BANGALORE: ‘A Death in the Family' is the first part in the My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knausgaard. The work is phenomenological in its approach: the writer writes as he experiences life. Mostly it is about mundane moments like making coffee.
But it is layered because while putting the coffee pot on the hot plate, the author delves into memories. Along the way, sights, sounds, thought processes and more are grasped in a moment and composed into prose. It is similar to Proust's In Search of Lost Time, but differs in that it is not concerned with the beauty of sentences.
Aesthetics is secondary to his style, the expression of the unfolding of life—transposed to prose, is the artistic effort. It is like a golden mahseer caught in the rapids in a river, being brought and cooked immediately on the shore with fresh herbs on a charcoal fire. That is how authentic the flavour of this writing is.
Describing the everyday through memory, especially of the author’s childhood, is a fantastic exercise because of the power with which it is evoked. It is either an elephantine memory or an acute creativity which fills in the gaps where memory fails. On both counts one is left in wonder at the expanse of the writer’s internal landscape, which is like a parallel world, rivaling the vast reality of our physical universe.
Though the book is classified as fiction, the author has used the actual names of everyone described, including himself. In that sense, the work is a memoir, but can be best described as a fictionalised-memoir. There is a conscious effort to express in greatest detail, the things the author is most embarrassed about—his deepest shame, insecurities and guilt are written about in stark terms.
In fact many of the author's relatives threatened to sue due to his brutal honesty.
The heart of the novel is about the author’s father becoming an alcoholic, and perishing in a horrific manner, after the addiction dilutes all his dignity. Much of the writing is catharsis. It is meditation: the author washes his horror in the still awareness of ink put to paper. The writing is like practicing a yoga asana where one slows down time by being aware of the body in motion, and brings about a shift in perceiving. The writing has so much life-force, it feels it was expressed using the immediate experience before it could be stored as memory and retrieved. For the reader, it brings him to a mellow place, slowing him down, and giving space for reflection about the most basic questions confronting the human condition.
The novel is consistent in its style and approach from the first page to the last. It is a smooth flow, like the experience of life itself, the sensation of nostalgia or humour at looking back at an episode which may have traumatised us when we experienced it, but the confidence that we are past it—that the worst is over. The fact that to exist is itself more utopian than anything that could ever be imagined is evoked with the consistent flow.
Writers are observant creatures. They try to understand the world around them. The human landscape, psychology and the subjective realm of passions and feelings are examined for insight in the process of creating literature. Often a God-complex develops in authors in their composing characters which are rigid or fully understood by the author. Though a character may be convincing, its inspiration may be falsely derived. Knausgaard is conscious of this. His prose is filtered through strict scrutiny so that what he may have thought as insight does not turn out to be delusion. The essence of reality, which to Knausgaard constitutes truth, is of the highest value in his artistic vision.
The following passage highlights this: "The worst part of all this, however, I was thinking as I walked along the avenue, past the queue of afternoon traffic, past tree after tree whose trunks were blackened with asphalt dust and car exhaust, so hard and rock like when compared to the mass of light, green leaves on the branches above, was that at the time I actually regarded myself as a sound judge of character. I had the gift or so I had deluded myself into thinking, it was something I was good at. Understanding others. While I myself was more of a mystery. How stupid can you get?"
The My Struggle series comprises of six volumes, two of which have been translated into English. It is a profound achievement.