“Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author… We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
—Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
I was eleven years old when the final Harry Potter book was released—too young to line up and buy it at midnight, apparently. First thing the morning of July 21, 2007, I walked with a friend of mine who had slept over the previous evening to the town’s high street WHSmith. Whether they had closed the store for a few hours, I don’t know, but there was still a line out the door. My friend and I joined the back of the queue, shifting our weight from one foot to the other on the pavement outside the recently imported KFC. The midsummer sun beat down on us, and the fumes from the fried chicken made me slightly nauseous.
The line moved slowly, but there was a system in place. As soon as you entered the store you were given the choice between two editions: the instantly-recognizable version with the children’s illustration, or a darker one marketed more toward adults—both hardbacks, of course. Then you were corralled to the first available register. If you wanted to browse for other books, you were better off returning the next week.
Ever the contrarian, I chose the edition that wasn’t marketed toward me and immediately turned to the last page to read the final lines of the series: “The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well.” My friend chose the edition with the now-iconic cover and, like everyone else in line, read from page one. Giddy with the thought I knew something they didn’t, I bounded over to the cashier and reached up to deposit the pound coins I had saved all summer.
As my friend paid for his copy, I turned once again to those final lines and did something that today still mortifies me: I read them aloud, at the top of my voice, to the entire store. People looked up from their books, blank-faced, before they realized what I was doing. Adults in line hissed for me to be quiet, and I was hastily removed from the premises.
Over the next week I devoured the book from front to back cover. Although I knew I would be moving away to the United States at the end of the month, I spent more time in my room reading than saying goodbye to my friends. The more I read those final lines, the more they irritated me. Not only were they corny, but they also marked the definitive ending to something I had loved. No matter how many times I reread the series—and I would, many times, over my first few years in the States—I never quite recaptured the feeling those books had given me when I first read them.
Eventually I moved on to other series. Most recently, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series have elicited perhaps the closest thing to the feeling I had when I eagerly awaited the next Harry Potter book.
The rollout for the Neapolitan Novels was almost impeccable: each of the four books was translated from the Italian and released in English within a year of its original publication, immediately available in affordable paperback by Europa Editions. Ferrante kept her identity hidden, and gave interviews sparingly, telling her publisher: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.” Despite the attempts of journalists to break her anonymity, Ferrante managed to minimize the influence of publicity on her writing.
The same can’t be said for Knausgaard and My Struggle.
Written in Norwegian from “February 27, 2008–September 2, 2011” (as the last of 3,600 pages painstakingly points out), all six volumes were originally published in Norway by Forlaget Oktober over the course of just two years. The series was a sensation: In a country with a population of just over five million, it sold over half a million copies. Naturally, the international market took notice; the series has since been translated into 22 different languages.
Archipelago Press published the final volume in English for the American market on September 18, 2018. When I arrived at The Strand that evening there was no line outside the door. In fact, with the ongoing construction and boarded-up front display, the store barely appeared open at all. I slipped in through the side entrance and walked straight to the information desk, with no intention of milling about among the casual shoppers.
The bored-looking woman behind the counter perked up when I approached.
“Can I help you find something?” she asked.
“Yes!” I said, reflecting her enthusiasm. “Ahh… here it is!”
Three copies of the book were stacked in front of her monitor. She let out a sigh as I picked one up and thanked her. I joined the back of the checkout line and saw when it was my turn that the next available register was manned by another bored-looking employee who had complimented my shirt the previous week. This time he appeared not to recognize me and barely acknowledged the brick I placed on the counter. $33.
When I got home I dropped my things and immediately cracked the first hundred pages. It was classic Knausgaard: endless descriptions of diapers changed, emails checked, and cigarettes smoked. Then there were the occasional flights of insight, which hit harder when they emerged from the banalities of everyday life. I underlined the sentences I wished I had written.
Four hundred pages into the sixth volume, Knausgaard gives us something we haven’t had in the first five: A chapter-break. Really, it feels like the start of book seven, or another project entirely. Over the next four hundred pages Knausgaard dives in to an essay on Adolf Hitler and his autobiography-manifesto, Mein Kampf. Why? Well, because when he was writing his own autobiographical novel his market-minded friend suggested he ironically lift the title. Knausgaard’s only other tentative title was the unremarkable Argentina, so he went along with his friend’s suggestion.
When—perhaps unexpectedly, but no less intentionally—the series became a hit, Knausgaard realized the gravity of having borrowed the title and felt a responsibility to address the subject. What resulted was a hugely ambitious and lengthy exegesis of Hitler’s autobiography, centered around a linguistic distinction between the “you,” the “I,” and the “we.” According to Knausgaard, Hitler’s worldview was warped by a narcissistic attachment to the “I,” an oversimplified conception of the “we,” and a complete disregard for an exterior “you.”
Readers of Knausgaard’s work in English have known this was coming. In countless features and interviews with the English-language media, the author acknowledged the controversy surrounding the series’ name and promised a “tell-all” in the final volume of this “tell-all to end all tell-alls.” Knausgaard said the essay is the most important thing he’s written but has also been candid about his desire to go back and make changes to the series.
It is startling to read, in Book 6, just how quickly he wrote the second half of the project: “I would have to write three new books in ten months. Which wasn’t implausible, I’d been doing about ten pages a day for the past six months as it was, in the region of fifty pages a week given the fact that I wasn’t allowed to work weekends.” While this pace undoubtedly enhanced the unedited, diaristic feel of the narrative, it is hard to imagine that it greatly benefited the essay.
And, really, why is that essay there, in the first place? As interesting as its subject matter might be, it nonetheless feels like a justification for the motivation behind a marketing decision. Knausgaard wrote a few fantastic books that could have just as easily been part of the Argentina series and then began to pander to the publicity he would receive. But if he had called it Argentina, perhaps I wouldn’t have found the series when I did.
***
I had just moved back to New York after taking a year off from school, working at a ranch-resort in Colorado. In the entryway to my apartment building one weekend, I stumbled over the Sunday supplement spilling out of a neighbor’s newspaper. On the cover was a photograph of a strikingly handsome man with long, greying hair and a scraggly beard, leaning against a garden shed and smoking a cigarette. The headline read: “The Norwegian Proust.”
I had been introduced to Proust during my second semester at NYU and had since become obsessed with him. While we had only read Swann’s Way for class, I immediately bought and began to read the remaining volumes of In Search of Lost Time, neglecting my other studies. Part of the reason I took a leave from school was so I could read the rest of the novel, and the many other works it led me to.
Now Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle was being hailed as the twenty-first century’s answer to perhaps the greatest novel ever written.
Later that Sunday I made my way down Museum Mile after revisiting the Vermeers in the Dutch and Flemish painting section at The Met and stopped to browse at The Strand’s Central Park kiosk. Among the half-priced paperbacks was a lightly used copy of My Struggle: Book 1 with a tasteful collage on the cover that has since been discontinued in favor of the ubiquitous author photos. $8.
Sitting on a park bench across from the duck ponds, I waded into the first fifty pages of what would become the longest series I’ve ever read, and thought: Fuck, he’s done it.
Since abandoning my ambition of becoming a journalist, I had been scribbling away in a vain attempt to recreate, for my imagined readers, the feeling Proust had given me. Little did I know that a forty-something year-old Norwegian living in Sweden had already done it better than I could, and before I had even graduated from high school. Worse still, he really was very good looking.
I canceled any plans I had for the next few days and read the rest of the book, spellbound. By the end of the week I would buy and read the second volume, too, which had already been released in paperback. On the cover was a photo of Karl Ove taking a long drag of a cigarette, wearing a sports jacket with the crest of an Argentina soccer jersey peeking out from underneath.
I decided to hold off on buying the third volume, which at the time was only available in hardcover.
On May 8, 2015 Knausgaard appeared at the 92Y to speak with Rivka Galchen and read from My Struggle: Book 4, which had just been released in hardcover by Archipelago Press, concurrently with a more affordable paperback edition of Book 3 by FSG.
I would wait a full year for the fourth volume to come out in paperback, on principle, but couldn’t resist attending the reading.
Near the Central Park Reservoir I met a friend from NYU who’d been in the class in which we’d read Swann’s Way. He was sitting on a park bench, reading The Savage Detectives. I myself had already sped through Book 3 and was now carrying a copy of American Pastoral in my tote bag.
“You look like you just got out of the office,” my friend said.
He was wearing water-ready Patagonia Baggies.
We were the youngest in attendance, and my friend was noticeably underdressed. When we took our “cheap seats” at the very back of the balcony ($25), my friend took note of the names of all the “dead white men” immortalized in large letters above the stage: Beethoven. Lincoln. Moses. It certainly was a strange selection. I had heard people make similar comments about the names engraved onto the Columbia libraries.
Knausgaard walked onstage to thunderous applause in what—as my friend pointed out—were some truly tight jeans. He paired them with suede desert boots and a tan blazer over a plain white tee. He gave the crowd no acknowledgment before beginning to read, hands gripped to the podium, mooring himself as he swayed to the ebb and flow of his own words.
During the question and answer period, Knausgaard referred repeatedly to the “selflessness” he tried to achieve while writing about his past. I don’t think it quite translated in the way he meant it.
Since comparing him to Proust—something Knausgaard himself admitted was flattering but absurd—the media had already begun to cool their praise for the author and My Struggle, some even stooping so low as to call it “typical” of the “selfie generation.” As if Knausgaard hadn’t been born in the sixties and 3,600 pages could be reduced to a single—or even a series—of snapshots.
Perhaps by “selflessness” Knausgaard was referring to what Roland Barthes acknowledged in his famous essay, “The Death of the Author”:
Proust himself, despite the apparently psychological character of what are called his analyses, was visibly concerned with the task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation between the writer and his characters; by making of the narrator not he who has seen and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to write (the young man in the novel… wants to write but cannot; the novel ends when writing at last becomes possible).
Knausgaard’s series ends with the lines: “Now it is 7:07, and the novel is finally finished. In two hours Linda will be coming here, I will hug her and tell her I’ve finished, and I will never do anything like this to her and our children again. Then we’ll take the train to Louisiana. I am going to be interviewed onstage, after which it will be her turn, because her own book has come out and it glitters and sparkles like a star-filled night sky. Afterwards we will catch the train to Malmö, where we will get in the car and drive back to our house, and the whole way I will revel in, truly revel in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.”
I didn’t need to turn to the last page when I bought the book to know that this would be the ending. The final volume had been released in Norwegian a full seven years earlier (underscoring the bizarre circumstances in which the translation of the book by two people took far longer than the actual writing of it) and this proclamation that Knausgaard was done writing had been teased to readers of all languages before subsequently being broken with the announcement that he had already written another series, titled after the seasons and to be translated by a third person and released in English by Penguin over the course of the year leading up to Book 6.
I broke my principle and decided to cough up for all the available books in hardcover, so as not to make the grueling publication cycle drag on for yet another year. By the end of the final volume I too was relieved the novel was “finally finished.” Part of me was surprised the last 1,200 pages hadn’t been broken into two or three more digestible volumes (then they could claim he had matched or even outdone Proust’s seven). But another part suspected I wasn’t the only one whose patience was starting to wear a little thin.
Without it being disguised in between seven hundred pages of his characteristic narrative, would readers have been able to stomach that raw, four hundred-page essay and buy a seventh or even eighth volume?
These were some of the questions I had when I attended the reading and Q&A, moderated by Maggie Nelson, for Book 6 at Murmrr Theatre in the Union Temple of Brooklyn on September 26, 2018. Like with the Harry Potter event eleven years earlier, part of the spectacle made me feel slightly sick. When Nelson opened the questions to the floor, I suddenly felt the urge to claim the microphone for my own—or yell like Mussolini from the balcony—and spoil the entire thing, maybe even ask her whether she thought the theory in Knausgaard’s essay held up to critical analysis.
Of course, I sat there silently, and politely clapped when he left the stage.