Karl Ove Knausgaard

Because the reviews of Knausgaard's My Struggle have been uniformly enthusiastic, in many cases, ecstatic, I was curious to sample it.  Although so far there are six volumes, each hundreds of pages long, I took the plunge.  The author is writing a detailed account sometimes in recollection otherwise contemporaneous with the events of the daily life of a man named Karl Ove Knausgaard, and the reader may presume, if he chooses, that the author and the protagonist are one and the same person.  Which may, indeed, be true.  I did not swoon nor surrender to the narrative in the course of the first volume; it is a strangely dispassionate description of everything he experiences, everything, every movement involved in spreading butter on bread, for instance. Still, I was sufficiently curious to finish it and pick up the second. Knausgaard is a Norwegian writer who lives in Stockholm with his wife and children, or at least that is what we read.  I cannot say I like him at all; he is self absorbed to an incredible degree.  His is the life of a new father who has undertaken to stay home with the baby so his wife can finish an advanced degree, at least that is the circumstance of the first and second volumes, although in the second we get the background of his meeting Linda, her pregnancy, and his decision to stay home with the baby.  He wants a life of disorder, claims that is what is the essence of Norway, condemns the excessive need for order and control he finds among the Swedes.  He and his male friends drink an extraordinary amount, sometimes what we would call binge drinking, and experiences again and again what we call blackouts, considered in our culture to be a symptom of alcoholism.  Nothing of that crosses the mind of Knausgaard, and while he sometimes feels guilty for his drunken binges, and his wife seems often disgusted, they never discuss drinking as a problem. But then perhaps that is the essence of marriage, that long suffering silence in the face of intolerable behaviors, the inevitability of enduring. Hh tells us that his father drunk himself to death, literally in the last couple of years of his life, while living with his aged mother, who seems to have accepted the situation passively.  His wife has suffered from extreme depression, suicidal impulses, the sort of disorder that one would imagine, I at any rate, would lead one to consider several times over whether marriage to such a woman, however charming and lovely she might  be, was a good idea.  On the whole, for an American the novel is intriguing, for presenting persons of artistic talent and intellect, who never summon psychology as a means of analyzing their situations, who often deliver abstract maxims, philosophical truths, as somehow relevant to the human condition, more especially their personal lives.  So far the best scene for me is in the second volume,  the long account of the birthing of their first child, an intimate scene of childbirth, which impressed me mightily because I was not allowed to be present at the birth of my children (not that I would have wanted to be!).  I very much read along with real empathy the many many accounts of this male who grits his teeth and undertakes parenting and childcare to the degree few males ever do, because of a pact he made with his wife so she could finish school.  Any male who has become a father will find this a redeeming struggle for the poor guy.