← Back Published on

Review: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “A Death in the Family”

I used to equate distance with attraction. I held the proposition that Joan Didion is interesting because I was unfamiliar with her country and her time; I probably wouldn’t give a fuck about who she was if she wrote about contemporary Hong Kong. The possibility of what could have been always seemed infinitely more interesting.

To this Knausgaard says no, the trivial everyday life is infinitely gripping.

In A Death in the Family there are no chapters, no three-point structure, in fact no story at all, only a natural progression of somebody’s life. I find myself voyeur-like and a little obsessed, peeking through blinders at someone else’s life (and mind). The narration’s interiority sucks you in: now I know what it’s like to be a teenage boy growing up in southern Norway, hiding beer from his dad, or talking the manager into letting them carry on with their (bad) heavy metal gig in a neighborhood mall on a Sunday morning. Knausgaard reproduces real life on paper in minute detail and a kind of magic lies in its result: even the blandest things are romantic if you let them be. Your hometown is beautiful, your own life is beautiful, your narrative is as meaningful as the next person’s. Your reality is worthwhile; it’s also the only thing you have.

From the very beginning of Part Two we are greeted by excitement and change. The writing is believable, the narrator ages and we see it. It also flows really well: following descriptions of Stockholm and trains of thoughts on art, modernism, death, the unfathomable and the great beyond, Knausgaard brings us right back to the present with him, wherever that is. His meta-thoughts are attempts to stay present, and have us be there with him.

As I read on to find Knausgaard back in Kristiansand for his father’s funeral after twenty years, I can’t fight the acute feeling that we can never turn back in time. Even though he’s thinking back to the past, nothing is accessible anymore. Memory is funny because it’s almost always wrong. When did he and Grandma, dressed in a floor-length trench coat, go to the fish market, or did they ever? We had been there with him during childhood, and of course I could flip the pages and go back to the first hundred to find out, but that wouldn’t mean anything anymore.

And while finally concluding what I’ve been trying to say for so long, rereading my notes and squinting at my too-bright screen, is that as each moment passes another one comes, and with that our thoughts accumulate and our being shifts, so there’s no use clinging to the previous moment because with a moment’s loss of attention a moment is gone, a.k.a. writing too much stuff down and having to edit it now is a pain in the ass, should better find a point to stop and post it and let it be it. a.k.a. the love for life is good, awareness is better, but nothing beats the passage of time. So pay attention and hold it tight then let it go.