#amreading Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgaard

"We were nobodies, two young lit. students chatting away in a rickety old house in a small town at the edge of the world"

I was new to Knausgaard and the My Struggle series when I picked up a copy of Some Rain Must Fall at Hatchard's in St Pancras station. I don't know if it was the 'literary sensation' label that had previously put me off or the fact that I couldn't quite work out whether these books for fiction or biography?

Anyway, I downloaded a Kindle sample (at 600+ pages this is a back breaker of a novel) and dived in as the train left London for Kent. By the time I was crossing the Medway near Rochester I'd downloaded the entire book. 

The story begins with 19 year old Karl Ove Knausgaard back-packing through Europe before moving to Bergen to study at the prestigious Writing Academy. Knausgaard's open and brutally frank writing brilliantly captures the optimism and pretentious hope that a new academic term in a new city offers.  As the term begins Karl Ove is soon left in serious doubt about his ability as a writer. His early submissions fall way short of the rest of the class. How had he won a place on the course if his work was so poor? Life in Bergen isn't working out to plan. His lowest point is when he plans to submit a poem made up entirely of the C-word.

The novel moves through the 80s with more career disappointment, personal failure and self loathing. There are occasional moments of tenderness, caring for his elderly grandparents and coming to terms with the total breakdown of his relationship with his father, but it is remarkable how far Knausgaard will go to bare his soul to the reader throughout his lengthy existential crisis.

Knausgaard is as comfortable writing about the history of literary criticism as he is describing how he felt when he discovered his girlfriend was sleeping with his brother. Within one chapter the novel blends different degrees of disappointment and holds back from any Millenial style gloss - this is warts and all and never played out for sympathy. Knausgaard is an middle years everyman (flawed and talented in equal measure).

When eventual career success does arrive, way after his peers, it is immediately followed by anxiety when it comes to the media and the critical reception. There are times when you wish Karl Ove would just give up and get a job in a bar but of course you know that a some point this character becomes the Nordic literary sensation that audiences go crazy to meet at book festivals. 

The hardback copy of this book is quite different from the previous in the series which include a close up photograph of Karl Ove in all his rugged Nordic honesty. The publishers clearly understand that 'Knausgaard' (the Brand) owns this niche between nordic fiction and memoir but are exploring something different with Some Rain Must Fall which I suspect will result in more new readers than just me.

For me Some Rain Must Fall is a literary memoir written by a great fiction writer for readers of fiction. In this respect the book is genre redefining - an autobiographical epic through the lens of a writer desperate to write a literary classic. 

Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgaard, published by Harvill Secker, RRP £17,99, 672 pages