I raced through Dancing in the Dark by Karl Ove Knausgård in just a couple of days. It is one of those books that manages to be revealing, honest, insightful and richly detailed without ever becoming tedious. As someone who spends much of his time revisiting diaries written fifty years ago and reflecting on the texture of ordinary life, I found it both enlightening and encouraging.
What struck me first was the style. There is a stream-of-consciousness quality to the writing, but it is never undisciplined. Rather, it feels informed by a lifetime of reading and by a writer who has consciously learned his craft. Knausgård wears his influences lightly, though he is generous in acknowledging the books and writers that shaped him. You can sense that this novel sits at the end of a long apprenticeship.
There are also clear lessons here in narrative technique. Knausgård knows how to hook the reader. Like David Nicholls, he understands the power of longing, embarrassment and delayed gratification. Karl Ove is eighteen, painfully aware of his virginity, and desperate to cross that threshold into adulthood. What follows is a succession of mishaps, misunderstandings and missed opportunities. The reader is carried along by the question of whether he will ever get there. When the moment finally arrives, in the closing pages, it feels both inevitable and earned.
The early hook is particularly effective. Karl Ove becomes fascinated by a beautiful thirteen-year-old girl and, by extension, her circle of friends. Nothing much happens, yet everything happens. The attraction is distant, complicated and largely unspoken. At the same time, he is an eighteen-year-old schoolteacher spending a year in what feels like the very edge of the world, deep in northern Norway. The contrast between his position as an adult and his emotional uncertainty as an adolescent gives the novel much of its tension.
Much of the book reads almost like memoir. Long passages explore his childhood, his difficult relationship with his parents, his brother, and the various girlfriends who came close to becoming something more significant. The effect is cumulative. By the time we reach the events of the present narrative, we understand not only what Karl Ove is doing, but why he is doing it.
The setting is equally important. His account of life in the far north of Norway is extraordinary. He is a stranger there, a fish out of water, and he captures both the beauty and the isolation of the landscape with remarkable intimacy. The place becomes a character in its own right.
What I admire most, however, is his attention to human feeling. He can describe what passes through his mind when he sees another person in just a few lines, yet reveal an entire emotional landscape. His treatment of sex is similarly impressive. It is neither romanticised nor pornographic. It is simply part of being human. Awkward, hopeful, disappointing, exhilarating, embarrassing: all at once.
The same unsparing honesty applies elsewhere. A scene in which he commits himself to a toilet after drinking too much is so vividly rendered that I almost wished it were not. Yet that is precisely his gift. He misses nothing. The embarrassing details, the petty thoughts, the fleeting observations, the physical realities we would usually edit out: they all find their way onto the page.
As someone fascinated by memory, diaries and memoir, I found Dancing in the Dark a masterclass in how the ordinary can become compelling. Knausgård demonstrates that drama does not require murders, conspiracies or grand adventures. Sometimes it is enough to place an uncertain young man in an unfamiliar landscape and ask him to navigate loneliness, desire, friendship and the difficult business of becoming himself.
I finished the book feeling not only entertained but instructed. It has shown me once again that the smallest details, honestly observed, often contain the deepest truths.
Leave a Reply