Is My Hunger for a Roman Fleuve Going to be Satisfied?

"Roman fleueve" means "river novel" in French, and a roman fleuve is a long story that is serialized over several novels.

I've always liked the idea of a roman fleuve. It seems potentially very satisfying.

I tried reading the most famous of them all, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust, about fifteen years ago. I really couldn't get into it, it was very heavy, with lots of long descriptive passages (which I hate). To be honest, I didn't even get through the first volume.

Like everybody, I'd heard about the famous scene involving the tea-cake at the start, where the taste of a tea-cake dipped in tea brings back memories of the narrator's life, and initaties the reminiscences. The description of this scene really seems to speak to everybody; it's the sort of thing nobody forgets once they've heard it described. We're all fascinated by memory, I think.

Around the same time, I read most of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. The catalyst event in this roman fleuve is the narrator watching snow falling into a brazier, which is also a very appealing image. The title is also tremendously evocative.

The idea of an entire story, a very long story, which is all part of the same reverie (in some way) greatly pleases me. I'm not sure why. The idea pleases me in the same way that the atmosphere of "In My Life" by the Beatles pleases me. Or the title of Maurice Baring's memoirs, Puppet Show of Memory. (Baring was a friend of Chesterton and Belloc, a writer and a Catholic convert.)

Sad to say, though, I was disappointed by A Dance to the Music of Time. I gave up about halfway through, or maybe even further. I found it a bit too light and humorous and not what I was looking for. Proust was too heavy, and Powell was too light. (Interestingly, Philip Larkin read the book towards the end of his life, and told Powell in a letter that his only complaint was that it wasn't long enough.)

I've also read some very long multi-volume series in genre fiction. Lord of the Rings, of course, a couple of times. I've read most of Robert Jordan's colossal Wheel of Time series, although rather ridiculously I flagged towards the very end and gave up. The same applies to The Dark Tower series by Stephen King.

The Stand by Stephen King is a single-volume work but it still has an epic character, both because of its length (I read it in its longer "uncut" version) and because of its subject matter. (A deadly plague leads to the collapse of American civilization, and the survivors form two camps-- one good, one evil.) King was consciously trying to write an American Lord of the Rings, and I think he succeeded to a great extent.

The Stand is more like a life experience than a book. I've thought about reading it again, but it's quite a commitment. (Actually, on my thirtieth birthday, I watched the 1994 TV miniseries on DVD; it seemed a suitably big marker for a big birthday.)

But genre novels don't really satisfy my hunger for a roman fleuve. I want something about real life, modern life. Something from the point of view of a single narrator.

Anyway, I've started reading a roman fleuve called My Struggle (I think the title is ironic), by a Norwegian called Karl Ove Knausgaard. There are six volumes of it and it's 1.3 million words long. It was published between 2009 and 2011. I came across a reference to it on TV Tropes (a website to which I'm addicted) and it intrigued me. It's an autobiographical novel and apparently various people in the author's real life are not wild about its candour.

The series has been a massive hit in Norway, and abroad, but nobody I've mentioned it to has heard of it. Even very bookish types.

I'm a hundred and fifty pages into the first volume and it's very promising so far. No unreasonably protracted descriptive passages. The characters are recognisable people. And the flights of introspection, and angst, aren't too self-indulgent. So far.

Knausgaard is a standard-issue lefty, as far as I can see, and one interview I skimmed had him make the usual critical references to Brexit and the Big Bad Wolf in Washington. I understand that it gets more political later. So far it has been pretty apolitical. Religion doesn't feature much so far. There's a sort of prologue at the beginning which shows us the narrator as a small boy, and it's mentioned that he's a Christian (much to his father's disapproval). By the time the main narrative of the first volume begins, he describes himself as an anti-Christian, although with the suggestion that this is just youthful posturing. At the point I've reached now, he's fallen madly in love with a classmate who's a Christian, even though her parents are not. But none of this is treated as central to the plot and nobody seems to get at all het up about religion.

I think I'm drawn to the idea of a roman fleuve because I'm fascinated by the texture of life, its overflowingness. The different flavours of different days and different stretches of time. It's the "in-betweeny" moments that appeal to me the most. I liked this description of the first day of the year, after a rather epic New Year's Eve party sequence, in which the protagonist in a friend's house watching The Guns of Navarone on video casette:

"Oh, this is fun", Trygve said as the first frames from the film appeared on the screen. Outside, everything was still, as only winter can be. And even though the sky was overcast and grey, the light over the countryside shimmered and was perfectly white. I remember thinking all I wanted to do was to sit right there, in a newly built house, in a circle of light in the middle of the forest and be as stupid as I liked."

We have the first five volumes in my library. I've requested the sixth to be bought. I can get it on inter-library loan, in any case.

Maybe I'll lose interest long before that.Or maybe this will finally be the roman fleuve I've been yearning for!