Lee Klein 's Reviews > My Struggle: Book Four
My Struggle: Book Four
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One day in the distant future, whenever we think about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle series, memories of an era between 2012 through 2017 will come rushing back.
My Struggle: Book One (2012) involved a teenage search for alcohol on New Year’s Eve followed by the alcoholic death of the author’s father some ten years later. My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love (2013)—the best one by far for me; the volume responsible for the author’s reputation—covered falling in love, fatherhood, the conflict of having a family and trying to write. My Struggle: Book Three (2014), set entirely during his childhood under the shadow of an unpredictable, menacing father, presented regularly occurring instances of tears. Book Four, published in the U.S. in April 2015, replaces tears with nocturnal emission and premature ejaculation.
A six-volume memoir of a chronic masturbator would be problematic. Fortunately, KOK avoids critiques regarding autobiographical autoeroticism:
The fact was I had never masturbated. Had never beat off. Had never played with myself. I was eighteen years old now and it had never happened. Not once. I hadn’t even tried. My lack of experience of this meant that I both knew and didn’t know how to do it. And once I hadn’t done it as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, time passed and it slowly became unthinkable, not in the sense of unheard of, more in the sense of beyond my horizons. The direct result of this was that I had heavy nocturnal emissions. I dreamed about women, and in my sleep not even touching was required, it was enough just to lay my eye on them, standing there, with their beautiful bodies, and I came. If I was close to them in my dreams, again I came. My whole body jerked and convulsed through the night, and my underpants were soaked with semen in the morning. (350)
If all goes well for the remainder of the year, 2015 will be forever linked in our minds with an 18-year-old’s underpants filling up with semen. This one’s narrative arc tracks an academic year as he teaches in a small fishing village in northern Norway, an isolated spot lorded over by fjords and permanent winter darkness. But progression can also be charted in terms of sticky underpants at first, followed by premature ejaculation during failed attempts at coitus, ending with a triumphant scene that made this reader literally LOL as he closed the book.
KOK at this age is sex obsessed, especially since he’s still a virgin. In a civilization lacking significant rights of passage, intercourse is the new bar/bat mitzvah, even in northern Norway in 1987. But there’s more to it than the will to copulate. It’s about exchanging the chrysalis of innocence for the wings of experience, attaining knowledge reserved for adults.
I looked upon [girls] as completely unapproachable creatures, indeed, as angels of a sort, I loved everything about them, from the veins in the skin over their wrists to the curves of their ears, and if I saw a breast under a T-shirt or a naked thigh under a summer dress, it was as though everything in my insides was let loose, as though everything began to swirl around and the immense desire that then arose was as light as light itself, as light as air, and in it there was a notion that everything was possible, not only here but everywhere and not only now but forever. At the same time as all this arose inside me, a consciousness shot up from below, like a waterspout, it was heavy and dark, there was abandon, resignation, impotence, the world closing in on me. There was the awkwardness, the silence, the scared eyes. There were the flushed cheeks and the great unease.
But there were other reasons too. There was something I couldn’t do and something I didn’t understand. There were secrets and there was darkness, there were shady dealings and there was laughter that jeered at everything. Oh, I sensed it, but I knew nothing about it. Nothing. (82)
It’s about love, too: erotic, spiritual, artistic. Young KOK loves women, books, music. But he doesn’t quite love himself. He believes girls detect his lack of confidence the way dogs smell fear. Nearly all members of the opposite sex are attracted to him, nevertheless, including many of his thirteen-year-old students.
My heart beat faster as I stopped beside her. Oh, it was ridiculous, but the awareness that she might be in love with me made it suddenly impossible to behave normally.
I leaned over and she seemed to shrink back. Her breathing changed. Her eyes were locked on to the book. I could smell the fragrance of her shampoo, I studiously avoided any form of contact, placed my finger on the first number she had written. She stroked her hair to the side, rested one elbow on the table. It was as if everything we did had become conscious: every detail became visible, it was no longer unthinking and natural but considered and artificial. (397)
Interactions with students awkwardly and tenderly approach transgression. He admires the form of a student and feels an abyss open inside him. He may be a little in love with Andrea, a thirteen year old, but he knows no one knows. At an all-ages alcohol-soaked party in another town, he kisses a thirteen-year-old girl, regrets it in the morning, and fears repercussions that never come.
But Book Four seems mostly about emerging from childhood into the freedom (and, to a degree, responsibility) of adulthood. It’s about an 18-year-old boy with artistic tendencies as undefined as they are ambitious, in a black beret, white shirt, and black pants held up by a studded belt, emerging from the shadow of youth. The first 100+ pages relay KOK’s arrival in the north to teach, the start of classes, his acclimation to the isolation in which he writes his first stories. One early weekend night, he goes out with new friends and blacks out after drinking too much. An audaciously long stretch of backstory follows (200+ pages), set during the preceding year. KOK’s childhood was lorded over by his increasingly alcoholic father, but he lives with his mother in southern Norway as he finishes high school. He hosts a graduation-type party (cases of beer stacked in the kitchen) that wrecks his mother’s house. That summer he sells cassettes to tourists, drinks, and tries as hard as he can to have sex. He causally mentions being drunk in a car that goes off the road and flips over at 100 kph (62 mph). By the time we return to the bathroom in which the young teacher has just vomited bile, we feel that in no way should he be educating children. He’s an overgrown child himself, fresh off a summer of indulgence in drunkenness and the quest to shed his virginity.
I wanted to steal, drink, smoke hash, and experiment with other drugs – cocaine, amphetamines, mescaline – to get high and live the great rock-and-roll lifestyle, to feel to the last drop of my blood that I couldn’t give a flying fuck about anything. Oh, what appeal there was in that! But then there was all the rest of me inside that wanted to be a serious student, a decent son, a good person. If only I could blow that to smithereens! (320)
Imagine Kurt Cobain in the classroom in 1987. (KOK was born in December 1968; Cobain in February 1967).
KOK knows the order of the planets and has written reviews about bands like Tuxedomoon for hometown newspapers, but there’s not that much difference between students and teacher, we realize, and there’s an expectation therefore that something indecent will happen while the teacher is blacked out one night.
Young Karl Ove is a fan of author Jens Bjørneboe and his History of Bestiality trilogy, the first volume of which describes an alpine wind that drives residents mad, sometimes causing murders, and difficulties with hard cider that often result in fathers killing their entire families. All three volumes consistently emphasize that we live on a thin crust of land between raging magma below and idiotically ordered outerspace above, that it’s no wonder we behave like homicidal lunatics, but there’s also great natural beauty and pleasures galore on Earth. Somewhat like KOK’s father, Bjørneboe was an alcoholic who ultimately hanged himself instead of drinking himself to death. The father’s shadow gives all these volumes their heft, so when young Karl Ove enthuses about his early experience with drink, end-stage alcoholism always lurks off-stage.
Why didn’t they drink? Why didn’t everyone drink? Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person become attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful. (426)
As with the first section of Book One (the teenage quest for alcohol on New Year’s Eve), Book Three (entirely embedded in early childhood), Book Four complicates for me the concept of relatability. Finding a novel “relatable” often seems like a weak critique but part of KOK’s allure is exactly this connection with readers. It’s not so simplistic as “I get what he’s saying, I once constantly thought about losing my virginity, too.” At its best, it’s more about evoking memories in a reader.
Proust is the patron saint of associative memory, the famous phenomenon in which a cookie dipped in tea revives a forgotten world. KOK and his My Struggle series will become associated with something similar: instead of some innocent trigger evoking memories, Knausgaard’s dramatization of his past evokes memories for readers. My Struggle is the madeleine.
His detailed quest for sex opens a world of memory, particularly embarrassing bits not so often aired these days. It takes considerable restraint not to list instances from my life that more or less match those in the novel. And I’m sure many women share memories of these mostly forgotten, awkwardly executed initial attempts at getting it on.
But there’s more to this than that: there’s the image of KOK listening to Led Zep, pacing his apartment with clenched fists, psyching himself up to write. There’s the excitement of his initial immersion in the act of writing. There’s the clueless/confident sense of the importance of what’s been written, a surge at first that hooks the nascent writer for life. And there’s the first experience with criticism, especially the negative sort from his older brother, which fuels his ambition to one day write something like My Struggle:
You don’t think anyone’s going to publish it do you? In all seriousness?
I’ll damn well show him. I’ll damn well show the whole fucking world who I am and what I am made of. I’ll crush every single one of them. I’ll render every single one of them speechless. I will. I will. I damn well will. I’ll be so big no one is even close. No one. No. One. Never. Not a chance. I will be the greatest ever. The fucking idiots. I’ll damn well crush every single one of them.
I had to be big. I had to be.
If not, I might as well end it all. (413)
As KOK once again receives big attention we can expect to see increasingly intense dissent online. This installment supplies more than enough fodder for those who prefer hot-take ridicule and rage over the time-consuming busy work of reading. I generally look forward to superficial, dismissive, reductive critiques based on the author’s gender and race, tweets along the lines of “do we really need more narratives like this?” (White male tales of heterosexual adventures.)
Scott Esposito (editor of the Quarterly Conversation and point person for lit in translation) off-handedly tweeted a few weeks before I started reading that “Book Four is pretty much all about Karl Ove’s penis.” This was followed by the online equivalent of eye rolls and sighs: “please tell me you are joking.” Esposito responded that it’s all about “semen and alcohol,” and the response was “no please make it stop.” Esposito then said it makes sense since KOK is like 18 years old in Book Four, to which the response was “I don’t care just make it stop.”
As attention ramps up with this volume’s release followed by events in NYC and San Francisco in May, we can expect to see more of this sort of thing. Or maybe since KOK’s attempts are so consistently thwarted most will find him (sym)pathetic.
Fortunately for My Struggle fans, new volumes won’t stop coming until 2017.
(If interested, here are my reviews of Books One, Two, Three, and Five.)
My Struggle: Book One (2012) involved a teenage search for alcohol on New Year’s Eve followed by the alcoholic death of the author’s father some ten years later. My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love (2013)—the best one by far for me; the volume responsible for the author’s reputation—covered falling in love, fatherhood, the conflict of having a family and trying to write. My Struggle: Book Three (2014), set entirely during his childhood under the shadow of an unpredictable, menacing father, presented regularly occurring instances of tears. Book Four, published in the U.S. in April 2015, replaces tears with nocturnal emission and premature ejaculation.
A six-volume memoir of a chronic masturbator would be problematic. Fortunately, KOK avoids critiques regarding autobiographical autoeroticism:
The fact was I had never masturbated. Had never beat off. Had never played with myself. I was eighteen years old now and it had never happened. Not once. I hadn’t even tried. My lack of experience of this meant that I both knew and didn’t know how to do it. And once I hadn’t done it as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, time passed and it slowly became unthinkable, not in the sense of unheard of, more in the sense of beyond my horizons. The direct result of this was that I had heavy nocturnal emissions. I dreamed about women, and in my sleep not even touching was required, it was enough just to lay my eye on them, standing there, with their beautiful bodies, and I came. If I was close to them in my dreams, again I came. My whole body jerked and convulsed through the night, and my underpants were soaked with semen in the morning. (350)
If all goes well for the remainder of the year, 2015 will be forever linked in our minds with an 18-year-old’s underpants filling up with semen. This one’s narrative arc tracks an academic year as he teaches in a small fishing village in northern Norway, an isolated spot lorded over by fjords and permanent winter darkness. But progression can also be charted in terms of sticky underpants at first, followed by premature ejaculation during failed attempts at coitus, ending with a triumphant scene that made this reader literally LOL as he closed the book.
KOK at this age is sex obsessed, especially since he’s still a virgin. In a civilization lacking significant rights of passage, intercourse is the new bar/bat mitzvah, even in northern Norway in 1987. But there’s more to it than the will to copulate. It’s about exchanging the chrysalis of innocence for the wings of experience, attaining knowledge reserved for adults.
I looked upon [girls] as completely unapproachable creatures, indeed, as angels of a sort, I loved everything about them, from the veins in the skin over their wrists to the curves of their ears, and if I saw a breast under a T-shirt or a naked thigh under a summer dress, it was as though everything in my insides was let loose, as though everything began to swirl around and the immense desire that then arose was as light as light itself, as light as air, and in it there was a notion that everything was possible, not only here but everywhere and not only now but forever. At the same time as all this arose inside me, a consciousness shot up from below, like a waterspout, it was heavy and dark, there was abandon, resignation, impotence, the world closing in on me. There was the awkwardness, the silence, the scared eyes. There were the flushed cheeks and the great unease.
But there were other reasons too. There was something I couldn’t do and something I didn’t understand. There were secrets and there was darkness, there were shady dealings and there was laughter that jeered at everything. Oh, I sensed it, but I knew nothing about it. Nothing. (82)
It’s about love, too: erotic, spiritual, artistic. Young KOK loves women, books, music. But he doesn’t quite love himself. He believes girls detect his lack of confidence the way dogs smell fear. Nearly all members of the opposite sex are attracted to him, nevertheless, including many of his thirteen-year-old students.
My heart beat faster as I stopped beside her. Oh, it was ridiculous, but the awareness that she might be in love with me made it suddenly impossible to behave normally.
I leaned over and she seemed to shrink back. Her breathing changed. Her eyes were locked on to the book. I could smell the fragrance of her shampoo, I studiously avoided any form of contact, placed my finger on the first number she had written. She stroked her hair to the side, rested one elbow on the table. It was as if everything we did had become conscious: every detail became visible, it was no longer unthinking and natural but considered and artificial. (397)
Interactions with students awkwardly and tenderly approach transgression. He admires the form of a student and feels an abyss open inside him. He may be a little in love with Andrea, a thirteen year old, but he knows no one knows. At an all-ages alcohol-soaked party in another town, he kisses a thirteen-year-old girl, regrets it in the morning, and fears repercussions that never come.
But Book Four seems mostly about emerging from childhood into the freedom (and, to a degree, responsibility) of adulthood. It’s about an 18-year-old boy with artistic tendencies as undefined as they are ambitious, in a black beret, white shirt, and black pants held up by a studded belt, emerging from the shadow of youth. The first 100+ pages relay KOK’s arrival in the north to teach, the start of classes, his acclimation to the isolation in which he writes his first stories. One early weekend night, he goes out with new friends and blacks out after drinking too much. An audaciously long stretch of backstory follows (200+ pages), set during the preceding year. KOK’s childhood was lorded over by his increasingly alcoholic father, but he lives with his mother in southern Norway as he finishes high school. He hosts a graduation-type party (cases of beer stacked in the kitchen) that wrecks his mother’s house. That summer he sells cassettes to tourists, drinks, and tries as hard as he can to have sex. He causally mentions being drunk in a car that goes off the road and flips over at 100 kph (62 mph). By the time we return to the bathroom in which the young teacher has just vomited bile, we feel that in no way should he be educating children. He’s an overgrown child himself, fresh off a summer of indulgence in drunkenness and the quest to shed his virginity.
I wanted to steal, drink, smoke hash, and experiment with other drugs – cocaine, amphetamines, mescaline – to get high and live the great rock-and-roll lifestyle, to feel to the last drop of my blood that I couldn’t give a flying fuck about anything. Oh, what appeal there was in that! But then there was all the rest of me inside that wanted to be a serious student, a decent son, a good person. If only I could blow that to smithereens! (320)
Imagine Kurt Cobain in the classroom in 1987. (KOK was born in December 1968; Cobain in February 1967).
KOK knows the order of the planets and has written reviews about bands like Tuxedomoon for hometown newspapers, but there’s not that much difference between students and teacher, we realize, and there’s an expectation therefore that something indecent will happen while the teacher is blacked out one night.
Young Karl Ove is a fan of author Jens Bjørneboe and his History of Bestiality trilogy, the first volume of which describes an alpine wind that drives residents mad, sometimes causing murders, and difficulties with hard cider that often result in fathers killing their entire families. All three volumes consistently emphasize that we live on a thin crust of land between raging magma below and idiotically ordered outerspace above, that it’s no wonder we behave like homicidal lunatics, but there’s also great natural beauty and pleasures galore on Earth. Somewhat like KOK’s father, Bjørneboe was an alcoholic who ultimately hanged himself instead of drinking himself to death. The father’s shadow gives all these volumes their heft, so when young Karl Ove enthuses about his early experience with drink, end-stage alcoholism always lurks off-stage.
Why didn’t they drink? Why didn’t everyone drink? Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person become attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful. (426)
As with the first section of Book One (the teenage quest for alcohol on New Year’s Eve), Book Three (entirely embedded in early childhood), Book Four complicates for me the concept of relatability. Finding a novel “relatable” often seems like a weak critique but part of KOK’s allure is exactly this connection with readers. It’s not so simplistic as “I get what he’s saying, I once constantly thought about losing my virginity, too.” At its best, it’s more about evoking memories in a reader.
Proust is the patron saint of associative memory, the famous phenomenon in which a cookie dipped in tea revives a forgotten world. KOK and his My Struggle series will become associated with something similar: instead of some innocent trigger evoking memories, Knausgaard’s dramatization of his past evokes memories for readers. My Struggle is the madeleine.
His detailed quest for sex opens a world of memory, particularly embarrassing bits not so often aired these days. It takes considerable restraint not to list instances from my life that more or less match those in the novel. And I’m sure many women share memories of these mostly forgotten, awkwardly executed initial attempts at getting it on.
But there’s more to this than that: there’s the image of KOK listening to Led Zep, pacing his apartment with clenched fists, psyching himself up to write. There’s the excitement of his initial immersion in the act of writing. There’s the clueless/confident sense of the importance of what’s been written, a surge at first that hooks the nascent writer for life. And there’s the first experience with criticism, especially the negative sort from his older brother, which fuels his ambition to one day write something like My Struggle:
You don’t think anyone’s going to publish it do you? In all seriousness?
I’ll damn well show him. I’ll damn well show the whole fucking world who I am and what I am made of. I’ll crush every single one of them. I’ll render every single one of them speechless. I will. I will. I damn well will. I’ll be so big no one is even close. No one. No. One. Never. Not a chance. I will be the greatest ever. The fucking idiots. I’ll damn well crush every single one of them.
I had to be big. I had to be.
If not, I might as well end it all. (413)
As KOK once again receives big attention we can expect to see increasingly intense dissent online. This installment supplies more than enough fodder for those who prefer hot-take ridicule and rage over the time-consuming busy work of reading. I generally look forward to superficial, dismissive, reductive critiques based on the author’s gender and race, tweets along the lines of “do we really need more narratives like this?” (White male tales of heterosexual adventures.)
Scott Esposito (editor of the Quarterly Conversation and point person for lit in translation) off-handedly tweeted a few weeks before I started reading that “Book Four is pretty much all about Karl Ove’s penis.” This was followed by the online equivalent of eye rolls and sighs: “please tell me you are joking.” Esposito responded that it’s all about “semen and alcohol,” and the response was “no please make it stop.” Esposito then said it makes sense since KOK is like 18 years old in Book Four, to which the response was “I don’t care just make it stop.”
As attention ramps up with this volume’s release followed by events in NYC and San Francisco in May, we can expect to see more of this sort of thing. Or maybe since KOK’s attempts are so consistently thwarted most will find him (sym)pathetic.
Fortunately for My Struggle fans, new volumes won’t stop coming until 2017.
(If interested, here are my reviews of Books One, Two, Three, and Five.)
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Reading Progress
March 25, 2015
–
Started Reading
March 25, 2015
– Shelved
March 31, 2015
–
41.24%
"Forgot to bring it with me to read at lunch today and oh the momentary sorrow!"
page
200
April 8, 2015
–
Finished Reading
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Caterina
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rated it 4 stars
May 26, 2015 09:09PM
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That might be one of the best lines I've read in a review ever. Stealing it. Outstanding review.
I was deciding whether to reread Brothers Karamazov or leap into book four and your review reminded me about KOK’s voice.
Books one and two inspired me while three felt tiresome at times. The details you mention about book four have me excited to crack it open—despite the omnipresent male appendage.
So what if the book is a white man talking about his penis anyway. The point is not exactly what KOK says about himself, but that he shows us what it means to lead an examined life, even if the doctor doesn’t always understand the results of his examination—which I think is sometimes true of KOK. That he looks at himself without the various lens we all use to survive the mirror is the point. Even if we find out he’s delusional, his hypnotic voice and eye for the most telling detail force us into the moment and then out again to glance in our mirrors, wonder how we’d measure up, and possibly believe that self-reflective honesty has the possibility to change us.
And it doesn’t hurt that the man knows how to string words together.