A little of the way through the second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-volume novel series, I was on the point of giving up. Not because it was boring me. It wasn't boring me.
No, I was on the point of giving up because I thought: "Am I mad to allocate so much reading time to an epic work by some modern writer when I could be chipping away at my ignorance by reading something more substantial, like history, or Augustine's City of God, or something like that?"
In the end, I decided to keep going because I'm sick of starting things and giving them up.
And it must be said, it's very interesting. Knausgaard is writing about his own life. In the book, one of his friends comments on his ability to write about completely mundane events and make them interesting. He really can.
He's especially good at writing about all the little misadventures and diversions that occur in everyday life. At one point he drops his mobile phone on a train and he thinks it's fallen into the open handbag of a woman standing beside him, who then gets off the train. He doesn't follow her because the doors are about to close--and besides, how can you ask to look in someone's handbag? (You could ask her to have a look, but that doesn't seem to occur to him or anybody else.) Eventually he gets a friend to message the phone, but that leads to further complications...
There are deeper themes in the book, of course. The main theme is the conflict between Knausgaard's consuming urge to write, on one hand, and the demands of ordinary life on the other. Another theme is the disenchantment of human life since the Enlightenment, and there are even jabs at political correctness. (In the second volume, Knausgaard is living in Sweden, and as a Norwegian he thinks it's a crazy society-- but he also mentions that Norwegians in Norway actually look up to the Swedes).
Religion hasn't featured very much in the foreground, but it's always there in the background. The first volume opens when Knausgaard is a small boy and considers himself a Christian (which seems rather counter-cultural, although later his first girlfriend is a Christian). By the time he's in his teens he calls himself ani-Christian, though there's never much evidence of this.
When his father dies, Knausgaard and his brother (both of whom seem thoroughly secular, as was their father) agree they want a religious funeral, and not some "awful humanist ceremony"--I forget the exact words used, but they were something like that.
In the office where he writes, Knausgaard surrounds himself with bric-a-brac from the pre-modern past, including religious imagery. He reads the Bible.
Then, when his daugher is christened in volume two, he surprises himself and everyone else by taking communion at the ceremony:
The priest was a young woman, we stood around her by the font. Linda held Vanja as her head was moistened with water. Ingrid left when the ceremony was over, the rest of us stayed seated. It was a communion. Joe Olav and his family stood up and knelt before the altar. For some reason I got up and followed suit. Knelt before the altar, had a wafer placed on my tongue, drank the communion wine, was given the blessing, and went back, with mum's, Kjartan's, Yngve's, and Geir's eyes on me, disbelieving to varying degrees.
Why had I done it?
Had I become a Christian?
I, a fervent anti-Christian from my early teenage years and a materialist in my heart of hearts, had in one second, without any reflection, got my feet, walked up the aisle and knelt in front of the altar. It had been pure impulse. And, meeting those glares, I had no defence. I couldn't say I was a Christian. I looked down, slightly ashamed.
There's more but I'm not going to type it all out.
Scandinavia has long been presented as the model secular society by secularists. It's interesting (and encouraging) to encounter evidence that it remains haunted by God and by Jesus-- which is what a Christian would expect.
As for materialism, it's always seemed to me like a dead-end for all art and literature. What is there left to say?
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