Review of My Struggle: Book Two by Karl Ove Knausgård

I only decided to continue with the series after reading the author’s other series.

The first book in the series got on my nerves. Perhaps I am now more accustomed to his rambling approach. I enjoy the more essayistic sections. Probably, I will enjoy each volume more than the last. The sustained narrative is nothing special. We are given excruciatingly intimate details about Karl Ove’s married life, the continual emotions washing over him as he raises children, conceives children, conceives books, writes books, despairs about having no time to write and then neglecting the people in his life so the overwhelming urge to write can have its way with him. At times he seems like a man possessed with a great vision. But reading his work, I often wonder what he thinks this great vision is.
He appears dissatisfied by status quo, but isn’t everybody. It could be that his needless worrying simply represents an everyman variety of needless worrying, that the reader is meant to sympathize with his plight of merely living. The default of humankind being suffering, he struggles often with lack of meaning to it all. I would argue that he ignores many obvious meanings and great truths, in favor of a sort of self-worship, which at times transcends itself, blossoming into an artistic churning of inner torments, coating the outside world with inner wastes. But I often experience that sentiment when reading literary fiction.
Most of the time, there is nothing challenging or particularly beautiful about the prose. Occasionally he describes his surroundings, but it is, like most contemporary fiction, largely focused on the inner life. Whether he is an indispensable artist or an inexhaustible example of the imposter syndrome is left up to the reader to decide. I do not like the comparisons with Proust. There is an undeniable difference in their writing styles. This is more akin to the bare bones treatment I find in Paul Auster, where lyricism is a mere distraction.
Surprise is not necessary. Predictable outcomes occur once you get to know the author. But the fact that you can feel that you deeply know the author is an accomplishment in itself. I will persist in reading because it is abnormally easy to read, which possibly explains its popularity.