Caroline Barron Author

THE END by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Harvill Secker 2018 (originally published 2011)

Linda has stars inside her, and when they shine, she shines, but when they don’t the night is pitch black.
– page 1025.

At Auckland University in May 2018, Knausgaard warned our small group that that this book was different. That ‘The End’ returned to the beginning, circling back around to question the very decision he’d made to publish in the first place. Had he done the right thing? Were his memories correct? What did he owe his uncle Gunnar, if anything? (And no, he did not mention the 300-odd pages of Nazism essay in the middle…).

Page 101:
For crying out loud.
What a fucking mess.
How the hell could I ever have put myself in such a spot? What was I trying to do? Why couldn’t I keep all the badness to myself like other people did? But no, I had to go and shove it in everyone’s face, and drag others down with me in the fall.

A fittingly dazzling end to the series, despite—and I have to admit it—I skim-read most of the Nazism essay. I understand why he included it, but it felt to me like a major detour, and I just wanted to get back to Linda, Vanja, Heidi and John. That’s where the magic lay for me.

I particularly enjoyed the way, once again, he so realistically juxtaposes the every day motions of life against the backing track of inner turmoil. Smoking a cigarette—thinking of Gunnar. Drinking coffee from that vacuum jug—thinking of Gunnar. Dropping the kids at nursery—thinking of Gunnar. He captures the nagging fear and shame of someone’s criticism and dislike, an earworm nagging at every layer of consciousness. It has the effect of slipping the writer and the reader away from the exterior and into the interior, each side alternatively amplified then fading out.

Other pulsing veins throughout the book are that he still felt the fear of his father, like an after-taste, despite his father being dead many years. Also, the intriguing gap he feels between himself and life:

Page 1057:
One of the many things she [Linda] criticises me for is that I don’t see her. This is not quite true, I do see her, the problem is that I see her more or less in the way you see a room you know well; everything is there, the lamp and the carpet and the bookcase, the sofa and the window and the floor, but somehow transparently, no mark is left on your mind.
Why do I organise my life like this? What do I want with this neutrality? Obviously it is to eliminate as much resistance as possible, to make the days slip past as easily and unobtrusively as possible. But why? Isn’t that synonymous with wanting to live as little as possible? With telling life to leave me in peace so that I can …yes, well, what? Read? Oh, but come on, what do I read about, if not life? Write? Same thing. I read and write about life. The only thing I don’t want life for is to live it.

And again, on page 213, he writes of the necessary distance between him and his children. He doesn’t explain why – “an element of enduring . . . of holding out, the opposite of letting go and living.”

I wonder if this is something most writers feel?

I felt at times uncomfortable with his detailed description of Linda’s illness and mental decline. Obviously it was Knausgaard’s story too, it affected him greatly, but it somehow seemed too much, cruel even, to reveal his wife’s weakness in this way. But this, we all know, is Knausgaard’s style, and where the magic lies.

Despite skim-reading much of the Nazism essay, I understand the point he makes, and was blown away by the dark and urgent question he asks of us:

Page 828:
Decent humans distanced themselves from all of this, but they were few, and this fact demands our consideration, for who are we going to be when our decency is put to the test? Will we have the courage to speak against what everyone else believes, our friends, neighbours and colleagues, to insist that we are decent and they are not? Great is the power of the weak, almost inescapable its bonds, and the only thing we can really do is to hope our we is a good we. Because if evil comes it will not come as ‘they’, in the guise of the unfamiliar that we might turn away without effort, it will come as ‘we’. It will come as what is right.

Woven throughout the novel are his considerations of, and questions about literature—what it is and its purpose:

Page 115:
And writing was such a fragile thing. It wasn’t hard to write well, but it was hard to make writing that was alive, writing that could prise open the world and draw it together in one and the same movement. When it didn’t work, which it never really did, not really, I would sit there like a conceited idiot and wonder who I thought I was, supposing I could write for others. Did I know any better than everyone else? Did I possess some secret no one else possessed. Were my experiences particularly valuable? My thoughts about the world especially valid?

Page 169:
From a literary perspective, mercy lay in beauty, which is to say in the beautiful sentence, and in the creative manifestation, the fictionalisation, the secret alliance of events that criss-crossed any novel, because this criss-crossing in itself was an affirmation of meaning and cohesion.

Page 224:
. . . on the contrary, literature’s entire system is based on the reader submitting to the work and vanishing within it.

Other favourite quotes:

Page 15: on death:
Everyone’s life contained a horizon, the horizon of death, and it lay somewhere between the second and third generations before us, and the second and third generations after us. We, and those we lived with and loved, existed between those two lines. Outside were the others, the dead and the as yet unborn. There, life was a chasm without us.

Page 243: on friendship and love:
Geir gave me the chance to look at life and understand it, Linda gave me the chance to live it. In the first instance I became visible to myself, in the second I vanished. That’s the difference between friendship and love. That the two things came into my life simultaneously meant for a while everything was turned upside down, all of a sudden, almost from one day to the next. I found myself plunged into something completely new. Everything was wide open, nothing was impossible any more. And in the sky, I that fantastic summer of 2002, the sun shone, sinking red into the Mälardalen every night, as if shrouded by a veil of blood, its last rays glittering gold on all the city’s towers and spires, and I was immortal.

Page 164: on the decision to publish:
In the years that followed, I willingly told anyone who cared to listen about dad and his demise, it made me special and perhaps interesting too, it made me into someone who had seen a few things, gave me a certain air of casual disregard and depth, something I’m sure I was trying to attain, I’d always carried that inside me, the desire to be someone, and that notion of elevation had always been a part of my motivation for writing. Holding forth in that way about my father and what became of him always left me with a bad taste in my mouth, because I was exploiting him and the tragedy of his life for my own ends. But that was small scale. The novel blew it all up and made a big thing out of it. I was exploiting him, yes, I was climbing on his corpse. And I was doing that simply by writing about it. At the same time it was the most important story in my life.

If you’ve a Knausgaard fan this is a must-read, but the weight of the central essay pulled the book down for me, so I give it four out of five stars.