For years it also prompted writer’s block. It only pushed events away from K., made it sound phoney, remote. accuses himself.Īt first, he tried to fictionalise things. The case that follows is to prove his own innocence – or guilt. is Knausgaard himself, and The Trial in question is one in which Knausgaard – let’s henceforth call him K.
My Struggle became Knausgaard’s personal struggle, his trial, perhaps even The Trial. It is torture, a twisted medium that buys time, that somehow offsets death. Writing wasn’t and still isn’t cathartic for Knausgaard he insists on that. It was a literary quest as much as anything else: how to find the right words to represent a life, prompted by a sudden insight into death. The search for answers became Knausgaard’s quest for self-clarification, his attempt to find wholeness again – or perhaps to find wholeness for the first time. Why did he cry? Who was this father? Who was the son? What had the son become now that he, too, was a father – a father writing about his father? And yet, when the grownup boy heard of his father’s eventual demise, he cried. He hated his father, was terrorised by him, psychologically and emotionally. Midway through the first book, A Death in the Family, Knausgaard says ‘writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows.’ The dark shadow looming large over My Struggle, and over Knausgaard’s life, is the death of Knausgaard’s father – a brooding, unpredictable and menacing alcoholic whose death tore son Karl Ove apart. The sixth and final volume – its thickest at over a thousand pages – is set to appear later in 2017, one of the most eagerly awaited literary events of the year. His bestselling, 3,600-page ‘autobiographical’ blockbuster, My Struggle, which has been translated into 22 languages, is an epic story scrawled in black.
Death hands storytellers the file, ‘full of sheets of uniformly black paper.’ ‘All the storyteller needs or has,’ Berger reckoned, ‘is the capacity to read what is written in black.’ The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Death’s Secretary after Berger’s own heart. By Andy Merrifield Storytellers, the late John Berger was wont to say, are ‘Death’s Secretaries’: they borrow their authority from the dead.
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