Welcome to the summer of nothingness – how one book made it hip to be bored
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Version 0 of 1. Only the boring get bored, we are told. As a child, the quickest route to a lecture on how spoilt you are relative to 99% of the world's population is to say these words: I'm bored. But if our capacity for boredom is inversely proportional to the amount of distractions on offer, you would think that, what with the internet and all, we are gradually losing the knack to self-occupy. Most of us, finding ourselves at the end of a long queue at the post office, will go into mini-meltdown if we discover we've arrived without our phones. (Besides which, going to the post office to mail a letter in person is so epically weird, these days, as to constitute an occult experience.) I mention all this because boredom has, lately, been raised to the level of art form by a Norwegian novelist who for the last year has been steadily accruing fans in the English-speaking world. My Struggle, the extraordinary six-volume, lightly fictionalized memoir by Karl Ove Knausgård, is a literary project that flies in the face of every known commercial principle, and yet the author is a rock star: 450,000 copies sold in Norway alone – one copy for every nine adults of the population. The third volume in the series has just been published in the US, and Knausgaard appeared this week here in Brooklyn to a rapturous reception. After the success of Stieg Larsson and TV crime dramas such as the Bridge, Borgen and the Killing, hit Scandinavian imports are nothing new. The difference is that My Struggle is neither a racy thriller nor a story imbued with political intrigue. The characters aren't devious or corrupt or outrageous beyond the average. And nothing happens. Really: nothing happens at all. A kid, "Karl Ove", grows up in a rural part of Norway, goes to the shop, buys some beer, hangs out with his friends Per and Jan Vidar, fancies a girl in his class and hates his dad, all of which he relates in tiny, incremental detail. Nothing happens, and yet My Struggle is completely and utterly gripping. So what's to sustain a reader's interest? That depends on what happens to your sense of time passing after being so thoroughly immersed in someone else's reality. Successful fiction relies on shaping, editing and imposing an artificial structure on the baggy and unmanageable details of existence, but Karl Ove does none of that. We are simply witness to every passing detail of his life as he experiences it, from lighting a cigarette, to missing a bus, to kidding himself that he is a good musician. The world slows to a crawl, and it is exhilarating in the same way that letting out a breath and allowing oneself a few seconds without oxygen at the bottom of the exhale can be exhilarating: time passes differently. Unlike most modern diversions, it doesn't quicken with excitement; it slows down into something like mindfulness. The success of My Struggle also depends on profound questions of recognition. It takes enormous talent to write about boredom without being boring, as we know from all those long-hot-summer novels from the Go Between to Atonement. As you read about Karl Ove doing nothing much over multiple pages at a time – having a disappointing but not disastrous New Year's Eve; being kind of encouraged by the girl he's in love with - what you think more than anything is: yes, that's how it is. It is for exactly this reason that critics and novelists have lined up to praise each and every volume. James Wood, writing in the New Yorker, observed: There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard's book: even when I was bored, I was interested. Zadie Smith, in the New York Review of Books: Knausgaard's boredom has many elaborations: the boredom of children's parties, of buying beers, of being married, writing, being oneself, dealing with one's family. Hari Kunzru, the other day, in the New York Times: He does all the stuff you're not supposed to do. He risked being boring at every turn. He has the courage to say, 'My ordinary life as a father in a regional town is going to be enough to hold the reader's attention.' The take-away from all this, perhaps, is that boredom itself can be a virtue. The rise in popularity of meditation and the $27bn yoga industry is an antidote to the speeding up of other elements in the culture and the reality that we are all, to a certain extent, suffering from attention deficit disorders. Artists such as Marina Abramovic understand the power of inactivity and so, increasingly, do psychologists and scientists. As children are over-stimulated with too much screen-time, studies are beginning to show the value of what might be called boredom – unstructured periods in which the child is thrown back to his or her own resources. A study at the University of Konstanz in Germany released late last year identified four types of boredom, three negative, but one - "indifferent boredom" - described by Thomas Goetz, a professor of empirical educational research, as positively relaxing, in a way that "reflected a general indifference to, and withdrawal from, the external world." Dr Teresa Belton, a senior researcher at the University of East Anglia's School of Education and Lifelong Learning, concluded after studying the way children behave after spending too long in front of their various screens, that they "need to have stand-and-stare time, time imagining and pursuing their own thinking processes or assimilating their experiences through play or just observing the world around them." The work of Karl Ove Knausgård flies so flagrantly in the face of mainstream entertainment values that he has, inevitably, been taken up by hipsters for demonstrating the kind of authenticity you just don't get from beards or artisinal beer anymore, and anyone travelling on the L or G trains through Brooklyn will probably spot at least one fellow traveller immersed in My Struggle. Unpromising as it sounds, it's a reading project that's well worth the effort. Somewhere there in the accumulation of small detail, one realizes, nothing is where everything lies. |