A Death in the Family

It took longer than I anticipated, but I finally finished this book.

Knausgaard records his life with a brutal honesty. One which, I read elsewhere, caused some distress to his family, not least in the depiction of his father and grandmother’s alcoholism. The book falls into two main sections. The first is his growing up, setting the scene of the complexity of the relationship with his father. The second is in adulthood where Karl Ove and his brother deal with the death of their father and preparations for the funeral.

The honest writing about both those seasons caused me to ruminate on my own experiences growing up and then, more latterly, dealing with the loss of my own father, even if my relationship with him was far less complicated than Knausgaard’s.

In my academic writing, I used auto ethnographical methodologies as a way of scrutinising my own thoughts and reactions to stressful situations by formulating a hypothesis and testing it against the research findings of others. In a way, Knausgaard’s honesty reminded me very much of that process.

Squeezed between these two main sections is a short contemporaneous fragment as Knausgaard’s looks at himself in the process of writing this book. His partner is heavily pregnant and it is almost as if Knausgaard is trying to escape from the reality of impending parental responsibility by going off to his rented office set up exclusively for him to write. He ponders the nature of observing life, seeking to at least gain understanding, even if gaining knowledge is beyond him. whereas, it would seem, the world is now full of knowledge, yet lacking in understanding.

I would like to read the next book in this series, but realised that there are eight volumes and the second book is even longer than the first.