. </p>
<p>This shift became more pronounced as he went along. “When the books started to be published,” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/karl-ove-knausgaard-the-duty-of-literature-is-to-fight-fiction">Knausgaard remarks</a>, “I had incredibly tight deadlines, which was a great help. Then I couldn’t afford to think about quality, only quantity mattered.” </p>
<p>Knausgaard is underselling himself a bit here. In the reckoning of the literary critic <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/13/total-recall">James Wood</a>, Knausgaard’s hypnotic prose is</p>
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<p>intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties, unafraid to appear naïve or awkward. Although his sentences are long and loose, they are not cutely or aimlessly digressive: truth is repeatedly being struck at, not chatted up.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/tying-the-knausgaardian-knot-struggle-scandinavian-style-36135">Tying the Knausgaardian knot: struggle, Scandinavian-style</a>
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<h2>‘No topic is off-limits’</h2>
<p>Knausgaard’s candour is part of his appeal, but he seems to have been genuinely taken aback by the public’s response to My Struggle. <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-karl-ove-knausgaard-cant-stop-writing-1446688727#:%7E:text=Of%20writing%20'My%20Struggle%2C',before%20his%20children%20got%20up">He confessed</a> as much to the journalist Liesl Schillinger:</p>
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<p>It’s bad. I wrote it rather blindly, I didn’t think it was exceptional. I thought this would be a minor literary book, I thought it would be a step down from my other books, I thought maybe it was boring and uninteresting and really about nothing.</p>
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<span class="caption">Knausgaard in 2011.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karl_Ove_Knausg%C3%A5rd.jpg">Soppakanuuna, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Knausgaard’s many readers would beg to differ. We warm to what we might describe as his radical openness, and appreciate his willingness to discuss subjects society tends to regard as <a href="https://lithub.com/karl-ove-knausgaards-feats-of-shame-and-openness/">shameful</a> and taboo. Sexual inadequacy, self-harm, Adolf Hitler. No topic is off-limits, everything is up for discussion.</p>
<p>This has occasionally made life difficult for Knausgaard. Some of his nearest and dearest have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/10/linda-bostrom-knausgard-i-would-like-to-be-seen-as-a-person-and-author-in-my-own-right">taken umbrage</a> at the way they are presented in My Struggle. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.boilerhouse.press/product-page/dear-knausgaard-by-kim-adrian">Feminist commentators</a> have been troubled by Knausgaard’s opinions about sexuality and gender relations in contemporary Europe. For example, in the second volume of My Struggle, he expressed scepticism about how “modernised and feminised” parameters of “equality and fairness” impact on masculinity.</p>
<p>Knausgaard <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThCB9lFvzhY">acknowledges</a> the criticism his work has generated in some quarters: </p>
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<p>I am accused of being right-wing and antifeminist or antiwoman even – all kinds of things – but I think if you read the whole book and see it … what I seek is complication.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-autofiction-turns-the-personal-into-the-political-192180">How autofiction turns the personal into the political</a>
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<p>My Struggle famously ends with Knausgaard declaring he is no longer a writer. However, his output across the past decade directly contradicts that statement. </p>
<p>He’s been a consultant on a new Norwegian translation of the Bible and published several nonfiction books, on subjects as diverse as <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/home-and-away-9781473523906">football</a> and the art of <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/so-much-longing-in-so-little-space-9781787300545">Edvard Munch</a>.</p>
<p>And he has contributed a novel, The Blind Book (<em>Blindenboken</em>), to the ecologically inspired <a href="https://www.futurelibrary.no/">Future Library</a> initiative, a series of original works printed on paper made from a thousand freshly planted trees. It will be held in trust, unpublished, until 2114, when it will be printed and released.</p>
<p>“From a writer’s perspective,” <a href="https://www.futurelibrary.no/#/years/2019">Knausgaard reflects</a>, “it is incredibly fascinating to do something and to know that it is [going to] be published in a completely different setting in a completely different world probably.” </p>
<h2>The Morning Star ‘divided critics’</h2>
<p>The Morning Star, Knausgaard’s first stab at fiction since My Struggle, is a speculative novel set in the here and now, in a recognisable version of our world. It has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/01/the-morning-star-by-karl-ove-knausgard-review-bloated-and-inconsequential">divided</a> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/karl-ove-knausgaards-haunting-new-novel">critics</a>. Bloated and inconsequential, compulsive and haunting – people can’t seem to make up their minds about it.</p>
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<p>Part of the problem, I think, has to do with the sheer scope of the work – which is exactly 666 pages long.</p>
<p>Divided into three sections and featuring nine narrators, the novel, much like My Struggle, is punctuated by a dizzying number of theological and philosophical detours. </p>
<p>Take the following example. One of the narrators, Kathrin, has invited a couple of friends – Sigrid and Martin – for dinner. Martin is a perennial student. By the time we meet him, he has already failed to finish degrees in philosophy, computer science and biology. To Sigrid’s despair, he now wants to write about trees. Here is Martin’s almost painfully earnest take on the topic:</p>
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<p>The mind is a kind of place where we become visible to ourselves. But why? What’s it good for? When we see ourselves, we see ourselves from without – the way others see us, in other words. That was what Nietzsche understood, that the mind exists for the good of the community. It’s there for what goes on between people. And that’s where some scholars believe there to be other kinds of consciousness too. Other forms of intelligence. The forest, for instance. The point being that those kinds of consciousness – intelligence, if you will – are so alien to us that it’s hard for us to see that they even exist. </p>
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<p>This is how characters in Knausgaard’s novels tend to talk. The question being asked here is basically: can a tree think? The answer, according to Martin, is not clear cut:</p>
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<p>“So a tree can’t think,” Martin went on. “But the trees can. The ecosystem as an entity can. The fact that such an idea is being talked about now is probably down to people trying to construct forms of AI. We don’t know what that’s going to look like either.” </p>
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<p>These passages are typical of Knausgaard, who <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2022/10/why-novel-matters-imperialism-absolute-karl-ove-knausgaard">believes</a> the power of the novel resides in its unique ability to pull </p>
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<p>any abstract conception about life, whether political, philosophical or scientific in nature, into the human sphere, where it no longer stands alone but collides with myriad impressions, thoughts, emotions and actions. </p>
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<p>This accounts for the wildly digressive shape of The Morning Star, which is best understood as a contemporary spin on a tried and tested literary genre: <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/06/25/the-gimmick-of-the-novel-of-ideas/">the novel of ideas</a>. </p>
<h2>Wolves of Eternity: ‘deliberately challenging’</h2>
<p>Published in 2022 and translated into English in 2023, The Wolves of Eternity shares several thematic and formal traits with The Morning Star. Like its immediate predecessor, the novel, which starts in 1986, contains a number of first-person narratives. Two in particular stand out. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Syvert Løyning has been released from Norwegian military service. He has just moved back home and needs to earn some cash. He eventually finds work as an undertaker. One day, while at home, he happens upon a stash of old letters from his late father to a lover living in the Soviet Union. He gets them translated, and discovers he has a half-sister, Alevtina, who works as a scientist. They eventually meet up in Putin’s Moscow. </p>
<p>The novel ends on an ambiguous and vaguely ominous note, with Syvert leaving Russia and heading back to Norway, which is in the throes of an extreme heat-wave. The morning star is hanging in the sky:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I slung my jacket over my arm, picked up my suitcase and bag and went down to the lobby, where my taxi was already waiting for me. Outside, the light from the new star shone in the grey sky above us, as if through a shroud. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>If anything, The Wolves of Eternity is even more ambitious than the book that came before it. The Morning Star is set in Norway and takes place over two consecutive days in late August. The plot of The Wolves of Eternity unfolds across Europe over decades. </p>
<p>Clocking in at a formidable 789 pages, it dwarfs its predecessor in length, too. Like The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity looks to tackle the most daunting and momentous of topics. </p>
<p>The meaning of life and the undoing of death. Scientific and political revolution. The nature of atoms and the history of the cosmos. <a href="https://theconversation.com/where-have-all-the-luddites-gone-exploring-what-makes-us-human-and-whether-modern-technology-threatens-to-destroy-it-202756">Transhumanism</a> and the existence of God. These are but a few of the matters Knausgaard concerns himself with in his new novel. Trees feature, too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All organisms lived in such pockets of time, whose settings differed from species to species, in which their life cycles ran their course, complete for every individual, filled to the brim with life in time. The trees had no brain either, nor any central nervous system, and this of course defined their existence too, the way systems of sensory perception defined the existence of all things living on earth, meaning that the world looked quite different to a fly than it did to a cow or a tree.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I quote at length from Alevtina’s narrative because it’s important to give you a sense of what you are getting yourself into, if you decide to take the plunge into Knausgaard’s latest. Like My Struggle, it was written at impressive pace to deadline.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Karl-Ove-Knausgaard#:%7E:text=Conversations%20with%20Karl%20Ove%20Knausgaard%20is%20a%20collection%20of%20twenty,writer%20and%20a%20daring%20interviewee.">Knausgaard accepts</a> that The Wolves of Eternity is a very challenging book to read. This is mainly because the plot, in the author’s words, “moves very, very, very slowly”.</p>
<p>Some readers may bristle at (or even be put off by) the prospect of this. But the more time I spent with the novel, the more I came to appreciate that its length and pacing serve a specific, indeed vital, function. </p>
<p>It forces the reader to take stock, to grapple with precisely the sorts of complications Knausgaard is interested in pursing in his work. </p>
<p>This, admittedly, is not for everyone. Still, I think there is something truly remarkable, even admirable, about Knausgaard’s willingness to stick to his guns when it comes to seeing what the novel form is capable of doing and containing. </p>
<p>As to what comes next, I’m not entirely sure. But I’m quietly confident it’ll be suitably epic.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215700/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Wolves of Eternity is remarkable – and deliberately challenging. Ranging across time and space, it muses on thinking trees, Putin’s Moscow, a Norwegian heatwave and the undead.Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/526992016-01-14T19:21:57Z2016-01-14T19:21:57ZFriday essay: Can you keep a secret? Family memoirs break taboos – and trust<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108122/original/image-20160114-2359-1vjaatu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Memoirists who write about divorce, addiction or suicide can start important conversations – and leave families feeling exposed or humiliated. Where do you draw the line?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">fosa./Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The television premiere of Benjamin Law’s adapted memoirs <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/programs/the-family-law">The Family Law</a> may have had us laughing last night, but a foray into the recent past of the family memoir genre reveals an ethical minefield of sibling conflicts, clashing memories, and unwanted exposés. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=830&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=830&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=830&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1043&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1043&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1043&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Benjamin Law’s memoir The Family Law (2010) has been adapted for TV.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Black Inc</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>In response to biographies scrutinizing his marriage to Sylvia Plath, the <a href="http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/brilliance-with-blind-spots-1-699072">poet Ted Hughes said</a>, “I hope each of us owns the facts of his or her own life”. In family memoir such hopes are dashed. </p>
<p>When writers tell the story of their lives they also divulge the experiences of siblings, parents, and lovers. They make the private public, often with a unique spin on events and not always with the consent of those involved. </p>
<p>Given the intimate nature of family life these tangles are perhaps unavoidable. The facts of our lives are always shared. </p>
<p>But life writing still raises important ethical questions. The memoirist’s candid account of family struggles can destigmatise taboo topics – such as divorce, sexuality, and suicide – but at what cost to those whose lives are laid bare? What should come first for a writer, loyalty to the truth of their own experience or respect for the privacy of others? </p>
<p>These questions have troubled a series of high-profile memoirs and autobiographical novels. Writers such as <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-karl-ove-knausgaard-cant-stop-writing-1446688727">Karl Ove Knausgaard</a>, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3671392/Hanif-Kureishi-A-life-laid-bare.html">Hanif Kureishi</a>, <a href="http://www.lilybrett.com/">Lily Brett</a>, and <a href="http://www.davidsedarisbooks.com/">David Sedaris</a> have upset family members by using personal details in their literary works. </p>
<p>These cases alert us to the difficulty of narrating shared life stories. How do we get to the truth when people remember the past differently and have conflicting investments in how the story is told? </p>
<p>But we might also see the potential social benefit of tell-all family memoirs. By representing the conflicts and silences that families live with writers can introduce more diverse and honest accounts of family life into public culture.</p>
<h2>Whose struggle?</h2>
<p>By the time literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard published the first volume in his six part autobiographical series, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7147831-min-kamp-1">My Struggle</a> (2009), several members of his family were no longer speaking to him. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Karl Ove Knausgaard’s memoir Min Kamp (My Struggle) (2009) caused serious family conflict.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Forlaget okober</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Norwegian writer’s aim was to describe the banality and drama of his daily life in raw detail. Critics have hailed the result as <a href="http://flavorwire.com/438468/karl-ove-knausgards-my-struggle-is-the-rare-21st-century-work-of-art-were-forced-to-savor">Proust for the 21st century</a>. Readers have said they feel as though he has written their innermost secrets onto the page. For Knausgaard’s family this is more than just a feeling. It is their reality. </p>
<p>Knausgaard doesn’t pull any punches. While much of the series is devoted to vivid descriptions of ordinary life, like brewing a cup of tea or going for a run, there are also details that most of us would shudder to have on the record. </p>
<p>Gossipy, post-dinner party conversations that he and his wife have about their guests are recounted verbatim. The rancid excrement that stains his incontinent grandmother’s couch, his father’s descent into squalor and alcoholism, the spoken and unspoken insults of his marital rows, the fumbling sexual encounters of his youth, his second wife’s struggle with bipolar, his feelings of frustration and boredom as a parent: it’s all there on the page.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, when Knausgaard sent copies of the first manuscript to his family, <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/karl-ove-knausgaard-a-traitor-to-his-family/news-story/8588890843c7d69a30101aadc4e4d4a1">they were unhappy</a>. His paternal uncle tried to halt publication, threatened to sue, and attacked the book in the Norwegian press. Tonje Aursland, Knausgaard’s ex-wife, recorded a <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/knausgards-ekskone-snakker-ut-1.7317286">radio program</a> about the experience of having her private life exposed in the novel, and then again in all of the media scrutiny that followed. </p>
<p>Knausgaard admits that the series also took a toll on his current marriage. The relentless attention caused his wife, Linda Boström, <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/august/1375315200/james-button/my-struggle">to have a breakdown</a>, which Knausgaard details in the final episode of My Struggle. </p>
<p>Knausgaard made a decision to publish a tell-all book. He exposes his own struggles to be a good husband, father, writer, brother, and son with disarming candour, sometimes even to the point of self-humiliation. </p>
<p>But the people who share his life did not make this decision. They didn’t know that their words and actions, sometimes at very vulnerable moments, would be published let alone read by millions of people, almost half a million in Norway alone. In a country of five million, that’s roughly one in ten people who know the intimate details of your private life. </p>
<p>The author is well aware of his indiscretion and what it costs him and his family. “I do feel guilty,” <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9104793/Hay-Festival-Karl-Ove-Knausgard-on-A-Death-in-the-Family.html">he has said</a>, “I do. Especially about my family, my children. I write about them and I know that this will haunt them as well through their lives”. Knausgaard also <a href="http://n.inklive.com/magazine/features/2013/06/interview-eith-karl-ove-knausgyrd#q5jKr8dtyGwwVXFD.99">understands</a> his father’s family’s response to the novels:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wish this could have been done without hurting anyone. They say they never want to see or talk to me again. I accept that. I have offended them, humiliated them just by writing about this. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Familiar characters</h2>
<p>British novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi is less remorseful about using his family as source material. In 2008 his sister published a letter in the Independent titled <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/keep-me-out-of-your-novels-hanif-kureishis-sister-has-had-enough-790839.html">Keep Me Out of your Novels</a>. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hanif Kureishi’s ex-wife accused him of writing about their marriage in Intimacy (1998).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Faber and Faber</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>She claims that most of his works use family members as characters. These include his parents in <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/302998.The_Buddha_of_Suburbia">The Buddha of Suburbia</a> (1991), his uncle in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091578/">My Beautiful Laundrette</a> (1985), his ex-girlfriend in the film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093913/">Sammy and Rosie Get Laid</a> (1987), and an account of leaving his wife and children for a younger woman in his novel <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153418.Intimacy">Intimacy</a> (1998). </p>
<p>Yasmin Kureishi is most upset about her brother’s portrayal of her in the 2003 film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0323298/">The Mother</a>. “It made excruciating viewing,” she says, “It was like he’d swallowed some of my life, then spat it back out.” </p>
<p>After reading Intimacy, Tracy Schoffield, Kureishi’s ex-wife, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/movies/features/hanifkureishi.htm">criticised him</a> for thinly veiling the break-up of their marriage as fiction: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He says it’s a novel. But that’s an absolute abdication of responsibility. You may as well call it a fish.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In defence, Kureishi <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3671392/Hanif-Kureishi-A-life-laid-bare.html">argues</a> that by writing candidly about his life he gives voice to a collective experience: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why would you vilify me? I’m just the messenger. I’m writing a book about divorce – an experience that many people have had - or separation, children, all that. … That book was a record of that experience. </p>
<p>I don’t see why I should be vilified for writing an account of it. … If you’re an artist your job is to represent the world as you see it – that’s what you do.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The same has been said of Knausgaard’s work. He disregards the privacy of his family. But he also challenges the rules of what we can and cannot say. He drags the darkness of our everyday thoughts into the light. In doing so, he de-shames social taboos, or at least offers the truth of what he thinks rather than what he should think. He sees the role of an artist as that of a social truth-teller. </p>
<p>But the tension around family memoirs brings into question the idea that an artist is simply documenting the truth. In some cases families are not upset that their lives are being represented so much as that the representation is, to them, inaccurate. </p>
<h2>That’s not what I remember…</h2>
<p>Can the memory of one person capture the true complexity of social events? What happens when people recall things differently? Kureishi’s sister and mother insist that he is not simply a messenger. His descriptions of his roots support the identity he desires in the present. Yasmin Kureishi, for example, recollects a very different image of her father than the one her brother paints in The Buddha of Suburbia. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Doris Brett wrote Eating the Underworld (2001) to tell her own version of her childhood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Vintage</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the radio documentary Knausgaard’s ex-wife recorded in 2010, <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/knausgards-ekskone-snakker-ut-1.7317286">Tonje’s Version</a>, she says what annoys her is that her memories will always be secondary to his work of art. People assume they know the truth of what happened in her life because they have read My Struggle. </p>
<p>Doris Brett was so opposed to her sister Lily Brett’s autobiographical renderings of their childhood that she published her own <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5428390-eating-the-underworld">counter-story</a>. Lily Brett has written novels and essays based on her experience of growing up in Melbourne as the <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-interview-lily-brett-20120927-26m51.html">daughter of Holocaust survivors</a>. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5428390-eating-the-underworld">Eating the Underworld</a> (2001), Doris claims that her sister wrongly depicts their mother as depressed and sometimes cruel. Doris doesn’t recall her mother screaming in the night. The two sisters seem to remember their mother as two very different women. </p>
<p>When Lily Brett and her father received copies of Eating the Underworld, Lily <a href="http://karenkissane.com/2001/09/a-literary-feud-born-of-family-trauma/">issued a statement</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There are some things not worth replying to. This book is one of them. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Her father, 85-year-old Max Brett <a href="http://search.informit.com.au.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/search;rs=1;rec=1;action=showCompleteRec">said</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This book by my daughter Doris, is a book of madness. … I recognise very little of our family life in this book.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Doris Brett chalked their public response up as further evidence of the bullying and favouritism she describes in her book.</p>
<p>For Yasmin Kureishi, Tonje Aursland, and Doris Brett the issue is not simply about privacy. They are all willing to tell their own stories in the public eye. Rather they want their life represented accurately, as they remember it. They insist that there is more to the shared story of their family than what is seen through the quixotic eyes of the memoirist. But of course the same question of memory’s unreliability also applies to them. </p>
<h2>Tangled lives</h2>
<p>With tongue in cheek, David Sedaris addresses the blurring of memory and imagination by describing his family memoirs as “<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/david-sedaris-offers-realish/">realish</a>”. Sedaris has forged a successful career by recounting the foibles of his family life in best-selling collections such as <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10176.Dress_Your_Family_in_Corduroy_and_Denim">Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim</a> (2004). </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">David Sedaris’ book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004) was the first his sister Tiffany allowed him to include her in.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Little Brown & Co.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Along the way, his sister, Tiffany, requested to be left out of his stories. In a 2004 <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/08/15/sister_in_a_glass_house?pg=full">interview</a> with the Boston Globe, she said “I was the only [sibling] who told him not to put me in his books. I don’t trust David to have boundaries”. Like Aursland, she became upset by the consequences of the stories. People read them as fact, and an invitation to discuss her private life. </p>
<p>In 2014, Sedaris came under fire for an essay he published in the New Yorker, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/28/now-we-are-five">Now We Are Five</a>. The essay describes the Sedaris family’s attempt to deal with their grief over Tiffany’s suicide. </p>
<p>A friend of Tiffany, Michael Knoblach, published a letter in the Somerville Journal accusing Sedaris of ignoring her request not to be a subject in his stories and exploiting her death for artistic and monetary gain. (The letter has since been taken down, but a similar version is reposted in the comments <a href="https://tealeavesdogears.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/sharing-someone-elses-grief-a-question-of-tact-with-david-sedaris/">here</a>). </p>
<p>Should Sedaris have published Now We Are Five after his sister’s death? Some may argue that he should have respected her request not to be represented in his stories. On the other hand, the story is also about her parents, and her siblings. It speaks candidly about grief, guilt, and the way death jolts us into reality. Even when faced with estrangement and loss, the life of the family remains intertwined. </p>
<h2>The Family Law</h2>
<p>Australia’s own David Sedaris, Benjamin Law, has written a memoir about growing up in a large Chinese-Australian family in 1990s Queensland. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8293532-the-family-law">The Family Law</a> (2010) was adapted for television and premiered on SBS yesterday. Law’s memoir offers a funny take on the everyday quirks of family life, but it also deals with sensitive issues such as his parents’ divorce. </p>
<p>The Family Law is unlikely to draw the kind of scandal that greeted Kureishi or Knausgaard. In a recent keynote at the <a href="https://iabaasiapacific.wordpress.com/">Asia Pacific Auto/Biography Association’s Conference</a>, Law noted that when he gave his family the manuscript to read before publication, they were mostly concerned with correcting his grammar. Law’s father insisted that audiences are smart enough to know the story is told from only one point of view, and with comedic license. </p>
<p>Law may win our hearts with the help of his siblings. They weren’t to know their teenage travails would be re-staged on national television. It might also be strange for his parents to hear the public weighing in on their divorce. But Law’s story will be a welcome addition to a television landscape that currently doesn’t come close to representing the diversity and richness of Australian families. </p>
<h2>Social secrets</h2>
<p>In her research about <a href="http://soc.sagepub.com/content/45/4/539.refs">family secrets</a>, sociologist Carol Smart talks about two kinds of families: families “we live with” and families “we live by”. Families we live with are our actual families, which may be ridden with tensions. Families we live by are the ideal versions of happy, cohesive families that Smart says we draw from popular culture. </p>
<p>We tell family secrets, Smart thinks, to bring the reality closer to the ideal. We edit certain experiences from the public eye so our family fits with dominant ideas about what a family should be. </p>
<p>In this context, to reveal a family secret might be to refuse pressures to pretend. To disclose conflicts within families can open up a space to talk honestly about family life, to question social norms, and acknowledge different kinds of relationships. It can be a way of bringing the ideal closer to the reality.</p>
<p>Revealing family secrets can be insensitive and ethically dubious when the teller is not the only one who has to live with the repercussions. But it can also be a way to rethink the reasons why we keep certain things secret in the first place. </p>
<p>For family memoirists, where is the line between rattling social proprieties and respecting others’ privacy? This is not an easy question to answer. And the answer would be different in each case. </p>
<p>But it is worth remembering that the true stories that enrich our public sphere are often drawn from the intimate and shared lives of their authors. It is not only Law who gives generously of his life to bring a new story to Australian viewers this week, but also the supporting cast, his family.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52699/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ashley Barnwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>True stories that enrich our public sphere are often drawn from the intimate and shared lives of their authors. Where is the line between rattling social proprieties and respecting others’ privacy?Ashley Barnwell, Lecturer in Sociology, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/462042015-09-01T20:11:03Z2015-09-01T20:11:03ZMy struggle is yours: why failure is the new literary success<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93401/original/image-20150831-13172-e3ovuk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Karl Ove Knausgaard's work strives deliberately towards constructing "real" experience – with all the failure that entails. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">editrrix</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>What happens when novelists actively incorporate the idea of failure in their books?</p>
<p>We generally understand failure as a negative attribute, particularly when looking at politics, the economy – and, yes, art. As individuals, we are driven by thoughts of success and achievement, so it makes sense that failure might make us feel slightly uneasy. </p>
<p>Turning that unease into something aesthetically pleasing is no mean feat, and yet, that’s where we are with the work of several well-known contemporary authors.</p>
<h2>Failing to speak</h2>
<p>In 2007, British novelist <a href="http://www.jonathanpegg.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=102">Tom McCarthy</a>, with philosopher <a href="http://www.egs.edu/faculty/simon-critchley/biography/">Simon Critchley</a>, issued what they called a <a href="https://tc3-production.s3.amazonaws.com/upload/52228de602e3e620b1000205/sfinsnydeclaration.pdf">Joint Statement of Inauthenticity</a>, in which they argued that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the essence of poetry is […] of trying (and failing) to speak about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>While this might not seem to relate to the novel, what they were setting up there was a relationship between “trying to speak” and “failing to speak”. </p>
<p>One of the pervading motifs in McCarthy’s novels is an emphasis on some form of failure. In his first novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101334.Remainder">Remainder</a> (2005), the narrator tries, and fails, to reenact a moment of perfection. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2051161.Men_in_Space?from_search=true&search_version=service">Men in Space</a> (2007), McCarthy’s character Ivan Manasek forges a stolen Byzantine painting in an attempt to perfectly recreate the original object. In McCarthy’s most recent novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22543699-satin-island?from_search=true&search_version=service">Satin Island</a> (2015), the narrator, U, is tasked with writing The Great Report of our age.</p>
<p>Long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize, this novel is, at its core, about the failure to write. The Great Report’s essential function is one of identification, one that “name[s] what’s taking place right now”. </p>
<p>U’s boss, Peyman, asks him to “[s]peak its secret name”. For U, this is rather like trying to name “Rumpelstilskin”, but it seems that McCarthy is directly engaging with the enduring aim of poetry to “speak to the thing”, even if he fails.</p>
<h2>Trying and struggling</h2>
<p>We don’t always feel pleased with artistic expressions of failure. <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n12/ben-lerner/diary">In an article</a> in June for the London Review of Books, American poet and novelist <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ben-lerner">Ben Lerner</a> suggested that the reason that we might “dislike or despise or hate poems” is because, in some way, “they are – every single one of them – failures”. </p>
<p>In Lerner’s first novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11100788-leaving-the-atocha-station?from_search=true&search_version=service">Leaving the Atocha Station</a> (2011), the narrator, Adam, is obsessed with artistic and linguistic failures because they allow him to experience an almost transcendent ambiguity. While in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20613582-10?from_search=true&search_version=service">10:04</a> (2014), the narrator, Ben, often addresses the second person – “You have failed to reconcile the realism of my body with the ethereality of the trees” – despite never being heard.</p>
<p>For Lerner, the “you” occupies “a collective person who didn’t yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate registers, were nevertheless addressed” – or, in other words, an audience that he will always fail to reach. </p>
<p>But it is <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Ove-Knausgaard">Karl Ove Knausgaard</a>’s six-part literary project, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26126190-my-struggle?from_search=true&search_version=service">My Struggle</a>, that is perhaps the most overt example of such an attention to failure. It offers a prosaic, not poetic, assessment of failure. </p>
<p>Indeed, it is a project that strives deliberately towards constructing “real” experience. In framing the work as a novel, Knausgaard <a href="http://www.omnivoracious.com/2014/06/well-how-did-i-get-here-author-karl-ove-knausgaard-on-my-struggle.html">has claimed</a> that he was able to “use [him]self as a kind of raw material,” enacting “an existential search” of the self. </p>
<p>The “struggle” suggested in the title references, in part, the struggle to write without shame to create something of value. </p>
<h2>An Eastern perspective</h2>
<p>Hungarian author <a href="http://www.thewhitereview.org/contributor-bio/laszlo-krasznahorkai/">László Krasznahorkai</a> won the <a href="http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/winner-2015-man-booker-international-prize">2015 Man Booker International Prize</a>. His most recent novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16241799-seiobo-there-below">Seiobo There Below</a> (2013), introduces the reader to failure in slightly different terms, through the aesthetic of <em><a href="http://nobleharbor.com/tea/chado/WhatIsWabi-Sabi.htm">wabi-sabi</a></em>. </p>
<p>Rooted in ancient Japanese tea ceremonies from the 15th century, <em>wabi-sabi</em> recognises beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and incompletion. To a Western eye, beauty is often equated with perfection, but for Krasznahorkai, fleeting moments are established as beautiful even if they go on to decay. </p>
<p>The novel’s first vignette describes the magnificent beauty of a white heron hunting, in contrast to industrial Kyoto. </p>
<p>But it is <em>wabi-sabi</em>’s focus on “the now” that makes it interesting when thinking about contemporary writing. What might be expected from a novel that reflects on its own inability to say things successfully? Or, more pressingly, that constructs failure as an aesthetically-pleasing subject? </p>
<p>By focusing on failure, contemporary novelists might find they can wield surprisingly equal critical, ethical, political, and aesthetic power. </p>
<p>Perhaps failure is not so bad after all.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46204/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexandra Kingston-Reese does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As individuals, we are driven by thoughts of success, so it makes sense that failure might make us feel slightly uneasy. And yet failure – and what that means in writing – is having a moment.Alexandra Kingston-Reese, Sessional Lecturer and Tutor in English Literature and Rhetoric, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/361352015-01-26T19:29:33Z2015-01-26T19:29:33ZTying the Knausgaardian knot: struggle, Scandinavian-style<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69449/original/image-20150119-14503-1bzkn2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Scandinavian cultural exports are showing the world a different mode of representing struggle, crime, and death.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">edittrix/Flickr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Norwegian writer <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3020048.Karl_Ove_Knausg_rd">Karl Ove Knausgaard</a> is the most recent export of a particularly Scandinavian expression of personal struggle. This ethos of resistance to larger socio-political forces, coupled with individual vulnerability, has become a Scandinavian trademark. It is especially noticeable in recent crime TV drama such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0826760/">The Killing</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1733785/?ref_=nv_sr_1">The Bridge</a>. </p>
<p>In most American crime drama, vulnerability exists but only to be overcome. In the Scandinavian narrative, by contrast, vulnerability is emphasised as that which makes the hero a better investigator or homicide detective. </p>
<p>The popular Danish crime drama The Killing starring Sofie Gråbøl as Sarah Lund also weaves a multitude of stories around its core narrative. It gives the background of all the murdered victim’s family, as well as the politics of Danish society. Lund displays equal measures of strength and vulnerability. </p>
<p>Who will forget Lund’s knitted jumper that seemed to emphasise a fragile humanity adrift in a sea of corruption? It isn’t a coincidence that the jumper is from the struggling Faroe Islands, still under the sovereignty of Denmark.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y5t4Aczm_fM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for The Killing, season 1.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Series 3 of the popular Swedish-Danish crime drama The Bridge will be released this year. It features Saga Norén (Sofia Helin) as the homicide detective who shows symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome. The word saga itself is the Icelandic equivalent of One Thousand and One Nights. </p>
<p>True to its protagonist’s name, The Bridge offers a complex network of stories. Even when one aspect of the crime is resolved, numerous other interlinked stories emerge.</p>
<h2>Stalling death through narrative</h2>
<p>As in crime fiction, a dead body is also at the centre of Knausgaard’s ongoing autobiographical project My Struggle. The author’s father died a slow alcoholic death. The series began as a result of Knausgaard’s effort to liberate himself from the influence of his abusive father. </p>
<p>Apart from documenting his struggle, the book itself has met with great opposition due to the nature of his disclosures. These arguments also end up being incorporated into later volumes.</p>
<p>My Struggle begins in 2008, a decade after the father’s death. Feeling the symptoms of an emerging midlife crisis, Knausgaard feared that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. </p>
<p>Instead of simply accepting his fate, Knausgaard chose a far more complex option. He took on the challenge of writing out his predicament. Without ever denouncing his father, no detail is spared. By relentlessly giving voice to his struggle, it is as if he stalls death for 3,600 pages. Knausgaard is the Scandinavian Scheherazade who prolonged her life by getting the King hooked on stories.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69454/original/image-20150119-14484-m36g7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69454/original/image-20150119-14484-m36g7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69454/original/image-20150119-14484-m36g7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69454/original/image-20150119-14484-m36g7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69454/original/image-20150119-14484-m36g7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69454/original/image-20150119-14484-m36g7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69454/original/image-20150119-14484-m36g7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Boyhood Island, the third volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Random House</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>My Struggle has received great acclaim in Scandinavia and in the English-speaking world. The first three volumes currently available in English translation have topped bestseller lists in the US and UK. The fourth volume is going to be released in April this year. </p>
<p>Knausgaard’s prose style impresses at the level of detail. Where a century ago Proust famously rendered the experience of eating a pastry with marvellous exactitude, Knausgaard does the same when describing seemingly mundane events: a drop-off at daycare, a visit to the toilet, the passing of clouds.</p>
<p>The heart of the struggle becomes apparent in the sixth and final volume of the book. This volume (I read it in Swedish translation) includes an essay of 400 pages about Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle is published as Min Kamp in Norwegian) as well as several lengthy theoretical musings on the role of literature today. What emerges is a powerful riposte to prevailing academic notions of the self as product of its surroundings rather than an agent in its own right.</p>
<p>What’s heroic about Knausgaard’s project is that he resists this theoretical dictum. In My Struggle, subjective agency is radically foregrounded in the way it resists fate. Death, to Knausgaard, becomes synonymous with the ease with which human beings are absorbed into the social setting they have produced. </p>
<p>Death means merging with consumer objects, sheepishly subscribing to fashionable ideologies, giving up, losing one’s identity. Knausgaard’s “I” refuses to submit to these pressures.</p>
<h2>A Scandinavian attitude</h2>
<p>What do Knausgaard and the female investigators in The Bridge and The Killing have in common? </p>
<p>Saga and Sara unravel complex patterns of crime by attempting to get under the skin of the perpetrators and to think like them. Knausgaard similarly takes second-guessing his detractors to new heights. </p>
<p>Ultimately, what they share is the ability to see their own vulnerability mirrored in their adversaries. Rather than attempting to disentangle life’s complexities, the Scandinavian ethos of struggle piles them on, like the densely knitted yarn in Sarah Lund’s jumper.</p>
<p>The attraction of these Scandinavian versions of conflict is in the way they refuse easy solutions to intractable problems. They engage audiences around the world because they do not offer a black and white view of the world. Rather, they offer more nuanced points of view and therefore more humanity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/36135/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sofia Ahlberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is the most recent export of a particularly Scandinavian expression of personal struggle. This ethos of resistance to larger socio-political forces, coupled with…Sofia Ahlberg, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.