Shawn Huelle

My Struggle vol. 2 - A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard

This book, which manages to balance a compelling and relentless narration of one life's quotidian minutiae against the rather less quotidian thought processes that attend those minutiae, or at least the author of this book (and that is another interesting tension: the book purports to be the life of its author, therefore to be the author itself in some ways, but the back of the book says fiction, and of course it is) is convinced that examining minutiae destroys the very thing which one wanted to examine in the first place. It is as though the atoms of our lives are given weight by the protons of our thoughts and the electrons can either have location or velocity, but not both. In fact, the author says so multiple times:

p76 Or was it perhaps that the light which illuminated the world and made everything comprehensible also drained it of meaning?

p414 The eye which gave meaning to the world was a constant possibility, but we almost always decided against it. . . .

p487 This was the problem with all representation, of course, for no eye is uncontaminated, no gaze is blank, nothing is seen the way it is. And in this encounter the question of art's meaning as a whole was forced to the surface.

p503 But the stars twinkle above our heads, the sun shines, the grass grows and the earth, yes, the earth, it swallows all life and eradicates all vestige of it, spews out new life in a cascade of limbs and eyes, leaves and nails, hair and tails, cheeks and fur and guts, and swallows it up again. And what we never really comprehend, or don't want to comprehend, is that this happens outside us, that we ourselves have no part in it, that we are only that which grows and dies, as blind as the waves in the sea are blind.