There’s been a fuss about the contents of Karl Knausgård’s memoir, particularly the account of his father’s descent into alcoholism and death. That description centers on the house in small-town Norway where the senior Knaussgård passed his final days, which is, when the writer and his brother arrive, layered in filth, and presided over by his still-happily-imbibing grandmother. The pages describing the storm of soiled laundry, food scraps, and bottles inside are terrifically vivid. The house has already been proclaimed one of the Top 10 Homes in Literature by one newspaper. (While the American paperback features an irrelevant splatter painting, the UK version features a white wood frame house.)
What I found most remarkable about the memoir weren’t the familial revelations (grandmother peeing in her seat) or brutal emotional honesty (apathy towards an about-to-give-birth wife), but the vividness of the physical descriptions. Even in translation (and the imaginative leap from Norwegian into English must be a big one) those passages that simply describe a thing (any thing, really) shine through. Each object is alive, a character that acts importantly on the author’s internal life. When just he, his brother and grandmother are inside the house “the rooms seemed to close around what had happened, as though we were too weak to open them." And after it’s is cleaned out and the windows are thrown open, "the movement of the air inside plus the sunlight falling over the floors and the overpowering smell of detergent on at least the second floor, allowed the house to open up, in a sense, and become a place the world flooded through…" It’s a wonderful way to write about buildings.