Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six My Struggle novels take a prominent place in the hallway bookshelves of our apartment. Set in order, they’re eye level as guests enter, sharing space with the output of Richard Powers and John McPhee, two other writers whose books I’ve loved. Because we’re fans of more than books and writers and also casually collect ephemera, propped against the spines of these top-shelf books are a Ken Griffey, Jr., rookie; a 1986 Dwight Gooden; 1980 Pete Maravich and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar cards; a tarot eel; and a gag-gift moustache made of actual human hair. Also on the shelf is a non-ephemeral bronze paperweight, a rectangular plaque neither quite the length nor heft of the Knausgaard novels. While the other collectibles rest against books by Powers and McPhee, the paperweight runs the length of My Struggle and bears Simon & Schuster founder Richard L. Simon’s famous admonition: “Give the Reader a Break.” Situating the plaque this way, my wife trolls me.
Though the novels created a huge splash in New York, where we lived when they were released in English about a decade ago, I got to them slightly later and then read them mostly on beach vacations — one a year for six years. My wife quickly lost interest in the first book but finished anyway, since we were trapped on a plane and she had nothing else to read. My closest friend and I texted recently about the novels and he typed, “I don’t need lasers and murder and treasures in my books but still.” Then, “One day you’ll have to explain him to me.” I demurred, “Another time.”
The Abyss or Life Is Simple reveals the pleasure that might have come with reading these books with people, especially people who, like me, are preoccupied with religion. When I’ve written about Knausgaard before, I’ve highlighted moments that explore ethical and sometimes explicitly religious questions. Writing about health food crazes in Book Two, for instance, Knausgaard finds foolish the idea that the wholesomeness of whole foods can make us wholesome people — a notion that appealed to me in my abstemious youth:
Oh, they were confusing food with the mind, they thought they could eat their way to being better human beings without understanding that food is one thing and the notions food evokes another.
In that same book, Knausgaard narrates a conversation with a friend Geir about a time when he, living alone on an island, sought “to do everything I could do to become a good person.” Back then, he found consolation in the diaries of poet Olav Haakonson Hauge, who “fought without cease for the same,” Karl Ove remarks, “for the ideal of how he should be.” Reading those diaries, Karl Ove gets the impression that Hauge’s pursuit of the ideal self led to happiness: “He escaped the iron grip on himself and relaxed, so it seemed.” Geir’s response invokes God:
“The question is whether it was God,” Geir said. “The feeling of being seen, of being forced to your knees by something that can see you. We just have different names for it. The superego or shame or whatever.”
This is an experience of God I know from even earlier in my youth, though it hardly released its grip on me — because yes, this feeling of being seen by God is just the sort of feeling that could lead to an approach to eating that confuses food with the mind (or the soul) and seeks moral uplift in the private habits of the ascetic. Looking back, I’m consoled by what Knausgaard writes of a place where those confusions can take root: “What a stupid, fucking idiotic country this was.”
These two passages are ones A Knausgaard Reading and Writing Collective might have taken up in their six years studying together. Or, at least, thinking back to these moments is where I start projecting my own participation into their conversations.
For instance, where food is concerned, Liane Carlson sees Knausgaard’s many descriptions of cooking and eating as “a central feature of his artistic practice.” In an essay entitled “Aesthetics of an Abused Child,” Carlson, coauthor of The Abyss or Life Is Simple, regards Knausgaard’s preoccupation with food, in part, as a wresting of control from a father who would surveil (like God) the young Karl Ove’s eating (of sardines and their tails, for example) in ways that reflected other, more threatening, forms of control — such as, say, being forced to one’s knees.
Here my own youthful vision of God, reflected in Karl Ove’s conversation with Geir, folds itself into what Carlson observes in Knausgaard’s concerns with food as an “aesthetic reverie and then, perhaps, a habit” across these novels. Carlson’s essay ends with a long quotation from Book Three that helps, she claims, “make sense of a particular ethical position Karl Ove takes toward his children.” In this passage, we see the real threat his father posed, the effect of his mother’s interventions, and the stakes for the life he’s simultaneously living and writing now:
She saved me because if she hadn’t been there I would have grown up alone with Dad and sooner or later I would have taken my life, one way or another. But there she was, Dad’s darkness has a counterbalance, I am alive. […] I have my own children, and with them I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father.
The experience of simultaneity between writing and living — for example, writing and parenting, writing and cooking, writing and reading, which then becomes, in a given text, writing parenting, writing cooking, and writing reading — is also one that preoccupies readers of Knausgaard’s novels. The effect is immersion in the life of Karl Ove, what the authors of The Abyss or Life Is Simple clarify to mean, through examples, “the illusion of immersion in the experience of cleaning house, or cooking meatballs, or mowing the yard — with the knowledge that such immersion can never be total.” The writers often evoke the abyss of their title through references to the immersive quality of the many mises en abyme that appear in Knausgaard’s writing — say, “a packet of washing powder with a picture of a child holding the identical packet” in Knausgaard’s Inadvertent. They read this kind of abyss as a framing for the novels as a series. The abyss the writers see in My Struggle as a whole comes at the end of Book Six, when “the writing is enfolded into the narrative — another mise en abyme”:
The writer “catches up” with the reader and the two merge. There the retrospection that has defined My Struggle, the past tense that has prevailed in the preceding six volumes, switches into the present tense, the “now.” This happens in the very final moments of Book Six — on the last page, page 1152. Here one reads, “Now it is 7:07, and the novel is finally finished.” But in the very next sentence, there’s another switch. The present writing becomes the future tense. “In two hours Linda will be coming here, I will hug her and tell her I’ve finished, and I will never do anything like this to her and our children again.”
The writers conclude from this final appearance of the abyss: “Life and death, past and present, converge in a future that recedes before us.”
Immersion in My Struggle creates what the collective behind The Abyss or Life Is Simple refers to as an “eternal present,” a state of being that is impossible in historical time but the very basis of religious time. For five years, these writers gathered in the “infinite space before death, with the death of the writer and our own deaths before us,” a present that enabled “the difficult, often painful, but potentially transporting work of reading and writing — and of religion.” They immersed themselves in the simultaneity of writing reading, or writing religion.
Immersion is also the word used by the critic I’d read on Knausgaard prior to this collective, Zadie Smith. Her writing on My Struggle Book One and Book Two, Man vs. Corpse,” is cited in an essay by M. Cooper Harriss, entitled “Shaping Our Ends,” that appears in The Abyss or Life Is Simple. For Smith, the immersion of My Struggle reflects an ability in Karl Ove, “rare these days,” she says,
to be fully present in and mindful of his own existence. Every detail is put down without apparent vanity or decoration, as if the writing and the living are happening simultaneously. There shouldn’t be anything remarkable about any of it except for the fact that it immerses you totally. You live his life with him.
I’m quoting here the same moment from Smith that Harriss does, highlighting the same possibility of Knausgaard simultaneously both writing and living, or writing living. The immersion that Smith sees in Knausgaard’s appearing “fully present” in his novels leads her somewhere slightly different, though, than the “eternal present.” For Smith, the space between now and death is far from infinite — it’s closing in every moment, even on the way home from a party. “Man vs. Corpse” opens with her arriving home to relieve the babysitter, having spent an evening with friends taking about Knausgaard, “like groupies discussing their favorite band.”
I took off my heels and hopped barefoot — it was raining — up Crosby Street, and so home. Hepatitis, I thought. Hep-a-ti-tis. I reached my building bedraggled, looking like death.
The doorman who had offered compliments on her way out now stares into his smart phone to avoid eye-contact. Smith is, like Knausgaard, writing and parenting, writing and drinking, too — the first part of the essay notes that she’s written much of what you’re reading, squinting “through a scrim of vodka,” shortly after arriving home. The whole essay turns on an argument that Knausgaard’s ability to bring the reader into his life essentially invites the reader into a “cathedral of boredom.”
And when you enter it, it looks a lot like the one you yourself are living in. […] It’s a book that recognizes the banal struggle of our daily lives and yet considers it nothing less than a tragedy that these lives, filled as they are not only with boredom but with fjords and cigarettes and works by Dürer, must all end in total annihilation.
For the writers of The Abyss or Life Is Simple, the “death of the writer and our own deaths before us” remains fully present and tragic within the “infinite space before death” they theorize. But for Smith, art that recognizes in banality the tragedy of death creates “the point at which aesthetics sidles up to politics.” Knausgaard’s cathedral becomes a place for politics, not religion. Calling herself in the moment of this essay a “sentimental humanist” — a humanism she more recently argued must involve “a radical, collective idea of the human” — Smith lives Karl Ove’s life with him through not just the particular overlay, but through the countless other lives and deaths she might imagine her way into. In particular, in “Man vs. Corpse,” this leads her from Knausgaard and the tragedy of one death (or perhaps all those experienced and anticipated in the novels) to a “[c]oncern over premature corpsification of various types of beings — the poor, women, people of color, homosexuals, animals.” These beings, she notes, become “consecrated in the legal sphere” (that is, politically) only after first, usually, “emerg[ing] in the imaginary realm” (that is, in art).
The foil to Karl Ove in Smith’s essay is the smartphone, a competing immersive storyteller that then, in 2013, was only just taking hold in ways we struggle to reckon with now, a device whose algorithmic immersion works by telling me the story of me again and again. My Struggle, Smith concludes, offers a politically valuable alternative by doing what good and useful art is meant to do: give the reader a break — from the trolls, sure, but mostly from our individual selves.