I'm around a hundred pages into the above immense work, Book 1 of six autobiographical novels by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard. Around a decade ago, when first published, the phrase "literary sensation" usually accompanied reviews of the work, which sold in Norway, a country of around 5 million, 450,000 copies. I have to say that the cover is false advertising. My Struggle, Book 1, the first of six chronicles, and the opening 440 pages out of 3500. It must have been quite a struggle, and indeed the author pic makes it look as if he's been living in the forest with wolves for awhile. Nevertheless, the last big episode I passed concerned the 15-year-old Knausgaard maneuvering and dissembling in order to get to parties, without his parents knowing, where kids drank liquor. I see that a critic, James Wood, says that even when bored he was interested, and for now I feel similarly. I think there is a cinematic genre in which the film maker purports to make "art" just by running his camera in front of people who are living their lives. Writing words is different from following people around with a camera but you get the idea: the first 100 pages of My Struggle called to mind such a movie. Here is a poem, by William Matthews, on a similar theme, though it's somewhat more concise (title is "Sad Stories Told in Bars, the 'Reader's Digest' Version"):
First I was born and it was tough on Mom.
Dad felt left out. There's much I can't recall.
I seethed my way to speech and said a lot
of things that were deemed cute. I was so small
my likely chance was growth, and so I grew.
Long days in school I filled, like a spring creek,
with boredom. Sex I discovered soon
enough, I now think. Sweet misery!
There's not enough room in a poem so curt
to get me out of adolescence, yet
I'm nearing fifty with a limp, and dread
the way the dead get stacked up like a cord
of wood. Not much of a story, is it?
The life that matter's not the one I've led.
I think the odd "matter's" in the last line is a kind of shorthand for the sense, "The life that matters isn't the one I've led," which has one too many syllables? Anyway, my favorite part is where the poem finally seems to be rising to the level of an English teacher's idea of "poetry" when the promising simile, "like a spring creek," gets immediately filled with . . . boredom.
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