Before The Abyss or Life Is Simple came to my attention, Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book 1 was a fixture on my “to read” list for several years. When deciding what to read next, I would check the list and mutter some version of, “I should read that, but it’s too much of a commitment right now.” I finally dove in after Winnifred Sullivan and Courtney Bender asked if I would be interested in a multi-authored volume that grew out of their Knausgaard reading group. To make an informed decision, I felt I needed to spend some time with the source.
I will admit I found My Struggle frustrating. At times, I wanted to throw the book at the wall and yell something childish like, “Get over yourself, Karl!” But there were other times I couldn’t stop reading. Ultimately, I abandoned it about two-thirds of the way through — because it really was too much of a commitment, but also because I was simply exhausted by the exercise. Despite giving up, scenes from the book still haunt me. They emerge as spectral presences at the strangest times, only to quickly disappear once again. What is the nature of that strange pull?
Part of that pull is the way My Struggle is shot through with religion — or at least the interplay of transcendence and immanence. (Perhaps that’s the same thing.) At times this interplay is explicit, at times it sits just below the surface or just out of frame. It’s no surprise, then, that when the authors of The Abyss or Life Is Simple came together to read My Struggle, they first titled their meeting “The Religion of Karl Ove Knausgaard.” All of the members of A Knausgaard Reading and Writing Collective (as they came to refer to themselves much later in the process) study religion, albeit from different perspectives and with different sets of methodological expertise. In My Struggle, they found new ways to think and write about religion together.
Some of the members were explicitly opposed to publication, concerned as they all were with creating a safe space in which to explore something new. After years of meeting, talking, and sharing pieces of writing, however, they were surprised to find they had produced something of an experimental book, one that might offer a generative model for others who wish to embark on their own collaborative projects in the study of religion and beyond. It was at that point that we began our conversation.
The University of Chicago Press, where I serve as the religious studies editor, has a long history of publishing innovative and probing books situated at the intersection of religion and literature. In the most general sense, then, the book was within our purview. More specifically, we are a publisher committed to taking risks, which includes publishing experimental work that propels scholarship into the future. In the abstract, this project seemed to fit that bill, and so I was open to thinking about whether it could work.
This sort of collaborative endeavor is not without precedent. There were a few valuable models I used for thinking about this book, the primary one being The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism from Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards. The balance of the personal and the critical, the individual and the collective, in that book compels. I found something similar at play in these intertwined essays about Knausgaard; the pieces in The Abyss or Life Is Simple are in conversation with each other in deep ways.
The book also interleaves fragments from the group’s meeting transcripts between essays. This sort of material runs the risk of being distracting if handled poorly, but that’s not the case here. The carefully selected, short passages offer a flavor of the group’s discussions while also serving as mini introductions to the themes that emerge in the essay that follows each fragment. They draw you into the project as part of a much larger conversation that feels alive and genuine. They provide a taste of how generous collaboration leads to insight, and how thoughtfulness supports risk. There is a playfulness, a freedom you can sense behind both the style and content. I felt it immediately in Courtney Bender’s essay, which was the first piece I read, and it carried through the entire collection. The proof of the pudding is always in the eating, and this collection of essays was delicious.
The final element of the book, the “Outro,” is authored by the group’s rapporteur, Hannah Garvey. It provides an unique and revealing set of reflections on witnessing and documenting collective work from the perspective of someone who is both an insider and outsider. As the reader, it’s easy to identify with Garvey’s position, which feels like your own. It’s a fitting way to close out this collective endeavor.
There are different types of experimental books, but the sort that comes my way most often involves collaborative work of some sort. The majority of these experiments simply don’t succeed. As a wise and dear friend said to me, “Not all collective relations need to be books.” I would go further and say most collective relations shouldn’t be books. The Abyss or Life Is Simple is an exception and I am proud that we published it.
A book or article by a single author is often viewed as the gold standard for scholarship on religion. We can point to countless important studies written by individuals — everything from deeply probing monographs, to bracing synthetic works, to incisive articles. But ideas develop in complex and full worlds. All intellectual work is collective, as the acknowledgments section of any book makes clear. The Abyss or Life Is Simple is an attempt to render that collective labor in full, to bear witness to the process of becoming as well as the product of that process. It’s also an invitation for others to do the same, with a sincere hope that the study of religion will be enriched by the effort.