I haven’t read all of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. I’ve read several hundred pages of Part One, and if there’s one thing I know about Knausgaard, it’s that he might have enjoyed my opening sentence. That’s because Knausgaard seems to take pleasure in the succinct. He opens his NYTimes Magazine several part “saga” on travelling through America with this sentence, “I lost my driver’s license over a year ago.” Of course such a writing style leaves Karl Ove rather wide open to criticism. If taken in bits and pieces, his prose becomes a ridiculously easy target. Anna Silman (Salon) has already used this to full effect in a web article where she splices his magazine piece into chunks and takes aim. Her subtext under her title reads, “The store, Target, was like a great hall…” Okay, sure, something about that written meditation seems laughable. But why does Knausgaard continue to draw an audience, is it because Knausgaard is in on the joke?
In William Deresiewicz’s article, “Why Has ‘My Struggle’ Been Annointed a Literary Masterpiece?”, Deresiewicz employs somewhat of the same strategy as Silman in attacking his style. He drops a chunk of Knausgaard’s writing in your lap and then implies from the simple presentation of the evidence that Knausgaard is clearly a disappointment. However, Deresiewicz goes a bit deeper than Silman in trying to analyze what it is in Knausgaard’s writing that readers are finding enticing. “Knausgaard’s life may be mundane, the thinking goes, but so is yours,” he writes as he tries to explain a pro-K.O. argument. Later, Deresiewicz makes an interesting point that perhaps then it is writers who are entranced by K.O.’s style, since it is so upfront and unabashed--the fact that he is willing to leave everything out on the table, even what isn’t pretty, that it then becomes unique. Although Deresiewicz is still unsold as he concludes, “to ask us to devote 100 hours of our lives, 120 hours, to reading about his own is to make a promise that My Struggle does not even try to fufill.” Here, Deresiewicz is really employing a clever logic trap, by saying that since K.O.’s work is so long, thereby he’s asking something from us. The two may seem related, but the truth is, Knausgaard has not strapped anyone down to a chair.
At other times Deresiewicz relents. He calls K.O.’s “honesty undeniably courageous,” and admits, “yes, Knausgaard produces some beautiful formulations.” My experience reading K.O. has been similar up and down affair. There are times when I become bored and uninterested. And then there are other times where I feel he cuts in to something very deep and important about the human experience. It is those parts that may have me returning to K.O. for some time to come. I’ve wandered off from K.O.’s book several times (partly I believe because I purchased the e-book of Part One), but oftentimes when I return, I’m hurriedly in the mind of someone who brings forth solid questions and therefore someone worth reading. But when I read Silman’s commentary on K.O.’s magazine piece, there was a part of me that began to feel foolish for wanting to read more from the over publicized writer.
Sure, a point over K.O.’s widespread publicity might merit discussing, but otherwise, do we have to approach the author in such a hot or cold fashion? Perhaps I’ve answered my own question, maybe it’s K.O.’s success that has everyone so up in arms. Reading Deresiewicz’s article previously, it led me down the same path that Silman’s did. I had to wonder, should I even be reading this guy in the first place? This in turn led me to do a little research into the writing of William Deresiewicz.
I started to read his article, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” Deresiewicz begins, “I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him.”
At which point I immediately had to wonder, is this going to fulfill the promise to be worth reading?