My Struggle

"Not an easy task. The amazing Karl Ove Knausgård came to the craft with a programme—to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth. In my opinion that is a dead end, both morally and existentially. But a programme is—thank God—not necessarily in concert with the end result. Said Clausewitz (among others): the first casualty of war is the truth. And what miracle hasn’t come out of a misconception—or an accident, as Isaac Newton could have put it? The Struggle is something as rare as a well-composed, sometimes brilliantly written, and organised stream of consciousness which lasts, as you said, for 3,000 pages. It certainly is—but Knausgård manages brilliantly to keep order in chaos, his language is clear, clean and floating like a river in another river’s bed, the one of a tradition that he will not himself always recognise. “The smaller the time-discrepancy between writing and reading, the more dynamic the reading experience seems to be” He moves his prose effortlessly between the trivial and the ecclesiastical. Here is everyday life in all its brilliant dreariness combined with learned essays on the most extraordinary philosophical topics. And although I prefer his surgical pen dissecting the triviality of everyday life, the glowing light of it would not be so bright without the more theoretical essays. Let me say something about time, since you mentioned Proust . By being able to write as fast as Knausgård does, without losing the grip and intensity of it, he manages to convey a certain and quite extraordinary flow to the reading process—I am not sure how to put it, but the smaller the time-discrepancy between writing and reading, the more dynamic the reading experience seems to be. It has something to do with freshness, I think, close contact between the writer’s and the reader’s experience. I guess this is at least part of the answer to why so many readers get addicted to his work. In addition to—of course—to being the reason so many people recognise themselves in his work; programme or not, he has managed to paint a highly gripping and provocative picture of our time. (Working fast is—by the way—not something I would recommend, unless you are Knausgård.) The word artless does not immediately ring a bell for me, unless in the sense that he is trying to free himself from the tradition, from the grip of all predecessors—and who doesn’t try to do that? By and large he seems sometimes more arty to me than, for instance, Dag or Lars…—but maybe the people who describe his prose as artless are the people who have subscribed to his programme? He is right of course—without failing you get nowhere. And when you stop failing and think you are finally educated, you are not only no longer a writer, you are no longer alive. That does not mean, though, that you have to publish all your failures and disasters—stealing time from the readers is not a decent line of work. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Don has been my protecting angel for years. He says himself that I am the most challenging one of his Scandinavian clients, but I have, to this day, not read a single review without the critic praising the translation—it looks like the book is written originally in English, they say. And for that I am most grateful. Nicely put—I have done some translation work myself, from Old Icelandic. These authors are long dead now, but they are still hanging like Damocles’s swords over my neck, so I will remember that quote."