There he makes this most highly-wrought formalist novel sound like something the vitalist Lawrence might have written: What has tempted me to give Knausgaard another chance? Not the renewed hype, even if “renewed hype” is one (cynical) definition of canonicity, but my recent reading of Lawrence’s Sons and Loversand rereading of Joyce’s Portraitand their very different approaches to the modernist male Künstlerroman, what I semi-seriously called a distinction between the Protestant and Catholic imaginations-and what is the standoff between Catholic and Protestant about if not the necessity of artifice to the human encounter with existential fundamentals? Despite what I will shortly describe as his affinity with Lawrence, Knausgaard wrote an introduction to the centenary edition of Joyce’s Portrait.
(On the principle that one shouldn’t review books one hasn’t read from cover to cover, I eventually deleted that post.) There I pronounced My Struggle an essentially conceptual artwork, meant to be contemplated as a phenomenon rather than read, and worried that Knausgaard’s willful and much-advertised abandonment of literary form implied that the necessary contrivances by which we live were merely disposable bits of ornament rather than load-bearing structures. As longtime readers know, I tried to read My Struggle when the first installments were published in America, did not succeed in clearing 100 pages, and wrote an impatient and aggrieved assessment of what I did read on this site in 2014. This will be neither a palinode nor a redrawing of the indictment.
My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgård
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