My Struggle, Book 2

I finished reading Book 2 of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard - book 2 of 6 - and I have to say that I enjoyed it, but I didn’t adore it.

Late in the book the author says:

"The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred value, 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."

“That were not about anything,” to me that sums of much of his writing.

Elsewhere he writes:

"Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life."

I’m not sure about his facts, but even if indifference is one of the seven deadly sins (sloth?), I think that meanness (wrath) - the opposite of kindness - is worse.  Mean people suck.

And while discussing friends and family he writes:

"… we were trapped in each other as in ourselves, we couldn’t escape, it was impossible to free yourself, you had the life you had."

Exactly, we can’t escape and most of us don’t want to.  But Karl Ove’s struggle is the struggle between the individual creative life and the family life.  On one hand he desperately wants time and space of his own so that he can write, on the other hand he is desperately in love with his wife and children, and wants to be part of their lives.  James Joyce wrote of the same struggle in the previous century, and did it with fewer words.

I hope this book is not, as the quote from a reviewer says, “the literary event of the century,” I hope there are better books to come.  But I will reserve final judgement until I have read all 6 volumes, if I ever do.