I read the first part of Knausgård's My Struggle series a few years ago. I had every intention of moving on to the second part immediately, but there was something to the opening pages of A Man in Love that put me off. I put reading the book on hold indefinitely. Now, I suddenly felt that I was ready to face the familial themes of Knausgård's autobiographical work. The book opens with a passage, where Knausgård takes his first child to the playground with his wife. In all its ordinariness - I even struggle to remember the exact contents - it's a great introduction to a book about love, lust, morals, family and masculinity that is tied to the world of early 2000s Sweden.
The strangest thing about Knausgård's novels has been that they make me distinctly bored at times, and not for insignificant amounts of time. In A Death in the Family, a new year's foray to a friend's party seemed to drag on forever. In this one, discussions of German philosophy could cause an onset of somnambulism. Yet, both books have been immensely rewarding all the same. The slower pace of his novels forces the reader to sit down for longer periods and adjust their rhythm to the pace of the writing. There is an element of victorian drama to it all: when everything is deliberated and considered, and the drama plays out in chapters and not paragraphs, even the slightest changes in tempo have an immediate impact on the reader.
Part of what makes A Man in Love, and all of the other books in the series, magical is the way they subvert your expectations without leaning on tropes or plot twists. Most other novels are built around traditional drama rules, things that you would learn in art school or drama class. If a gun is introduced, someone must pull its trigger. Emerging love interests need to be resolved or rebuffed. Tension is built up, then released. A Man in Love adheres to none of these. Drama unfolds as it does in the real world: conflicts are left unresolved and motivations are either left unexplained or are unexplainable. It takes some time to get used to this and as the novel plays with your expectations of what can happen in drama, it gets under your skin.
Nowhere is this more evident then when Knausgård takes his daughter to a toddler music class. He sits among mothers with their children, chanting silly nursery rhymes and feeling emasculated. Anger builds up inside him, because he is unable to act on his instinct to make an exit. He feels humiliated in front of the attractive instructor, a young woman that barely acknowledges him. He wonders if he could make advances on her after class. A scene like this would have some cogent resolution in ordinary fiction. But here, nothing happens. Knausgård and the instructor never speak or see each other again. He doesn't charge off cursing.
The sixth and final part of Knausgård's saga was released in English a few months ago and many reviewers mentioned the previous books, especially A Man in Love, as some of the greatest novels of the 2000s. Personally, I'm a bit torn. I haven't actually finished it yet and I'm stuck a few dozen pages before the end. Then again, I already feel that both A Death in the Family and A Man in Love have had an outsized impact on me as a human. I adore books that get in the reader's head, and both novels do that without a hint of trickery. It reminds me of Andreas's effect on Pip in Jonathan Franzen's Purity. Knausgård has power over the reader because he is present more in their brains than on the page. He has charisma, looks and a prickly personality. Keeping him in check is part of the struggle.