Knausgard is so honest. That feels like such a simple quality, especially in a writer, but it’s hard to muster up a different word for it.
I’m talking about the kind of honesty that gets you to write about not being cool enough to get invited to a New Year’s party, hating your alcoholic father but wanting his validation, not knowing whether it’s OK to get drunk with your dependent grandmother.
This honesty comes out in such normal writing that at times I was left thinking, who is this great writer everyone is raving out? And then he snatches you away as you’re becoming absorbed in that normality, his pen links to an adjacent memory that is interwoven as if by an artisan. Snatches is the wrong word, at times the novel feels like a dream in how it floats from memory to memory, but it never cruelly jars you to reality.
I guess ‘A Death in the Family’ is about a lot of things: a death, obviously; a Faustian bargain he makes for writing over family; learning how to assert who you are as you grow up. Really though, it’s writing for its own sake, and Knausgard does that very well.