My Struggle, Book 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

I was unable to dissemble, unable to play a role, and the scholarly earnestness I brought into the house was impossible to keep at arm's length in the long run, sooner or later they would have to engage with it, and the disequilibrium it led to, as their banter never demanded anything at all of me, that was what must have made them call my mother in the end.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett) Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012

It was Knausgaard's articles recently in The New York Times Magazine  about America --funny and perceptive -- that led me to My Struggle Book 1, a fascinating book divided into two distinct parts, one about his teenage years and one about the death of his alcoholic father.  His teenage years are devoted, to a considerable extent, to obtaining alcohol for parties, while his father's death from alcohol causes him to abstain, not always successfully.  Throughout he observes the quotidian details of life, finding them both beautiful and burdensome.  In his teenage years he chases girls, drinks, reads, and plays in a band:  We were utterly hopeless, completely out of our depth, there was not a snowball's chance in hell of anything coming of this, we wouldn't even be good enough to perform at a school party, but although this was the reality we never experienced it as such.  What follows is a funny, and sad, episode where they are hired to perform at a shopping center and then thrown out after five minutes because "you don't even sing!"

When his father dies at his Grandmother's house Karl Ove and his brother go there to clean up the place, a Herculean job:  The blue wall-to-wall carpet was covered with dark stains.  The open built-in wardrobe was full of loose bottles and bags of them.  More bottles, clothes hangers, shoes, unopened letters, advertising brochures, and plastic bags were strewn across the floor.  As Karl Ove cleans he weeps and flashes back to better days with his father and his grandparents.  When he goes outside he is reminded of images from Ruisdael and Giotto; this and music and memories help him get through the ordeal.

One of the many fascinating things about Book 1 is the combination of the general and the specific:  the details are Norwegian in many ways (including discussion of the grandparents' relationship with the Nazis, food, education, et al.) but also the general details of being a teenager and dealing with death are, in many ways, the same everywhere.  And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.