![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It is, on the face of it, a deeply unsentimental beginning, one that positions the author as an enemy of mystification. ‘What difference would it make if a bird were to alight on him and take a peck?’ Why, wonders Knausgaard, do we turn away from this natural and inevitable event? Why do we act so swiftly to cover the dead, move them out of sight? A teacher who dies of a heart attack in the school playground can safely be left where he lies until the caretaker removes the body that evening. The passage that follows considers death not as a metaphysical mystery but as a physical reality, describing the pooling of blood that has ceased to circulate, the cooling and stiffening of the body, the infiltration of the bacteria that begin the process of decomposition. He strokes us with the idea that the heart is the home of the sentiments, then slaps us with a blunt literalism: ‘For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. But this is not the simplicity Karl Ove Knausgaard has in mind. It is foolish fond, it leads us where it will, it cannot be reasoned with, it wants what it wants. ![]() ‘For the heart,’ it begins, ‘life is simple.’ The phrase instantly wraps us in the warm comforting embrace of romantic cliché. The opening lines of A Death in the Family perform a small but calculated bait and switch. ![]()
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May 2023
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