JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

“Proustian” on a back cover blurb is not necessarily an adjective that makes us buy the book. It is a word of caution: “How far did you get into Swann’s Way the last time you resolved to read Proust?” (3 chapters, a record) We admire Proust, we know he is an important writer, but as King of the Doorstops he demands greater commitment than we can give at this point. (In Russian doorstops, at least, there’s always someone having a psychotic fugue.)

Half-convinced by the rapturous reviews for My Struggle, Book One by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard (English translation by Don Bartlett—we don’t know Norwegian, but the English version is awesome), we read the first page.

And could not stop reading. Nothing earth-shaking happens: there is something almost generic about Karl Ove’s life (this is an autobiography). Karl Ove is a kid in the 80s. He lives with his parents. His father is scary. Karl eats sandwiches.

Digression: What is it with Scandinavian novels and sandwiches?! Girl With Dragon Tattoo is packed with sandwiches and corpses—at the third description of the sandwich-making process we hurled it at the wall. Fine, we haven’t read many Scandinavians. Except for the sagas in Comp Lit, and Burnt Njal. (Why was it called Burnt Njal? Because they burned Njal.) Suddenly our hatred for the horrid old crone who taught that survey course flares up again. We survived her class by imagining a trap door opening under her desk so she could descend into hell and torment Satan for a change.

Karl watches TV. Karl listens to bands and makes mix tapes. Karl gets an older kid to buy beer for a party and hides it from his father. He has a crush on a girl. It’s all very commonplace: under different circumstances this book would’ve been hurled at a wall. But the writing! Powerful, intense, precise, relentlessly readable.

* * * * *
First paragraphs:

For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action will cease of its own accord, and the blood will begin to run towards the body’s lowest point, where it will collect in a small pool, visible from outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whitening skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain. These changes in the first hours occur so slowly and take place with such inexorability that there is something almost ritualistic about them, as though life capitulates according to specific rules, a kind of gentleman’s agreement to which the representatives of death also adhere, inasmuch as they always wait until life has retreated before they launch their invasion of the new landscape. By which point, however, the invasion is irrevocable. The enormous hordes of bacteria that begin to infiltrate the body’s innards cannot be halted. Had they but tried a few hours earlier, they would have met with immediate resistance; however everything around them is quiet now, as they delve deeper and deeper into the moist darkness. They advance on the Havers Channels, the Crypts of Lieberkühn, the Isles of Langerhans. They proceed to Bowman’s Capsule in the Renes, Clark’s Column in the Spinalis, the black substance in the Mesencephalon. And they arrive at the heart. As yet, it is intact, but deprived of the activity to which end its whole construction has been designed, there is something strangely desolate about it, like a production plant that workers have been forced to flee in haste, or so it appears, the stationary vehicles shining yellow against the darkness of the forest, the huts deserted, a line of fully loaded cable- buckets stretching up the hillside.

The moment life departs the body, it belongs to death. At one with lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of death. Nonetheless, there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to a see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only hidden away in discrete, inaccessible rooms, even the pathways there are concealed, with their own elevators and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered. When they have to be transported from the hospital it is through a dedicated exit, into vehicles with tinted glass; in the church grounds there is a separate, windowless room for them; during the funeral ceremony they lie in closed coffins until they are lowered into the earth or cremated in the oven. It is hard to imagine what practical purpose this procedure might serve.