A section divider, roughly a third of the way through Some Rain Must Fall, the penultimate volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle cycle, is a reminder, if one were needed, that this is not quite a stand-alone novel. The break is a distraction even for the committed reader: it takes a Knausgaardian feat of memory to remember that the first volume was also cleaved in two. Yet despite its jarring inclusion, the part break proves a reminder of Knausgaard’s sheer ambition and his committed attention to the moments and memories that define a life.
Arriving in Bergen as a 19-year-old creative writing student, Karl Ove gets drunk, writes badly, plays drums badly and falls in love, leaving 14 years later as a writer of repute. Early on, we get a typical Knausgaard irony – he claims “surprisingly little” memory of the time – followed by 600 pages of his now familiar micro-minutiae focus. Before the section break, the prose feels like an extension of the straight, time- and space-limited narratives of volumes three and four, but afterwards Knausgaard alters his scope and range. Shifts in the way time is handled, skipped over, truncated or expanded suggest a difference in Knausgaard, a greater urgency to understand the events and emotions that define him.
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