His banal epiphanies satisfy because of his acknowledgment that life includes the random, the inexplicable and the unbeautiful. He understands rogue happiness. This perverse attention to what other writers ignore is part of his charm ... the eerie thing is that, at times, it is as if we are not within the pages of this book at all, but outside it and in his confidence. We understand that he is ambitious to write a novel that will make his name and we suppress, as we read, the acknowledgment that this achievement, this extraordinary work of which he has been dreaming, is the book we hold in our hands.
There are moments in My Struggle: Book Five that drag. Once or twice, I wrote 'Help Me' in the margins and doubled down on the double espressos. These were small eddies in an onrushing river. The critic James Wood has captured my sense of Knausgaard: 'Even when I was bored, I was interested.' My Struggle is fundamentally a confessional work, and Karl Ove has admitted, in Book Three, that he is writing in part to exact revenge on those who pitied, dismissed or bullied him. He wants to return home a literary champion, someone who is impossible to ignore. As we await the concluding volume in this series, it’s a reminder, for those who still need it, that great impulses are not required to make great art.
This fifth volume feels more insular than the others, but that’s where Knausgaard has always been at his best. The inner life inspires him. It’s what gives the sentences their urgency. He’s the rare writer who has made self-absorption work for him.
It has always seemed audacious for Knausgaard to name his novel after Hitler’s autobiography-cum-manifesto, but Book Five is proof that we didn’t realize the extent of his ambitions. It turns out that his Min Kamp is meant to be Mein Kampf’s fraternal twin, and proof that the evil of their shared birthright can be overcome.
It’s the most charmless installment so far, composed in delirious haste and possessing none of the bird’s-eye-view meditations on art and mortality that threw the prosaic chronicles of the early volumes into interesting relief. But at this point it hardly matters. Yeoman readers who have already made it through 2,000 pages of these 'struggles' will simply hold on for dear life as the Knausgaard leviathan drags them where it will, little knowing where they’ll all end up next year when the final volume at last carries them back to shore.
Knausgaard's books feel like an antidote to the sterile, branded curation we sift through every day. It offers this rich texture as a contrast to the perfection of those suntanned smiles. He is saying, here is what life really feels like. It's messy. It often ends in failure. It often detours and rambles.
Book 5 seems both more controlled and traditional in form than much of what’s gone before, following the conventions of the bildungsroman to tell the story of an unhappy young man who becomes a writer. Frequently bleak, it is also knowing and often extremely funny ... For those of us who have found My Struggle addictive, and want to claim it as a serious work, its shameful nakedness feels important, a kind of writing that asserts the raw value of the 'thoughts no one else has and which no one must ever know.' As Knausgaard puts it here, 'What emerged from this was myself, this was what was me.'
...more than anything else, the latest installment is the one in which Knausgaard wills himself to become a writer. It’s a book that does a remarkably good job of depicting failure, and of capturing the single-mindedness required to make real artistic progress ... Knausgaard has his detractors. They argue, with some merit, that his 'Struggle' is self-indulgent and his prose uneven. But even his fiercest critics might concede that Book Five contains fascinating insights about inspiration and hard work.
This entry in the six-book series on Knausgaard’s life is his most structurally conventional volume and one of his most broadly compelling. The pointillist portrait of the artist as a bumbling striver spans the 14 years he spent in Bergen finding a way to turn his calling into a craft. In previous books we’ve seen the callow youth and the tortured father; here is the grisly connective tissue.
There are always inconsequential episodes: who else but Knausgaard would think it worth devoting two pages to a miscommunication at the bar which ends with him paying for twice as many beers as he meant to order? But childhood, sex, love, art, work and death are there too, writ small from his own perspective, but compellingly observed.
Much of the unforgettable first volume of My Struggle revolves around the immediate aftermath of this father’s squalid death. The new volume returns us to this episode. And although the story is told from a different, less pressurized perspective, it is no less gut-wrenching. We see with greater insight this second time how the child’s blameless humiliation is reinforced by the adult son’s guilt at his failure to try to prevent his father’s decline. What is extraordinary about My Struggle is that Knausgaard’s willingness to expose his shame, without ever flinching, is balanced everywhere by his openness to beauty, his belief in transformation, his heartfelt yearning.
