Speed Reading Knausgaard

Why My Struggle’s frictionless prose is so addicting and how it unlocks dormant feelings and long-lost memories

Entering college, I told myself I wouldn’t major in literature because I knew I would always be devoted to reading. I intended to study linguistics, in part because I believed language shaped reality and that the rapid extinction of indigenous languages meant vast troves of knowledge would soon be lost forever. I envisioned myself as a kind of Indiana Jones, venturing to remote corners of the Earth to discover and preserve linguistic treasures. But the physiology of dipthongs and plosives covered in Linguistics 101 went right over my head. I didn’t sign up for the anatomy of the tongue. I signed up to understand the world through language, so I scurried back to the literature camp.

Shortly after graduating, I moved to New York and applied to various bookstores. After years of rigorous study extending back to high school, I was ready to work a semi mindless job and I soon landed a part-time gig at Greenlight Bookstore. At the time, our two bestsellers were Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic autobiography told in six massive installments and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy. Safe to say these two authors sustained Greenlight, and probably a slew of other indie bookstores, during slow periods and possibly carried them out of the red. We always had dozens of copies in stock. Nevertheless, I snubbed my nose at both of them, dismissing Knausgaard as a narcissistic white guy and rolling my eyes at continental Ferrante.

I had spent the past four years studying some of literature’s most challenging works and edgiest practitioners. Not only that, but the majority of my reading had been prescribed. Now that I was finally freed of syllabi, I didn’t want to be told what to read. I was curious about contemporary literature, but I was more inclined to champion the underdogs -- works in translation, small press titles -- than concede to popular opinion.

I dismissed the international best sellers even though I’d come to believe that the highest form of literature necessitated an audience. In other words, the greatest writers had something brilliant to say and they said it in a compelling and impactful way. The successful marriage of message and technique was actually far more difficult, I concluded, than many of the mind-numbing, boundary-pushing works I had just spent years deciphering such as Ulysses and Pale Fire. (The course devoted to Ulysses was led by a straw-haired man who looked like he shared Leopold Bloom’s love for eating liver. The referential fog in Pale Fire was so thick, every line so laden with meaning, that we had to move at a glacial pace to unpack it all.) I enjoyed collectively analyzing these works, but the actual reading experience was stilted at best and miserable at worst.

My own writing in college was obsessed with aesthetics and linguistic play. Meaning and substance were secondary to sonic pleasure. Originality and breaking convention were prized above all. Emotion and accuracy were hardly considerations. As you can imagine, a lot of what I wrote was unreadable, especially the poetry. But poetry was the only form that could accommodate my cryptic value system.

Years later, my friend Nata made me reconsider Knausgaard and Ferrante. I was introduced to them through a writer I met at a Bud Smith workshop. Nata was living in Mexico City at the time but looking to move to New York and we had a room to fill. We won the roommate lottery with Nata. Here was someone I could talk books and writing with, something I dearly missed from my days working at Greenlight when there was often little to do besides catch up on what my coworkers had been reading and writing as we made sure display copies were perfectly flush and shelves were properly stocked. Nata had nothing but good things to say about Knausgaard and Ferrante. I trusted their taste, for they were serious about writing, very knowledgeable, and shared my love for Roberto Bolaño and Tyrant Books.

Nata and I are in our own writer’s workshop now and they brought up Knausgaard after reading my latest personal essay, mentioning it dealt in part with a difficult father-son relationship. So My Struggle was top of mind when I was considering which big book I wanted to tackle this winter.

I also considered a thousand page biography of Dostoevsky that doubled as a cultural history of Russia or rereading Infinite Jest, which has become a lit bro punch line but I genuinely loved it in high school and have been curious how it holds up.

In the end, I started Septology by Jon Fosse, recent winner of the Nobel Prize. It was one of my Dad’s books that I brought back with me and the thought of a dark, Norwegian winter appealed to me. Winter was just beginning. If I read it fast enough, I’d still have time for Knausgaard.

Septology was more challenging than I anticipated, reminding me of my college days, which was actually refreshing. I was stretching an old part of my brain as I waded through the periodless prose.

The seven-part novel centered around two main characters named Asle and Asle. Both Asles were aging painters, but one was successful and widowed in the countryside and the other was an alcoholic wasting away in the city. Fosse’s reluctance to differentiate/his inclination to blend and obfuscate boundaries, permeated the novel, which moved at a plodding pace full of stops and starts. I often felt as if I was reading in circles: slow, concentric circles. It embodied the monotonous habits that tend to make up a life and the reading experience was accordingly monotonous.

I strained to see something more and sometimes I caught a glimpse. Each passing turn brought the reader deeper into the fold. Each turn was another lap on the wooded path, and slowly but surely that path became packed, cutting a groove through the thicket. The path differentiated itself from its surroundings and the reader, having traveled that path so frequently, started to notice other subtle distinctions. How the light streamed through at a certain time of day, the many shades of green and brown, the smell of the detritus in the early mornings, after the rain, and after the sun evaporated the rain. This knowledge was gained through endurance, transmitted in composite. It was sedimentary knowledge, many-layered and revealed only by deep drilling and chance fossils.

So little happened and Fosse’s vocabulary was so circumscribed (God, light, painting, neighbors, emptiness, the sea), that I found myself skimming after 100 pages. I figured perhaps I could gulp down entire pages, swallowing the wall of words in their totality. But what meaning had begun to slowly emerge rapidly retreated. I stopped on page 232, no longer enjoying myself, but went deep enough to find this passage that cut through the noise that dilutes the novel: “it’s probably these moments when I’m sitting and staring into empty nothingness, and becoming empty, becoming still, that are my deepest truest prayers, and once I get into the empty stillness I can realize I’m sitting there, I just sit and stare into the empty nothingness, and probably in a way I am the empty nothingness I’m looking at, I can sit like that for I don’t know how long but it’s a long, long time, and I believe these silent moments enter into the light in my paintings, the light that is clearest in darkness, yes, the shining darkness, I don’t know that for sure but that’s what I think, or hope…” I know this feeling of stillness but I haven’t felt it in a long time.

After putting down Septology, I abandoned more than half of the books I started -- Dr. No by Percival Everett, The White Album by Joan Didion, Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson. My interest waned even when I was just fifty pages shy of the end.

And then Knausgaard pulled me out of my reading rut. I’ve already finished it and stopped by Unnameable to see if they had a used copy of the second one. (They didn’t. Instead I picked up Hua Hsu’s memoir and Leslie Jameson’s newest book, Splinters.)

My Struggle perplexed me. Not the writing, which is simple and direct. Nor the themes, which are explicit and universal. But rather its addictive nature. It is a thrilling page turner about day-to-day life, with drawn out descriptions of the author’s actions, from buttering his toast to studying the flow of commuter traffic. It is punctuated by milestones (student years, being on the cusp of parenthood, his father’s death) but mostly it concerns the minutiae of life. While that might sound drab, it is strangely compelling and I’m trying to figure out why. I never tire, for instance, of the countless instances where the author heats a kettle to make coffee and steps out for a cigarette.

After mulling this over all week, I think My Struggle was addicting because Knausgaard held space for the reader and gave them a kind of agency most books don’t. I think he accomplishes this for three reasons which I’ll elaborate on below.

1. The writing is ambient.

2. His emotional remembrances jolt our own.

3. The easy-to-follow prose allows for introspection.

The writing is so unobtrusive it's nearly ambient, which is a testament to Knausgaard’s descriptive powers. His descriptions can be dry as wallpaper but they are also transportive. Scenes from his childhood are rendered in exacting detail, conjuring specifics of 1970s Norway while also drawing on universal feelings in adolescence. They are meticulous, yes, but not overly wrought. Importantly, they keep things moving and are as economical as stage directions.

While the writing is ambient, Knausgaard’s presence is paradoxically inescapable. He permeates the novel and seemingly withholds nothing, allowing the reader to raid his mind like the FBI. We are given reason to believe we have access to every action and every thought, no matter how ugly, shameful, or unflattering it might be. For example, after ending a call with his wife, he writes, “As always when I said [I love you], I wondered if it was actually true.”

In submitting so readily, he flattens himself. The novel pertains to his life and his experiences, but the target of his writing is always the underlying emotion. What did it feel like to be such close brothers in childhood and how did adulthood transform that intimacy? What did it feel like to be desperately in love for the first time (and perhaps more enamored by the feeling of being in love)? What did it feel like to try to fit in at school? These are hallmarks of modern life and Knausgaard succeeds in recovering these emotions so faithfully that he unlocks them in the reader, no matter how dormant the feelings might have been. For these remembrances tap into a kind of deep knowing that, once surfaced, unleash a tsunami of memories within the reader.

Knausgaard does the work for us, identifying and recreating these emotional moments, but he also shows us how to do the work ourselves. My memory-induced asides were but mimics of his own detours down cul-de-sacs of memory, which he does quite frequently but so smoothly you hardly notice until you’ve already been rerouted back to the main highway of the narrative.

The book has a remarkable flow in this way and glides like a puck over ice. His frictionless prose drifts from external action to interior thought and back again, from the present to memory and back again.

Aside from structural reasons, his prose is also frictionless because it is so easily legible. Metaphors are scarce throughout the 450 page novel and there are no remarkable turns of phrase. The narrative requires so little brain power to comprehend that we do not have to read between the lines. It is easy enough that we can speed read, if we so choose. And when we encounter a certain passage that is emotionally charged, igniting a feeling or memory within us, we can entertain that feeling, hold it, consider it, without losing the thread of the narrative. Therein lies the magic of My Struggle.

I am someone who heavily annotates the books I read, underlining choice words or poignant passages or aha moments. I did not underline a single passage in My Struggle. I want to say it is styleless but that would be untrue. Everything is a choice and the choice Knausgaard seems to have made with this book was to exercise utmost restraint in his writing -- no flourishes, refrain from metaphor, always opt to describe things as is -- while simultaneously withholding nothing from the reader. No thought, no emotion, no experience is off limits. He revokes his own privilege to privacy, refusing to hide, even behind language.

At least, that is the effect, and a convincing one at that. His willingness to put it all out here kindles trust in the reader. It also inspired me to go deeper as I continue to take a hard look at my own relationship to my father, substances, and achievement.

I’m sure Knausgaard has inspired countless imitators. One could argue everyone on Substack is a Knausgaard hack to some extent. I’m not interested in trying to replicate his style, but I would like to carry with me his powers of observation, his receptiveness to memory and emotion (which seems to require long swaths of focused solitude (i.e. no screens)), and his ability to translate that into narrative.

As a writer, I am constantly trying to translate life into a narrative, but Knausgaard takes it a step further by trying to translate thought into narrative. Like a blacksmith, he smelts thought into liquid metal, quivering and hot, and hammers it into a legible, linear shape.

Of course this is a manipulated representation of the brain. The elastic mind is closer to a quantum particle, simultaneously here and there as it pinballs through a nebula of thought, emotion, memory. A more faithful representation of the mind’s inner workings might resemble some of those confounding, incomprehensible texts I read in college. Ulysses, in fact, is a babbling stream of consciousness. But these days I prefer stories over texts, and I found Knausgaard to be a very generous storyteller. The best storytellers are usually generative. Story begets story begets story. Knausgaard did that for me. His frictionless prose ultimately acted as kindling, igniting all kinds of ideas and memories that I felt compelled to share. So here we are, sitting around a modest flame amid a blizzard of consciousness, swapping stories late into the night like new friends.