Why, wonders Knausgaard, do we turn away from this natural and inevitable event? Why do we act so swiftly to cover the dead, move them out of sight? A teacher who dies of a heart attack in the school playground can safely be left where he lies until the caretaker removes the body that evening. The passage that follows considers death not as a metaphysical mystery but as a physical reality, describing the pooling of blood that has ceased to circulate, the cooling and stiffening of the body, the infiltration of the bacteria that begin the process of decomposition. He strokes us with the idea that the heart is the home of the sentiments, then slaps us with a blunt literalism: ‘For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. But this is not the simplicity Karl Ove Knausgaard has in mind. It is foolish fond, it leads us where it will, it cannot be reasoned with, it wants what it wants. ‘For the heart,’ it begins, ‘life is simple.’ The phrase instantly wraps us in the warm comforting embrace of romantic cliché. It is a brilliant work that emphatically delivers on the unlikely promise that many hundreds of pages later readers will be left breathlessly demanding more.The opening lines of A Death in the Family perform a small but calculated bait and switch.
But the novel also tells other stories: of becoming a father, of the turbulence of family life, of outrageously unsuccessful attempts at a family vacation, of the emotional strain of birthday parties for children, and of the daily frustrations, rhythms, and distractions of city life keeping him from (and filling) his novel.
My Struggle: Book 2 is at heart a love story-the story of Karl Ove falling in love with his second wife. He also tracks down Linda, whom he met at a writers' workshop a few years earlier and who fascinated him deeply.
He strikes up a deep friendship with another exiled Norwegian, a Nietzschean intellectual and boxing fanatic named Geir. In the second installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental six-volume masterpiece, the character Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to Stockholm, where, having left his wife, he leads a solitary existence.
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