The book started with a bang for me as I really loved the discussion about death on pages 4-7. Among other examples, it spoke about how everyone likes to hear about death on the news but no one wants dead bodies on the street. It pointed out how many people die in films, novels and videogames but how taboo footage of cadavers being eaten by birds would be in the same context. It is really excellent.
Sadly, things quickly went downhill for me. A lot of the prose is lacklustre and uninspiring. Every minute detail is described but not in a colourful or beautiful way, rather, it is quite dull and simplistic. The result is rather mundane and not evocative. The endless details never combine to paint a vivid scene. For me, it seemed more like heaping boring description upon boring description. I suppose you could describe the style as distinctive but I didn’t enjoy it. I also wondered, given the chronology of the book, how he could possibly have remembered such a multitude of inane details about his youth. So, when I reached ‘Part 2’ I was a little confused to read, ‘I hardly remember anything from my childhood. That is, I remember hardly any of the events in it’ (p211). I began to wonder whether this guy really knaus what he’s talking about! In some way, this seemed to make all the boring recollections of how he had prepared his lunch, or from what angle he had approached his father, or how black and steamy his coffee was rather less forgivable! On finishing the book, the adjectives ‘black’ and ‘shiny’ stick in my head as overused. I feel like an effort to remember details from one’s childhood can be a worthy endeavour insofar as it can be helpful in reconstructing a ambience or environment. However, simply making up a mountain of tiny details seems rather pointless to me and perhaps this is why I find the author’s prose underwhelming. Perhaps I’m being too black and white about whether this is a work of fiction or autobiography and I don’t think it really matters so long as what’s created is effective and here, crucially for me, most of it wasn’t really.
One possible exception to this general stylistic gloom and lack of ambience is the section describing his father’s descent into alcoholism and his death around pp 250-270. It seemed more authentic and contains the honesty that many people have praised in Knausgaard’s writing but it’s still a bit bland and mechanical for my tastes. Another brighter section was pp 316-334 where he describes the state of his grandmother’s home that she and his father having been living in prior to his father’s death. Alongside the forensic descriptions of the filth and chaos of the house there’s also a lot of detail on the floor plan. The same is true for descriptions of his childhood home. I’m not sure whether I am alone in this but I found these descriptions difficult to follow and was never left with the feeling that I had a working knowledge of the floorplan described. Despite all the description I remained confused! It’s more the descriptions of the filth that ring true and are evocative.
Another stylistic gripe I have with the book is that it contains a number of impossibly long sentences. For reasons that I hope will be obvious to the reader I will refrain from reproducing them here. However, three of the most heinous examples occur at pp 353/4 (17 lines), p366 (16 lines) and p429 (16 lines). In some cases, like p366, he obscures a lovely idea of books being everyman’s access to ‘the supreme’ with quite a lot of pretentious rambling about ‘Orpheus’ gaze’. In others, such as p429, he probably does the reader a favour by distracting from the banality and self-aggrandisement of the subject matter; in this case, how his wife likes how good he is at reading people. My point is not simply restricted to these three examples, although these are perhaps some of the most extreme cases of it. In general, I feel the sentences are too long, a bit rambling and suffer from a lack of clarity and crispness owing to the large amounts of information crammed into them.
There are stylistic highlights too. There is an excellent and perceptive section around pp 368-9 about the role playing nature of early identity:
“So there I was, playing roles, pretending this and pretending that...There was something furtive and dubious about my character, nothing of the solid pure traits which I encountered in some people during the period, people whom I therefore admired.”
Also, a section on swimming in the sea from p401:
“the sun burning down through the high blue sky and sea. The water streaming off your body as you haul yourself up using hollows in the rock face, the drops on your left shoulder blades for a few seconds until the heat has burned them off, the water in your trunks still dripping long after you’ve wrapped a towel around yourself.”
Both are powerful pieces of prose. The first because of the idea it contains and the clarity with which it is expressed, it’s also unusually pithy. While the latter is, perhaps, an example of how the author’s chosen method of forensic description can bear fruit.
At the end of the book, the author returns to the theme of death and its relation to the physical human body. He repeats the idea that the dead body is just another inanimate object and that the death of a body is just another process like those that inanimate objects undergo all the time:
“for humans are just one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor”
But this kind of thinking, like the idea of leaving dead bodies to lie where they die, is highly theoretical at the end of the day. This same man who has such intellectual regard for death finds himself inescapably moved to tears by the death of his father who he has, intellectually at least, wished dead for several years; not without justification! It is the strength of the feelings surrounding death and grief that make these kind of approaches to death more or less impossible for most normal humans. It is not reason and intellect that see the author rooting through his bedroom cupboard in the middle of the night to check his father is not there (p489)! The strength of the emotions, connections and the sense of loss are too powerful for anyone to be able to treat a dead body like a kettle or view a loved one’s death like a smashed window. Regardless of the truth of these assertions from an empirical perspective, they are emotionally devoid of all meaning.
The book contains some interesting ideas and some good passages but overall it was only just good enough for me to view reading it in a vaguely positive light. I disliked the style and found it cluttered, overly descriptive and lacklustre. I also found the author’s ideas and his expression of them a bit pretentious in places. The sections dealing with his father’s death and the aftermath were the highlights for me but, overall, it’s not a book I’d especially recommend and I don’t think I’ll read any more in the series.
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