Beltane Closing Moon
Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s, My Struggle: Volume I. This book hits me as his memories call up my memories. His father memories call to mind my own, distant father, somehow unknown and unknowable. As he sat at the kitchen table, ruler and fat pencil in hand, mocking up an ad for the Times-Tribune’s Thursday edition, the big one which made us paperboys groan as they weighted down our green canvas bags, I would watch him, wonder why a man of his intelligence would spend time doing this.
His mind (Knausgaard’s) roves around ideas and art and writing in ways I recognize, having traveled many of the paths on which he walks. He wonders about his visceral reaction to art, why one painting moves him and another doesn’t, why so many of the ones that do come from a time before the 20th century. He plays with epistemology, speculating on how confident we can be about knowing the world; it is there, as David Hume said when he kicked the rock and said, “I refute it thus,” referring to Bishop Berkeley’s world of perceptions only, yet the world is not so easily known, forming itself from colors, for example, that represent not what color something is, but exactly the color it isn’t.
And, too, he is Norwegian. So he describes the inner workings of a Scandinavian mind and a culture that references lutefisk, fjords, cold and snow in the way a Hawai’ian might mention taro, palm trees and the hula.
My Struggle is not for everyone. It is personal, microscopic, intimate, plotless, meandering. If you need a narrative that hangs together in the usual way, this is not it though there is a continuity, a sort of modest stream of consciousness, more like blocks of consciousness, that do connect one with the other.
Recommended.
