Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgaard review – gripping account of early manhood

In the fifth epic volume of Knausgaard’s compelling life story, he learns how to love and not to write

If you did not know better, you would say Karl Ove Knausgaard was teasing. His tremendous, maddening, addictive autobiographical epic has taken his native Norway by storm, drawing comparisons with Proust and becoming an international literary sensation. But in the opening sentence of volume five, he announces that this latest instalment will be about the 14 years he lived in Bergen; he adds that of this period, which begins in 1988, when he is 19, he remembers “surprisingly little”. That ought to make his book, at 672 pages, staggeringly long. But to all Knausgaard fans (a group to which I helplessly belong), the length is expected. We have, in more senses than one, been here before.

The books, written under the title My Struggle, have up to this point been non-chronological. We know about his father’s death (dealt with in volume one, A Death in the Family), his second marriage (volume two, A Man in Love), his beginnings (volume three, Boyhood Island) and his teens (part four, Dancing in the Dark). Knausgaard’s indifference to chronological time is faithful to the way in which he, like most of us, thinks about his life. He keeps reminding us of the way emotions reorder time. And in this gripping account of early manhood, emotions rule.

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