Expressing the Beauty in the Ordinary
It’s Friday, 9:44 AM. I’m sitting in a bohemian-inspired café, waiting for the slightly overpriced Rwandan pour-over I just ordered. A steady stream of carefree jazz floods the room—a bit too loud for my liking—as I set up shop at a table. There’s a half-empty mug to my right, left behind by a previous customer.
Besides waiting for my coffee, I’m also waiting for inspiration, or maybe it’s more artistic to suggest that I’m waiting for my surroundings to fill the empty screen in front of me. The assumption that I can pull riveting prose out of my ass simply because I’m situated in a vibrant, buzzing environment is a bold one. Truthfully, very few writers possess the ability to extract magic out of the mundanity and turn it into magnetic prose. One example of such a writer is Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård.
Last week, I returned to his six-volume autobiographical series Min Kamp (My Struggle) and begun My Struggle: Book Two, which centers around him falling in love with his second wife. As a mediocre writer and passionate admirer of hypnotic prose, I struggle to pinpoint why his autobiographical series is so mesmerizing. One would assume that his life must be full of frantic change, frequent escapades, and unpredictable twists in order to fill over 3,200 pages and sell a few million copies—but it’s not. His life, for the most part, is just as simple as yours or mine. In the retelling of his life, he grieves over the loss of a loved one, falls in love, grapples with maturation, questions his life’s direction, and carries out the banal tasks of everyday life. So what makes it so damn readable? Why do I find myself flipping page after page without hesitation? I suspect it’s his ability to zone in on the quotidian. His writing possesses a hyperawareness to the everyday experiences we take for granted. The way a woman’s lips peel back over her teeth when she smiles, the warmth between an elderly couple sitting by the window, the dried saliva that’s collected in the corner of your mouth—he’s clued into it all and makes you conscious of it too.
He remarks in My Struggle: Book Two:
“Death makes life meaningless because everything we have ever striven for ceases when life does, and it makes life meaningful, too, because its presence makes the little we have of it indispensable, every moment precious.”
Beyond the morbidity of the quote, I think it sheds a light on why his novels and others like it, are so intriguing for readers. When written well, these rote tasks or everyday encounters are spotlighted as the ‘precious moments’ they are rather than being immediately discarded from our memory. For most of us, these moments of reflection and appreciation of life’s nuance are few and far between. Life moves at a furious pace and carelessly leaves you behind if stop to smell the roses. Works like Knausgård’s My Struggle return our consciousness to a greater state of awareness.
The Personal is Not So Personal
Despite being a deeply personal work—even controversial for its inclusion of family members and real names—it succeeds in reflecting universal human experiences. As Knausgård digs through his past like a dusty, neglected attic, he uncovers his failures, pain, and regrets. Every proud moment and shameful act is laid out onto the page. In an interview with The New Republic, he said this about the project: “The difficult thing for me is that I want basically to be a good man. That's what I want to be. In this project, I wasn't. It is unmoral, in a way.” It’s his immorality and imperfections that make the novels truly come alive. While working through the second book, I’ve found myself enraged by his egoism and unnecessarily antagonistic behavior toward his pregnant girlfriend—yet, I can’t help but ingest page after page. There’s a realness and honesty about the work. There’s no softening low points or romanticizing high points, expect for his ability to pull readers into the room with him. The novels are simply a comprehensive glimpse into a largely normal life.
“Everyday life, which could bear down on us like a foot treading on a head, could also transport us with delight. Everything depended on the seeing eye.” - Karl Ove Knausgård
So, as I pound away at my keys to produce the very essay you’re reading, I lean on Knausgård for stylistic inspiration. Effective storytelling doesn’t require elaborate settings or dramatic action, but rather linguistic precision and introspection. Human beings are rarely found in fantastical plots or highbrow language. Instead, they’re found living simple lives, struggling with ordinary issues, and likely overlooking the little things that make life precious. I’d like to see more writers explore the shared experiences of humanity and find ways to bring our focus back to the present in a chaotic society that’s constantly yearning for the future.
