What's Universal - Book Review

Why does Karl Ove Knausgård's writing captivate so many people? Writers should consider the question.

Circular storm clouds and classic stone tower.

Split 2016

One way to learn more about Norway is to read a six book 3,600 page memoir in which a single man’s life is documented with precision, where pages equal moments, and where every banal and trite and irrelevant aside of life is explored. You do get a certain flavor for the country.

I’m aware that the books in question are rightly considered solipsistic, and that the name Knausgård can even be hurled as a verb, denoting the solipsistic. The people that I know from Norway—who wouldn’t object to being called literary—are dismissive.

Yet the captivating quality of his lines can’t be denied. Something is certainly keeping his readers awake as they slog through all six books. I read the English translations, so I don’t have a sense of his rhythm in Norwegian, and I won’t quote the text here for that reason, but I wouldn’t be quite sure what to quote: no single line over 3,600 pages jumps out. Karl Ove Knausgård isn’t a stylist, and nothing comes across as poetic or aphoristic. There’s simply a sense of gravity that tugs the reader through the quotient details of one man’s life.

How is that effect achieved? What made his series so captivating to so many people around the world? Anyone who strains to throw sentences onto the page should consider those questions.

Book One does provide a few clues almost immediately. The subject is exclusively Karl Ove Knausgård, in all his flaws and stutters and confusions. In obsessive detail, he catalogues what’s peculiar, what’s boring, what’s unspeakable, and lets such a distinct narrative voice draw readers closer.

Here’s Knausgård writing in the New York Times about a Michel Houellebecq sentence, which he considered, “anything but impressive, rather it is strikingly ordinary, sauntering in a way, slightly disharmonious and irregular in rhythm, untidy even, as if the author lacks full mastery of the language or is unused to writing. What does this mean? It means that from the outset, the novel establishes a human presence, a particular individual, a rather faltering and yet sincere character about whom we already know something.”

What’s descriptive about Houellebecq almost certainly betrays Knausgård’s goal for his own writing.

From page one of Book One, the topic of shame emerges. Behind every scene is indignity, regret, humiliation. Knausgård throws every disgraceful moment and insecurity on the page—finding enough angst to fill all six volumes—and that raw archive of shame has a breathless feeling, it’s relentless, perhaps even masochistic, but most certainly human.

What’s the lesson for writers? The example isn’t restricted to the autobiographical. Knausgård’s words reveal a paradox in storytelling that few learn: what’s precise and distinctive appears universal. Ignore every trope about relatable stories and relatable characters if you want to engage readers. The most remembered and debated characters in literature are always distinct characters; figures that are fascinating in their singular, unmistakable natures. Do you want to describe an entire beach? Start with a single grain of sand and distinguish its features with rigor. Six volumes aren’t needed to adapt the method.