Art and The Abyss

Richard Flanagan. First pub: June 25

Pic: Guardian here

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION

A MAN IN LOVE
By Karl Ove Knausgaard
Harvill Secker, $32.95

A Man in Love is the second volume to be published in English of a monumental six-volume, 3600-page autobiographical novel by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, collectively titled – amusingly for a small nation once invaded by Nazi Germany – My Struggle. The first volume, published last year in English as A Death in the Family, was about the author’s adolescence and his father’s death. It was the best contemporary work of literature I had read for several years.

My Struggle is an astonishing creation in which Knausgaard invents a monstrous, tender, brutal, gentle, vain, humble, selfish, brilliant and banal man called Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose life he documents minutely. Just as Walter Whitman, failed journalist, had only superficial resemblances to Walt Whitman, genius, of Leaves of Grass, so too, one suspects, the Knausgaard of these pages shares some but by no means all characteristics of the real Knausgaard. This is one of the strangest projects of recent literature, and one of the most fearless.

As A Man in Love slowly opened up to me, I began to make sense of the grand architecture of Knausgaard’s ambition. Where the first volume was about death, this was about creation. It tells of Knausgaard’s time after he leaves his first wife and Norway for a new life in Sweden. There he falls in love with the poet Linda, with whom he has three children.

A time of love becomes one of crisis also; his purpose in life, to write, becomes impossible, and the book ends with him abandoning fiction and starting a new project in which he seeks meaning by writing up his life, beginning the work that will become My Struggle. He writes quickly, up to 20 pages a day, seeking to stay ahead of his thoughts. This means abandoning all attempts at literary perfection.

”You have to burst the balloon that is the world,” he writes, ”and let everything in it spill over the side.”

As a result, much of the writing is bad, cliches abound and, rather than cut, Knausgaard adds. For him, more is decidedly more. He’ll spend a paragraph on making a cup of tea with a tea bag, a page on changing a nappy, and we even get not one shopping list but several. If much of this is dull, it also becomes weirdly compelling; if the task is self-consciously Proustian, it also smacks of the voyeuristic mesmerism of reality television.

It is not without writerly vanity: Knausgaard does it because he can. What in the hands of a lesser writer would be in turn pompous, dull, dead and – most unforgivably – unreadable, is here fascinating, occasionally transcendent and rarely less than compulsively readable.

Read the full review:
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/art-and-the-abyss-20130524-2k6gr.html#ixzz2XDfMCLtx