#kevinorourke

Furthermore: I like to think Hemingway is best read outdoors in spring, James Wright on hammocks in Minnesota, and Herbert’s Dune series—which I have read many, many times—in bed late at night when afflicted with a terrible case of reading-induced insomnia. Taking place as they do in far-off galaxies and on alien, sand-blown worlds of gigantic annelids, the Dune books are best read in the wee hours, when the mind is most apt to range to andfro.

 For its part, Saskia Hamilton’s poetry, particularly her newest collection, Corridor, is best read in settings that replicate to some degree the spare, drizzling, chilled, somewhat distant language of her poems. I happened to read Corridor for the first time on an afternoon just before this past Christmas, when I was spending a week in a rented house in northern Vermont, not far from the Canadian border. We had no cellphone service. The house’s WiFi was spotty at best. The world was extremely quiet, and there was no light pollution at night. And the place was situated on several acres of land, the closest neighbors hidden behind a line of conifers, just uphill from a lovely pond that had frozen over before our arrival.

 On the day in question, it was raining lightly, but there was so much snow on the ground and on the pond that the landscape remained white. And I was drinking tea, which I tend to do increasingly in the afternoons.

 All of which (mundane and personal as this is) added up to the perfect setting for reading Corridor. This is a collection of evocative poems that manage the difficult task of inviting the reader into their world (at times the writing is quite intimate, giving startlingly clear insight into the speaker’s head) while also holding the reader at arm’s length. They tantalize. And they are as adept as any I’ve read at conjuring entire landscapes. To wit, the first half of the collection’s first poem titled (Hamilton often uses the same title for multiple pieces) “Flatlands”:

We pull away from the center of the city, poverty, business parks,   trashed strips of ground, tire graveyards, gasometers, modern bungalows, swans and ducks in a canal,   tall grasses, fields and sheep   and then the always classical landscape. The wood with its innumerable pathways.

Hamilton’s use of what is basically a list might be rote if it weren’t so economical—she does not waste words on describing just what the poverty looked like, but lets the reader’s imagination do the rest of the work—and such an accurate description of what traveling from many cities’ centers toward the country, particular on trains, looks like. That she couples this move from civilization back toward nature, toward what she calls “the always classical landscape,” with a period, then ends the stanza on its longest description, the “wood with its innumerable pathways,” is further evidence of her deft hand. The rhythm of description and movement in these lines is really impeccable.

 Another example of Hamilton’s delicate touch is a poem from later in Corridor, “Cover,” which is short enough to quote in full:

Nestle, thistle, dandelion, clover by the dry stone wall. Light, then clouds, then light, conversant with the seemly structure of thinking, and the stops. Warmth of the bench. You inside saying to someone, “I like that.” Rain begins to know the table.

Though her language here is characteristically unadorned, one can easily imagine oneself “by the dry stone wall,” in the last moments of sun before rain moves in. As these lines prove, even if one can’t manage to read Corridor on a sofa by a fire in Vermont—I highly suggest it!—there’s no need to worry. These poems create their own moods and settings, transporting the reader fully into the world of the poem, woods with “innumerable pathways,” so that the reader’s mind, to borrow from Hamilton herself, begins to know the poems as intimately as a lover.

(Photo via Dischord Records / by Michael Ackerman) Part Two: “Can I have that pretzel?”

However, there might be a catch in my reading. Maybe I find Hamilton’s work stirring and intimate because I know her personally, albeit slightly. And maybe this complicates the act of reviewing a book of hers.

 When I was an undergraduate, I took a poetry workshop with Hamilton, who was teaching at Kenyon College for what was my junior year. I really, really, enjoyed her class, and though I’m now ashamed of both my undergraduate writing and behavior (more on the latter in a bit), Hamilton must have thought enough of me that she suggested our (her, myself, Jeff Boyle, and one or two others) going to see Fugazi when they were playing in Pittsburgh. See, Hamilton, as I recall, grew up with Guy Picciotto’s sister, and knew the band. Which fact I found completely fucking amazing, and only deepened the goofy crush I already had on her.

 Therefore the morning of April 21, 2001, a Saturday, found me terribly hungover and Hamilton awkward in my messy apartment, waiting for me finish puking in the bathroom so we could make the 2.5 hour from Gambier to Pittsburgh with enough time to park etc. before Fugazi’s set that afternoon. It was an unpleasant drive; we had to pull over so I could puke, again, on the side of the road. My head hurt badly, as heads are wont to do when one stays out late drinking Natural Ice. And of course there was the obvious, copious shame, which lingers to this day.

 However! The show was awesome, despite my running into not one but two malignant ex-girlfriends at the show. Fugazi, who several years ago released a fine recording of the 4/21/2001 show as part of their Fugazi Live Series, engaged in an appropriate amount of banter with the crowd (Ian MacKaye asked the above pretzel-related question of a fan), demanded they stop moshing, refused to play any Minor Threat songs, and, generally, rocked very tough. In all, not a bad Saturday, and one I remember fondly (well, the show) all these many years later.

 Which of course complicates my feelings about Hamilton’s work: of course I like the poetry of a widely respected and kind writer who looms large in my memories. Particularly because Hamilton came into (and then basically departed) my life during what might be my most miserable year on the planet. And because the little time I spent around her is also bound to the memory of seeing the only live show I ever saw of my favorite band. And because Hamilton was years later kind enough to write me a recommendation when I applied to graduate school, which recommendation I am convinced is the only thing that got me into grad school at all, my undergraduate grades being middling to horrible. And on and on; the point being: I’m not what one would call an impartial observer, and it’s complicated.

(Exterior View of the St. Lazare Train Station, Arrival of a Train, Monet, 1877, oil on canvas) Part Three: “Day has been ending / for the entirety of day.”

Or, rather, reviewing her work would be complicated if it weren’t so objectively good.

 Corridor is Hamilton’s third collection, and her first since 2005’s Divide These. Where Divide These and Hamilton’s first book, As for Dream, are populated by many others—often people who seem to be lovers, frequently addressed by the plaintive “you,” as well as the sickly, the infirm—Corridor is more sparsely peopled.

 To be sure, there are a handful of poems with seeming lovers (or objects of the speaker’s focused attention, which is close enough for me), addressed in lines like “I wanted to read an essay on his wrist” (“An Essay on Perspective”) and “Facing him at the table, I caught / the warm look of someone whose neck I have kissed, whose ear” (“En Face”). But many of this collection’s poems are suffused with a sense of place, grasping for understanding a place, that is as immediate and important as any expression of desire. “En Face,” from which the previous quote comes, ends thusly:

… We’d met on the off beat   the time between lunch and five, and braved the almost destroyed thing over wine and olives in the stony basement bar on—was it John Islip Street? John Cowslip Street?

The poem therefore starts with affection and ends in a fumbling for place; that she gives the poem’s entire last line over to the street names shows that correctly recalling the name of the street where the speaker “braved / the almost destroyed thing” is as important a topic (if not more) as the relationship.

In a conversation with Fanny Howe that Graywolf Press posted to its website, Hamilton—after noting that the period during which she wrote Corridor was marked by travel, change, and familial loss—says that “I was thinking that the best way to let go of something, to let it have its own life, is to start working on something new.” Hence, possibly, all of the travel found in these poems, they way they seem to pass through and by locations; some of the Corridors poems are in the city, many more are in the country (among bees), and many involve the kind of travel seen in “Flatlands.” At the risk of using a tired, cliché word, this is ephemeral work, and Hamilton is as good as any poet working today at using silence and brevity.

A wonderful example of her work’s restraint, shall we say, is “Leave,” which is also short enough to quote in full:

The children who dug a hole in the garden of the house rarely visited uncovered the limb bones, and I, lately arrived, spoke to the parents before I called the police. Let them play here later, I’d said. I put the phone down. The grass grew in patches on the ground, the oaks rose at the edge of the property as if newly taking possession of a lease long since expired.

And at the risk of quoting too many of Corridor’s poems, below is the second half of “Flatlands,” which I think is an appropriate way to end this essay. The poem’s first half is an uninterrupted move toward the pastoral, while its second half hints at flies in the ointment, and avoided dangers. In fact this entire collection is filled with that quality that many of us adults lose (save in times of narrowly missed tragedy, or after a loss) once the sheen of impressionable youth dulls into the routine of routine and responsibility: wonder and marvel at the world’s simple beauty. Corridor’s poems offer an antidote to such creeping stupefaction.

Or green spreading on the willows, mechanical shovel on the building site beside the mixer turning cement, fly ash, aggregate and water.   My mind begins to drift as a storm collects over the land we’ve since departed, as if danger were averted only for us, who had boarded the train—   Everyone’s asleep.

  ...

The answers to this question are legion, and this essay can’t hope to address them in any meaningful way. But I’d say, extremely broadly, that writing is about remembrance and expression: we write to express our view of things, and by so expressing that view entomb & preserve it. Writing can be a way of dealing with the inevitability of our own deaths; a written record, even an unpublished one, ensures that our voice will carry beyond the grave, even if it carries to a miniscule (or nonexistent) audience. The very act of writing something down implies some manner of desire for that thing to be shared, conscious or not.

  Hence The Hairsplitter’s Dead Poets’ Society series, and this, the first essay in that series. Essays included in Dead Poets’ Society—yes, the name is borrowed from the film—will examine the work of dead writers, not all of whom were poets. Some of them may have been ‘forgotten,’ some not, but nonetheless the point is that the series will reintroduce and dwell upon the work of writers who are now in the great beyond. They are all taking a dirt nap.

“The sudden, overcast quiet of the past tense”

  Up first is Larry Levis, who died far too young in 1996, at the tender age of 49. As a means of comparison, Dick Cheney turned 55 in 1996, and had already had three heart attacks by the time Levis’s myocardial infarction killed him in May of 1996, the year the Spice Girls’ saccharine, goofy “Wannabe” went head-to-head with Los Del Rio’s “Macarena.”

  Levis published fewer than ten books during his life, but the ones I own—Winter Stars (1985), The Widening Spell of the Leaves (1991), and Elegy (1996, published posthumously)—are all minor, and at times major, masterpieces. Though most of his work was broken into lines, his work has the restless forward motion and reflective, absorbing discursiveness that the best prose poems possess. To read Levis is to listen to a mind remember and reflect: his poems move so seamlessly from memory to imagined scene to imagined scene and then back to the speaker that one forgets where one began until Levis, or Levis’s speaker, emerges to tap the reader on the shoulder. For example, from The Widening Spell of the Leaves, “The Spell of the Leaves” begins with a scene of a woman whose husband has left her:

  Then she would climb in, she told me

On the wrong side of the small, open car

And sit quite still, an unlit cigarette in her hand,

And wait for him to come out and drive her

To work, as always. The first two times it happened

She was frightened, she said, because, waiting for him

Something went wrong with time

  & this continues to a scene of the woman and her young son placing wildflowers in a vase and reciting Christopher Smart to each other and then moves back to a reflection on the woman, as the speaker says “when I think of her, nothing has happened yet,” moving from there to:

  When I think of her, she’s still sitting there,

On the wrong side of the car, intent, staring,

As her thought collects in pools yet keeps

Widening until, now, it casts its spell—

And then the scene is one of great stillness ripening,

  And on, restlessly, to the abandoned son in his classroom and the father who abandoned him standing in “the cramped kitchen of his studio” and then back to the speaker who continues to ruminate on how in the vision of the mother and her son two days after the father has left them Time—yes, Time, with a capital T—sticks “Like the tip of the father’s left forefinger / To the unwiped, greasy, kitchen countertop.”

  All in 107 lines. While far longer than your average Emily Dickinson poem, this is fairly standard, even a bit short, for Levis. For example, the title poem of The Widening Spell of the Leaves (more below) is 210 lines. Levis’s poems tend to take their time and reward patient reading. They are also difficult to summarize. What is “The Spell of the Leaves” about anyhow? While an absurd question to ask of most poems, especially pretty much everything written since Whitman, it is a doubly absurd question to ask of Levis, as Levis’s poems tend to be about a good many things at once.

  But since I’ve posed myself the question, a guess is in order: much of Levis’s work seems to be about the fact that everything is and will always be falling into the past, a tense in which everything achieves a sort of stillness. Much of his work is concerned with what Levis beautifully referred to as “the sudden, overcast quiet of the past tense” in “Slow Child with a Book of Birds,” also from The Widening Spell of the Leaves:

  …that unrelenting music

That makes all things a scattering & wheeling

Once again, the black seeds thrown out onto

The snow & window squealing shut just after—

The sudden, overcast quiet of the past tense

  “That was the day I decided I would never work.”

  Despite the somewhat mournful quality of the above lines, Levis is not really a woe-is-me poet, sobbing over spilled beer and relationships gone awry; in Levis’s poems the fact that the past exists is not a source of sadness but one of wonder (and simple ontological fact). And occasion to induce cataplexy in his readers, as the work is often so, so stupendously beautiful. Even Levis’s reading voice, one of those nicely lilting, soft poets’ voices, much like Ashbery’s, adds to his work; see “The Map” on the Academy of American Poets website.

  Take the aforementioned “The Widening Spell of the Leaves.” From the 1991 book of the same name, this poem deserves an enormous stone monument all its own. Schoolchildren should grow up memorizing this poem in class, in lieu of the usual Frost or the happier Dickinson poems (not that I’ve any issue with either), and once they’ve memorized it sufficiently well they should recite it together in large numbers, a la a great, poetic version of some synchronized North Korean patriotism-reinforcement performance. “The Widening Spell of the Leaves” is one of the very best poems written during the second half of the twentieth century, and might be my favorite poem.

  So, you ask, what is so good about this poem, about some sort of leaves’ spell? Well, let’s start with its last ten lines, which I will quote in full:

  The leaves were becoming only what they had to be—

Calm, yellow, things in themselves & nothing

More—& frankly they were nothing in themselves,

Nothing except their little reassurance

Of persisting for a few more days, or returning

The year after, & the year after that, & every

Year following—estranged from us by now—& clear,

So clear not one in a thousand trembled; hushed

And always coming back—steadfast, orderly,

Taciturn, oblivious—until the end of Time.

  Though there are many treasures in the passage above—the leaves’ possession of “little reassurance / Of persisting,” how the cycle of disappearance and return leads them to be eventually estranged from us yet “always coming back—steadfast, orderly / Taciturn, oblivious” (that Levis describes the leaves as taciturn is especially wonderful, taciturn meaning “habitually silent” and carrying connotations of dourness, of silent disapproval; the leaves see what we are doing with the world and they do not approve)—it would do the poem a disservice to focus solely on its last lines.

  “The Widening Spell of the Leaves” begins with Levis’s speaker (whom I’ve always read as Levis himself, at least in this poem) “in a foreign country” driving

  toward a large city famous

For so little it had a replica, in concrete,

In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck

In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it.

  As dismissive a dismissal of a place as any I’ve read, and one that quite succinctly sets the scene as taking place in a strange land; what kind of country would think to make a concrete, two-thirds scale replica of the Arc de Triomphe but also fuck that replica up by placing it in the middle of traffic? A strange one, and Levis, as he will reveal later in the poem, is the stranger who finds himself there.

  The poem’s pleasures only continue to mount thereon. The city in question, the speaker tells us, “was hours away, beyond the hills / Shaped like bodies of sleeping women.” Which brings me to another point about Levis’s work: in addition to being a master of affect, of languorously drawing out his poems, his imagery is often stunning. Understated but stunning. Evocative even, though I hesitate to use that word as it always seems to want a preposition to follow it, but sometimes prepositions aren’t necessary: Levis’s imagery is simply evocative.

  In the poem in question, we have the aforementioned hills like women’s bodies; peasants who

  turned  

Quickly away, vanishing quietly into that  

Moment, like bark chips whirled downriver

  goats with “brays like the scraping of metal”; a quiet, spreading stillness

  Moving like something I’d witnessed as a child,  

Like the ancient, armored leisure of some reptile  

Gliding, gray-yellow, into the slightly tepid,

Unidentical gray-brown stillness of the water

  and finally a simile to show other similes how it’s done:

  Disease was like

An equation that drank up light & never ended

Not even in summer.

  It is this quality of Levis’s work, the profusion of pleasurable images, that makes it akin to play; much of his poetry is fun to read (though not in the mirthful sense of fun; they are not necessarily funny but full of rewards). Indeed, in the middle of “The Widening Spell of the Leaves,” Levis’s speaker touches on a memory of a childhood neighbor & photographer, a Mr. Hirata, who before he was sent to a Japanese internment camp took Levis’s portrait:

  I remember the way he lovingly relished 

Each camera angle, the unwobbling tripod, 

The way he checked each aperture against

The light meter, in love with all things

That were not accidental

  And it was while watching this man work—or as he puts it, play—Levis decided he would never work:

  But Mr. Hirata did not work. He played.

His toys gleamed there. That much was clear to me…

That was the day I decided I would never work.

It felt like a conversion. Play was sacred.

  The best Levis poems are nesting dolls of lovely, playful, evocative imagery, which is to say nothing about his work’s logic; the above images are not thrown out at random, discrete points of clarity in an otherwise undecipherable postmodern abstraction. Hardly, as Levis’s images are almost gifts to the reader in service, or along the route of, some sort of narrative. Many of his poems feature a narrative framework, and in “The Widening Spell of the Leaves” that framework is Levis’s speaker (or Levis himself) driving in said foreign country until he gets lost and is sick by a tree against whose bark he could see

  The outline of every leaf on the nearest tree,

See it more clearly than ever, more clearly than

I had seen anything before in my whole life.

  To repeat and revise my earlier point, the best Levis poems are ruminations that have taken on the guise of narrative. They are navel-gazing without being insufferable, making use of their “occasion” to reflect and expound philosophically, and do so with great clarity and therefore with great galvanization, as their direct, straightforward, unobtrusive language never gets in the way of the poems’ forward motion, never lessens their impact.

  “The pencil could not believe the thing / It had been asked to do”

  Which is not to say that one does not have to do some work when reading Levis. The opening lines of “The Smell of the Sea,” from Elegy, wryly acknowledge that writing is hardly all fun and games and that poetry can and should be an incisive thing:

  Because they could not blind him twice, they drove a pencil

Through the blind king’s ear. The pencil could not believe the thing

It had been asked to do, but by then it was already entering the

        mind

And there it forgot that it had ever been a pencil.

  The metaphor here is so obvious that is hardly qualifies as a metaphor, but no matter; yes the pencil here is a literal pencil that is used as a weapon, but it is also a stand-in for writing. Writing, as all writers know, is the source of both our pleasure and pain: ask a writer what bothers them most and you’ll often hear something about not having written/being able to write. As the saying goes, writers want to have written, preferably recently, as even the act of writing can be wrenching. Extended essays on dead poets don’t write themselves, people.

  But back to Levis. The difficulty found in Levis’s work is most often not one of clarity (though he does occasionally wander into seemingly unrelated tangents in the middle of poems) but of incision. Levis’s work is most often relatively easy to read and “understand”; he does not present the same issues that more overtly abstract poets like the aforementioned Ashbery or Carl Dennis do, who though they write radically different sorts of work have both produced abstruse, abstract work that is literally difficult to read, a la Finnegan’s Wake. Who amongst us has made it through & fully understood Ashbery’s Flow Chart? Rather, Levis’s work is difficult because it asks us to look closely at ourselves, and because it is often so self-lacerating, which has the effect of being reader-lacerating. The inward gaze often turns outward in Levis’s work.

  A good example is the poem at hand, “The Smell of the Sea.” The poem is bookended by the scene of a “blind king” being murdered with a pencil, and through the course of the poem we learn that the blind king wasn’t necessarily blind per se “& owned a record store.” Via Levis’s typical intimately detailed anecdotal style, we also learn that this king, this record store owner (which fact immediately brings to mind one of those initially reserved but intensely-gregarious-once-music-is-mentioned guys who seem to own and or work at record stores, at least to this writer) was a Mormon who

  had once suspected God did not exist & had spent a summer

Lying on the beach at Santa Monica trying hard not to believe in God,

And was unable to. It was 1967. Wild Thing was coming from a radio.

  Which is only the start of this man’s story, a man who struggled with faith and who he was, until the poem returns to its violent beginning, when “two men pretended to browse” until committing rape & murder. Forgive the big block quote:

  Through the stacks of record albums for a while, & then made the owner close

The store & marched them down the steps, & made the woman take off her dress,

And made the boyfriend watch as one, & then the other, raped her there.

  What happened after that is blind & smells its way to the sea. They forced

The woman & her boyfriend to swallow some Drano from a can, & then flushed

Their mouths with water & made them swallow. But before they found the leftover

        can

  One of them must have noticed the owner with the pencil in his ear, then

the short pine two-by-four. “Has the thought ever entered your mind…?”

One of them said after they had made the man lie on the floor, made him lie on his

        side

  This is a neat, sneaky trick Levis has pulled on his readers: the poem’s opening lines allude to some violent scene, but the description of that scene is couched in poetic, symbolic-seeming language such that the natural reading is to assume metaphor. The pencil that forgets it ever was a pencil isn’t really a pencil, not yet, not until the end of the poem when Levis gives us the full scene, in lines that are as broken as well as any poem but which read almost like prose (as does much of Levis’s work; I have more than once thought he’d have made a good lyric essayist, had he been around for that particular MFA fad) and which carry the immediacy of prose about murder. The ending lines of “The Smell of the Sea” grab our attention both because of the violence found therein but also because they lay bare the artifice with which he was working in the beginning. He forces us to question our own tendency to see metaphor everywhere, and to find the self-reflective in every line of a poem. Sometimes things happen about which no more should be said than the facts of what happened. Their power makes spin and interpretation irrelevant. They simply are.           

  “The last thing my father did for me / Was map a way: he died, & so / Made death possible.”

  Many of Levis’s poems carry such force, which is why I chose to write about him for this series. And why Levis is one of my very favorite poets. To put it another way, when I’m listening to a song I really like, one whose parts just seem to come together like a clock, I will sometimes get those lovely, goose bumpy chills that tell me wow, this is good. An example that seems to work every time, no matter how often I listen to it, is the first 30 seconds or so of “Jesu Christe—Cum Spirito Sancto” from Mozart’s unfinished “Great Mass in C minor” (KV 427). When I listen to it all the hair on my arms stands on end.

  Same goes with the best Levis. Poems like “The Widening Spell of the Leaves,” “The Smell of the Sea,” “Slow Child with a Book of Birds,” and “The Spell of the Leaves”—to name but a very few—have that same effect on me (and, I hope, on any readers heretofore unaware of Levis & who have made it this far into the essay). A question poets occasionally like to ask each other, often with a wry, somewhat impish grin, is what a poem’s occasion might be. What inspired a poem? What worldly connection gives a poem its weight? And so on.

  Well, the best poems carry their own occasion: the reader experiences the occasion while reading the poem, because that reading more than justifies the poem’s existence. It is, as Allan Kaprow might have called it, a happening. Levis is like that, and his best work reminds us that more art, particularly our own art, ought to strive to be as immediate.

  Which brings me to the lines above. They come from “In the City of Light,” from Levis’s 1985 book Winter Stars. Though the poem falters a bit in its middle, its opening lines are just killer. To requote and expound on the above, they read:

  The last thing my father did for me

Was map a way: he died, & so

Made death possible. If he could do it, I

Will also, someday, be so honored.

  The explicit death stuff aside—though bam, Levis really did nail it—this is what great artists like Levis can do for those of us who care for them: they map a way. They may not show us how exactly to create art as powerful as theirs, but their art shows us that such power & affect is possible.

  …

Editor's note: As indicated, the photograph of Larry Levis that prefaces this article comes to us courtesy of VCU's James Branch Cabell Library Special Collections & Archives. We are super thrilled to be able to run such a great image of Levis, and especial thanks go out to Leia Darwish at VCU's Blackbird and to Larry Levis's sister, Sheila Brady.

Case in point: the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. A “provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel,” that seems to be the largely unfiltered story of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s life, the English translation of volume two was released in May of 2013, with four more iterations to come. Aside from the fact that both books one and two of My Struggle are often as gripping and intelligently written as anything I’ve read, both are impressive in their size & scope & detail: they contain multitudes. To wit, Book One is 448 pages, while Book Two is 375; apparently the whole set comes in at around 3500 pages. But this is not to say that every bit of these multitudes are equally gripping, as large swaths of both Books One and Two, particularly Two, are concerned with the sorts of banal goings on that in another sort of fiction might have been cut.

  For example, we get a great deal of the narrator/author’s (who are both named Karl Ove Knausgaard) daily activities—shopping (for food, for records, and often books), cooking and cleaning, the benign intricacies of taking his children out—and frequent, extended, navel-gazing essays on everything from his desire to paint to his feelings about Scandinavian landscapes to his wife’s behavior. In Book One, there is one particularly lengthy section detailing a New Year’s Eve experienced by then teen-aged Karl Ove that involves hiding a bag of beer by the side of the road in the snow and then removing it and then hiding it again when a car comes by and then removing it and walking to town in the snow with the beer, and on and on. I would in no way be surprised to find a deeply moving, three-hundred page description of taking a shit in one of the yet-to-be-released-in-English volumes.

  In sum, My Struggle reads less like a novel per se than a catalog of the narrator’s life and all of the minutiae that make up that life; it is a life in book form that the reader experiences alongside the narrator. The word “autobiographical” hardly does it justice: My Struggle is a self-effacing, self-lacerating, denuding confession in the form of a novel. It also seems to be largely true. So is it fiction? Yes? No?

  Well, if the book is not true qua true, it smacks distinctly of truth. Many if not all of the characters that populate My Struggle are based on and share the names of real people in the author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s life. Take the narrator’s best friend Geir, his mother-in-law Ingrid, and his wife Linda: Geir is clearly based on the “real” Geir Angell Oygarden; Ingrid is Ingrid Bostrom; and Linda, Linda Bostrom Knausgaard. In addition to the fact that using real names’ flaunts one of fiction’s longstanding tenets—that any similarities to persons living or dead should be purely coincidental—the portraits Knausgaard paints of the people in his life are often less than glamorous.

  For example, an episode in Book Two depicts (the character) Ingrid’s alcoholism: (the narrator) Knausgaard discovers that someone seems to have been drinking his liquor while both he and his wife are out and Ingrid is home with their daughter, so he confronts her, only to have her deny everything, totally flabbergasting Knausgaard. Eventually, however, she admits to having a drinking problem and vows to go into recovery. Not to say that this sort of episode isn’t fodder for fiction (for what isn’t?) but one can easily imagine how…perturbed…real-world Ingrid, who is real-world Knausgaard’s mother-in-law after all, must have been after this was printed very publicly in a book that has sold many thousands of copies; family holidays must be fun! Such brutal honesty, or if not honesty then gross & hurtful dramatization, so it’s probably honesty, is almost unbearable. Indeed, Knausgaard told the Paris Review that with My Struggle, “I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read.”

                                       One Dust-Free Room, Please

  But it’s all worth it, as My Struggle’s thin artifice makes for an obsessively absorbing read. All of the banal housework and extended scenes at children’s birthday parties and confrontations with Knausgaard’s crazy drunken Russian neighbor gives one the sense of being enveloped by Knausgaard and Knausgaards’ life and Knausgaard’s worries and what Knausgaard orders when he goes out to dinner and what it’s like when he sips a beer, and it is mesmerizing. Not always entertaining, but mesmerizing. While reading Book Two of My Struggle, I kept thinking about the following bit from Dellilo’s Underworld (a book Knausgaard mentions in passing), in which Marvin Lundy, the baseball memorabilia collector who supposedly owns the Bobby Thomson baseball, reflects on his decades-long quest to buy the ball and meeting so many other people over the course of that quest:

  “The shock of other people’s lives. The truth of another life, the blow,     the impact … The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.”

  Which brings me to those questions I kept asking myself while reading My Struggle: where does Knausgaard go from here? More broadly, why is My Struggle so compelling? And what about literature as a whole, what effect might this book have on that? I’m going to hold off on the last question—more selfie-stories? Or the opposite, lots of non-allegorical genre fiction?—and Knausgaard himself has addressed the first question, telling the Paris Review in aforementioned interview that he “can’t stand” My Struggle, saying if “I could I would burn that, too, but there are too many prints, so it’s impossible.”

  So I’ll just stick to the second question, of why My Struggle is compelling: it is compelling because the world Knausgaard constructs in it is so complete; though the book is grounded in our world and reality (as opposed to, say, Middle-earth), is it also grounded in a completely alien reality, i.e. that of another person’s life. And what separates it from other omniscient, first person singular books is the degree to which My Struggle inhabits its narrator’s life. While highly detailed, omniscient first person singular books abound (Tartt's The Goldfinch, which I am currently reading, comes to mind), the fact that My Struggle is “true” and diaristic gives it a greater ability gather its readers to its breast than might a plot-driven work of fiction, however realistically realized it may be. Couple this truth, or seeming truth, with the attention paid in My Struggle to the aforementioned banality that in another work might have been cut and we get an almost unrealistically complete view of Karl Ove Knausgaard, both narrator and man. The book’s obsessive attention to detail, and the attention to cataloging those details, gives one the sense of being a voyeur of (the writer) Knausgaard’s life. So much so that one can almost imagine being Knausgaard, or at least imagine to a very great degree what it is like to be Knausgaard.

  Toward the end of Book Two, in one of his typically excellent essayistic digressions, Knausgaard directly addresses the project of writing My Struggle. He turned away from conventional fiction, and toward what one might kludgingly call quasi-nonficitive-fiction, because eventually,

  “the only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experience collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.”

  So to say that to read My Struggle is to become a voyeur isn’t really correct, because the word voyeur has connotations of forbidden behavior, of sneaky scopophilia and shame, whereas My Struggle freely, happily invites its readers’ attention, returning their gazes with its own. My Struggle is an unrepentant exhibitionist.

  In her essay “On Photography,” Susan Sontag says that writing and art “is frankly an interpretation,” while photographs “do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, minia­tures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” Following this, My Struggle is more a piece of the world than an interpretation thereof, not so much a miniature of reality as a magnified, blown-up version of one man’s reality. In its insistence on cataloging, on setting down on paper in unflinching honesty one man’s experience of life, it is as immersively escapist a read as the most well constructed universes in literature. J.R.R. Tolkein et cetera and everyone else, eat your hearts out.

  …