Linda Boström Knausgård

‘Maybe the silence was always inside me.’

This short novella from Sweden’s Linda Bostrom Knausgard packs a whole heap of stuff into such a short space of time. It is a compelling portrait of a family on the brink of collapse: 11-year-old Ellen is our narrator, having decided that she will refuse to speak; her older brother locks himself in his room by nailing planks of wood to his door; their mother, an actress, tries to keep a bright and breezy outlook, keeping the family together. show more Ellen’s father is dead, and she is convinced that she – and God – are to blame. His drinking and mental health had driven him from the family home and Ellen, in her nightly prayers, had wished him dead.

Very little happens here, so this is not the kind of book for someone who is looking for exciting car chases, or lots of action, or, let’s be honest, a plot. This is a meditative reflection on family relationships, on the flashes of love and frustration between siblings, and on a mother’s love for her daughter. Ellen’s refusal to speak seems to be some way of her seeking a form of control as her family spirals out of control, but she also is aware enough to see the problems that it also causes. Moments of ‘normality’ interrupt the book: her brother brings a girl home for dinner; her mother starts a relationship with the young director of her play. But there are also external threats that are embodied in other events, as Ellen’s school is set on fire by two pupils, and she keeps seeing her dead father in her room. As these external forces are removed – both her brother and mother seem to end their respective relationships – the ‘normality’, for Ellen at least, manifests itself in the status quo, the way things were at the start of the book:
‘An old, familiar mood settled over the apartment. My brother nailed his door shut again. Dad kept away, or else it was me who made sure. It was a delightful time.’

The writing is sparse, yet poetic, and the reader is never fully on firm ground with the strange situation. It feels in the realm of the absurd, and I was struck by its feel of Camus, or Beckett, or Ionesco. Many will come to this because of the author’s ex-husband, but this fully deserves your 100% attention for what it is: a compelling, moving account of a family, and a young girl in particular. It is a voice of protest, of seeking understanding, but without being sure what it is protesting about. In an unsettling world, this is a perfect expression of how our separate worlds are desperately fragile. A brave and sensitive piece of writing. show less

October Child was a curious and creative form of a memoir, or was it a curious form of a novel? Different reviewers and the book’s publisher disagree, but what difference does a label make? Knausgård is very straightforward in writing about her mental health problems, as well as her relationship, and finally her divorce from fellow author, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Characterizing the beginning of their relationship as a time when “We were drunk on love and alcohol our whole first summer show more together.” Several sections of the book are written almost as one side of a conversation she’s having with Karl. “My illness dragged us all down,” and “I knew that what I’d done had raised a wall in you. You will never stop blaming me for this. Never forgive me.”

Between 2013 and 2017 she was in a psychiatric ward off and on, and underwent eighteen electroconvulsive therapies. I wasn’t aware that Sweden uses the most electroconvulsive therapy per capita of any country, and some believe that it’s “the answer to a person’s every torment.” She refers to the institution she was in as the “factory,” and her detailed descriptions of the electrical procedure—with all the beds of patients lined up and waiting for it—quickly brought to my mind some bizarre sort of a shocking assembly line. She writes of the euphoria that follow the treatments and how some think it’s a result of some brain damage done. She also gives her readers a very curious look at the effects of the procedure on one of a writer’s most valuable and unique resource, their own memories. “Nobody cared that I wouldn’t be able to remember large swathes of time afterwards.”

How we see ourselves and the world around us is tied directly to our past memories. Through much of the book, Knausgård is in a massive struggle with her tangled present. At different times, she’s writing and trying to make sense of what’s going on in her life through writing, a process of recording and interpreting friends, her family, medical professionals, fellow patients, and even herself. “I didn’t have an unhappy childhood. Neither was it a happy one. It was no one’s childhood. I didn’t know who I wanted to be and this made me weak.”

As a book groupie, I am always interested in the dynamics of writers who are married and working out of the same household. She and Karl already had three kids, when she found out that she was pregnant again. By that time, she was already suicidal, having been saving up a lethal dose of her medications for many months, and she still decided to go ahead with her attempt to end it all. Obviously, she wasn’t successful, and thankfully the baby was born just fine. Attempting suicide while pregnant is a brutal level of desperation. Of her mindset, she says, “But the truth was, death and dying were all I thought of.”

Knausgård lays out her life with such openness that I had to keep reminding myself that this was factual and not some wild bit of fiction. The Wall Street Journal characterized her writing with the following. “Her sentences are short, dry, and brittle, like tinder on the verge of combustion.” As she grapples to maintain her memories and her connection to sanity, bits and pieces of all parts of her life play out in her mind’s eye. I found myself feeling her detachment, isolation, and depression full on. When she writes about her feelings, she is so close and personal that I sometimes had a desire to step back and away from its intensity. Yet, she writes, “Some parts of the novel were really heavy to write, but sometimes I found myself laughing while I was writing. I think the book needs that dark humor—things can be hysterically funny at a psychiatric ward.”

She begins the book with, “I wish I could tell you all about the factory, but I can’t anymore. This is what I know: I was there for several long stretches … and my brain was shot through with so much electricity that they were sure I wouldn’t be able to write this.” The following section was very near the book’s end and referred to herself in that psychiatric ward. “When a door opened at the far end of the corridor. It was me. I was the one coming out of the room with Maria and closing the door behind me. I was walking through the corridor. As I passed by, I looked at myself like you might look at a thing in passing, gaze unfixed. I watched myself leave the ward.”

I found this book a fascinating inside look at what losing your mind and trying to find it again looks and feels like. show less

I am quite taken with this slim novel and its young female narrator, Ellen, who takes the reader to the heart of her very troubled family. People seem to throw the term dysfunctional around too much, but it settles in and finds a true home with Ellen, her parents, and her brother. Two key things about Ellen: she has decided to stop talking completely, and she is sure that she’s responsible for her mentally-disturbed father’s recent death, a death that she repeatedly prayed for on many show more occasions. She decided to stop talking because she simply didn’t think there was enough room in her life for both speaking and growing up. Her father’s body was discovered after several days in his apartment, because he missed some counseling appointments.
The father may have tried to kill his entire family with the apartment’s gas, was a source of immense darkness in the family, and had been institutionalized at least once. To quote Ellen’s thoughts, “It felt like we’d been living under the foot of a giant pressing us down.” Her brother was a constantly brooding and threatening presence for Ellen, and she avoided him as much as possible in their small apartment. He recorded music with quite an array of equipment in his bedroom, the door of which he constantly nailed shut. Ellen’s mother acted on the stage, and while she was quite a narcissist, at least she wasn’t a bodily threat to anyone.
During the book’s storyline, her brother has a girlfriend who he records singing and photographs in the nude, and the mother has several lovers from her stage companions. Owing to the apartment’s thin walls, Ellen is most aware of everyone’s actions.
This is a short novel, written very simply, in mostly brief sentences. Having read it twice in a day, I can report that it has a real power to it. It has a stream-of-consciousness style, and while the time does jump around, and you can’t always be sure of the truthfulness of our narrator’s words, I love the voice, as Ellen attempts to make sense of her world.

A bit of housekeeping: Yes, Linda Boström Knausgård was Karl Ove Knausgaard's first wife, and her first novel (The Helios Disaster) will finally be released in April of 2020. show less

I am so confused about the Athena theme. Does Anna believe herself to be Athena? Is that a part of her mental illness? Is she actual Athena, depressed as she is in the wrong place and time--or just depressed because, as an immortal, she has to be somewhere? Is she actually a depressed tween, or is she a frustrated immortal, who just has to keep going?

Is this novel about mental illness or a look at what immortality can mean--and what modern people might do to the Greek gods/goddesses if they show more were to actually be among us. show less