The end finally in sight

Except it’s not really, is it? In the time since book one was first published in English in 2013 (it debuted in Norway in 2009), Knausgaard has published a book of correspondence with a friend in Brazil, about the 2014 World Cup (Home and Away), and has released another series of books, Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer, brief musings about the mundane and the profound — not much of a stretch for him, one imagines.

And though they’re clearly ‘Knausgaard’ they’re not the frustrating, difficult, impossible, charming, witty, emotional ‘Knausgaard’ we get to know intimately in My Struggle — Min Kamp in his native language, to give it its original, controversy-aping title.

Book six — The End — was published in 2013 but is only arriving in English-reading hands five years later. Knausgaard is a literary phenomenon, whether you enjoy his reflections and humdrum meanderings or find him tedious — the Australian writer Richard Flanagan says that My Struggle “marks the moment 21st-century literature begins”.

One hopes there aren’t many copycat ‘Struggles’ coming, though — how many Knausgaard readers would want to put themselves through all this again? We have indulged Knausgaard in this fictionalised story of his life — it’s hard to imagine people picking up The End who aren’t already fans, even if there are sighs of resignation at going through the emotional rollercoaster with him one last time. And at over 1,100 pages, it’s easily the longest book of the half-dozen.

Alas, it’s also by far the most disappointing of the half-dozen. Knausgaard is writing it while the first books in the series are being released in Norway. We’ve heard the stories, that My Struggle divided his family, led to friends cutting contact, leaving one part of Knausgaard’s life in tatters as the other half became celebrity. The End details the jitters, doubts, and threats that Knausgaard faced pre-publication.

We find Karl Ove worried. It’s a few days before the first book, about his father’s death, is released and his paternal uncle, Gunnar, is angry at the details depicted therein. Gunnar goes beyond questioning its authenticity — which critics and readers have been doing for almost a decade now — and calls Knausgaard’s writing a pack of lies.

That first book sees Karl Ove and his brother dealing with the death of their father. An alcoholic, he died in his own filth at his mother’s house. Or so Knausgaard has written.

But Gunnar has left him questioning everything, on the eve of the book’s release. The End is akin to ‘Inside Baseball’: we get to look behind the scenes at the publishing process, the whys and whos of what Knausgaard has taken out and left in, the initial responses from the characters — the real people — to My Struggle.

And we get answers: Knausgaard calls the books novels. He says the form penetrates our “veils of habit and familiarity simply by describing things in a slightly different way”. The conversations, he admits, are his own interpretations. Names have been changed. And some situations probably didn’t occur. This he has come to accept.

On Gunnar’s incessant challenges though, going so far as to threaten to sue the publishers, Karl Ove doubts himself — Gunnar is so strident in his views that he decides he must be right: “In which case I was unreliable. In itself this was a crushing admission. But had I been unreliable in everything I had written?” He wrestles with this problem for hundreds of pages.

Knausgaard’s writing style will never win him any awards in itself. The tediously long passages about cooking, shopping, and babysitting will have turned many readers away by now. Why exactly has he written in such a drawn-out manner? “Everything had its own significance, that was what culture was. The fabric of a pair of trousers was sig

nificant, the width of a trouser leg was significant, the pattern in the curtain hunt in front of a window was significant, the sudden lowering of a gaze was significant. The particular way a word was pronounced was significant. What a person knew about one thing or another was also significant. Culture charged the world with meaning by establishing differences within in, and those differences, in which everything of value existed, varied from culture to culture.”

He ponders about the very essence of writing, telling us that “literature’s job is not to be exhaustive but to construct the inexhaustible”. He details the Ozymandius notion of writing that stands the test of time. “Only in fiction is there any expectation of a unique I, whose greatest and most important constraint is not to imitate, not to copy anyone else or say the same as them, at least not in the same way. The more distinctive a writer is, the greater he or she is perceived to be.”

Knausgaard also addresses, ad nauseum, the title of the series, My Struggle, and its obvious connotations. Over hundreds of pages he ruminates on the rise of Naziism and how the Germans didn’t laugh at Hitler’s ideas but embraced them as earnest.

Weaved throughout this hundreds-of-pages-long aside are reminisces about his father (he’s still not over it; he never will be), philosophical discussions that might be more at home in an undergraduate’s paper on Jordan Peterson (“Identity is culture, culture is language, language is morality”); and thoughts on the greats of literature, like Joyce’s Ulysses. Depending on your viewpoint, this ponderously long section is either the very essence of the My Struggle series or its nadir — anyway, it can easily be skipped.

Over the last 300 or so pages, Knausgaard is writing the final book or two as the series is being released. He analyses the processes that went into their creation. For book one, he reveals it was too aggressive and almost slanderous.

I had been frustrated and angry when I wrote it, and the frustration and anger had occasionally infused it in ways that would damage both me and those I had written about.

Alongside all this, as his literary star is rising exponentially, his wife, a writer in her own right, is struggling mentally. It is Knausgaard at his very best. Too revealing, he offers intimate looks at both his and his wife’s worst aspects. We judge him for not being comforting enough — he prefers to shed tears alone, behind closed doors — and we wonder what we would do in a similar situation. He wonders: “Why couldn’t we get our bloody kids to shut up?” He is awful. He is us.

“I never knew where what I was writing would end,” confesses Knausgaard.

He has written about the death of his father, his personal journey from being a child through adolescence to fatherhood himself, his loves and addictions along the way. He has shown us the worst sides of his character (did he sexually assault a young pupil during his teaching days in his early 20s, the Norwegian media demands to know as the books are released; how could he shake his children?) and brought us along as he seeks to complete his singular goal in life: “I wanted nothing more than to write and be an author.”

Yet the final line in the series concludes: “... I will revel in, truly revel in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.”

How else did you expect it to end?

The End (My Struggle: Book 6)

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Translated by Martin Aitken and Don Bartlett

Harvill Secker,

HB €17.99