Second Half First by Drusilla Modjeska

Author:Drusilla Modjeska
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2015-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

The bookshop where I bought Dave Eggers’ novel is in Newtown, not far from the house on the corner where I used to live. It’s a suburb where you see fathers with babies strapped to their bodies, or pushing children in strollers. You see men in the supermarket comparing brands, or sitting in the cafés with a book, or with a friend and his child. Is this the other side of the coin? The new-style, new-age, good-father home makers? What hatched them? Also in the bookshop, alongside the novels and memoirs of hopeless or absent fathers, were piles of the latest volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s vast memoir-novel My Struggle. I was in London when the first volume came out in English in 2012, and like everyone else I was swept along by the energy of his prose, the audacity of the pages of details that held my interest even when they bored me, which they often did, the point being that most of daily life is boring, but still worthy of our attention. It was summer and I’d sit in the square near where I was staying and read under the chestnut trees, or lie on my bed with the windows wide open. One evening with friends, the talk turned to Knausgaard. Was he a genius or a narcissist? Both, or neither? In the first volume, A Death in the Family, he gives us in excoriating detail what it was to have been the son of an inadequate father, growing up with little guidance, and then to watch him die an alcohol-sodden death. Early in the book there are pages about the first time a girl, Suzanne was her name, lets him see as well as touch her breasts, and then the soft hair beneath her pants. He was fourteen years old, and he transports you there, to the girl’s bedroom where they are lying on the bed while her parents are out. And he takes us into the mind and body of a boy mesmerised by the astonishment of it, until he ejaculates, though he doesn’t realise it, a pain in the groin he thinks might be the death of him, and the breasts, so recently all his world consisted of, become as nothing, just skin and nipple; and afterwards, the confusion and the shame, and no one he could ask whether what had happened was normal or some terrible pathology. To a woman, though maybe not to a male reader, it is a revelation, not boring at all, even as the pages go on and on.

In the next volume, A Man in Love, Knausgaard takes us through 528 pages of how such a son becomes not only a father, but the house-husband-father who does the childcare while his wife works. Early in this volume, there are pages on the humiliation of taking a toddler to a rhythm-time class, the only man, lusting after the woman playing the guitar and putting on the awful tapes for the children to bounce to – another electrifying scene of the cross-currents of desire and shame.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.