Long books

I’ve been dipping into a work by Karl Ove Knausgård. He’s a Norwegian writer famous for the autobiographical six-volume series, My Struggle. Knausgård is often described as the Norwegian Proust. My brother left one of his books in the flat. It’s the final volume, titled, The End.

Sam’s bookmark sits 360 pages into this chunky 1153-page work. Still, he reached a third of the way through Volume 6. Pretty impressive. I remember us talking briefly about the author before he left the flat in London to go and study in Sheffield. The narrative had reached a place where the author was going on about getting his kids ready for school or something – a subject that had been discussed perhaps a hundred times before – and Sam lost the impetus to go on.

I watched an interview with Knausgård a few weeks ago. He started the series of autobiographical works following prolonged frustration with writing fiction. If I remember correctly, he just said to himself: 'Right, that’s it,' and sat down and started writing and didn’t stop for two years (2009–11), a remarkably short time given the length of My Struggle.

One wonders about the forces at play behind such exasperated dedication. That same engine driving a Proust to write, write, write until the last breath. There’s something anxious, broken, tragic, captivating and admirable in it. Perhaps it comes from a necessity to empty the self before passing from this life; of leaving all traces of oneself in this material realm, before disappearing into the spiritual. Or perhaps it’s the state of a petrified ego, sprinting endlessly from the terrible reality of death. Maybe they’re the same thing.