On "A Time for Everything" and "The Buried Giant:" Part IV of On dreams, being devastated by stories, and imagining the future

Pather Panchali, Dr. Zhivago, A Time For Everything, The Buried Giant, and more

Photo by Sri Jalasutram on Unsplash

It is not necessary to read the earlier parts of this essay to enjoy this one, but if you would like to you will find them below:

For Part I of this essay, On Dreams, please click here.

For Part II, On Devastating Stories, please click here.

For Part III, on Pather Panchali and Dr. Zhivago, please click here. (Note: this one is a bit long.)

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On four devastating stories, continued

A Time for Everything, a 2004 novel by Karl Ove Knausgård, translated from Norwegian into English by James Anderson in a volume published in 2008.

The Buried Giant, a 2015 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.

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Nothing I read in adulthood devastated me as much as the two stories discussed in the previous part of this essay, which you can read here.

My experience with those — especially Dr. Zhivago— was the most extreme of this kind I have ever had from fiction other than in dreams, which one might argue are the inhabited fictions created by one’s own mind.

But I have encountered books as an adult that I think provided the same kind of devastation. These are works with an echo of that intensity, just at a lower level.

Oddly, they are not always the books that provoked the most emotion.

There are intelligent, insightful books that made me cry, and that I found both beautifully written and unbearably painful — I think of the Canadian poet Anna Michael’s 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces, for instance — that still did not devastate in the specific way that I’m talking about here.

In trying to piece together what that kind of devastation is, I thought that we might look at two books I’ve read in the past 10 years or so that did.

Neither one made me cry, but both of them carried a whiff of the reactions caused by Pather Panchali and Dr. Zhivago in childhood.

Like those, these mix the personal and societal, and both are beautiful. At the end of this discussion, when we come back to the concept of devastation in the particular sense I mean it here, I will propose that this is likely not a coincidence, and not specific to me, even if these particular works themselves might not be devastating to everyone who happens upon them, and even if others, like Anne Michael’s book, might be.

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Lets begin with A Time for Everything, by Karl Ove Knausgård.

Knausgård is best known now for his autofictional series My Struggle; his A Time for Everything is an earlier and stranger, almost indescribable novel.

I read it probably six or seven years ago, and have not reread it since, so some of the details I give here might be a bit misremembered, and I will focus on just one section of what is essentially an episodic piece of storytelling.

This section of the book centers on a family in what feels like rural, preindustrial Norway. There are hills, and fjords, and farms, and barns. The family includes a boy named Noah, who is a bit off socially; his sister Anna; a younger brother, who is much-loved by both; and their parents, who have a small farm.

Time moves around in the telling, but in the middle we are with the siblings as they grow, and as conflicts develop, and loss occurs. The parents get older; Noah and his sister grow apart; both marry and have children. Eventually the mother dies, and the father, who still lives on the farm with the sister and her husband and children, develops dementia.

We start the story a bit earlier, however, when Noah begins to have visions, and to carry his wife and sons along with him on the obsession that follows.

He begins a building project that makes no sense.

We end it later on, when his sister has inherited the family farm. Her children have grown, her daughter is now married, and a first grandchild is on the way.

Anna, solid, kind-hearted, grounded, is a matriarch not only in her own family but in their entire small farming village.

The bulk of the story is told from her perspective, including the part when the rains begin and the world falls apart.

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I don’t know why, before this novel, I had never really entered into the biblical Noah story from the perspective of those he leaves behind.

I’d generally, without much deep thought, seen it primarily as a story of survival.

The core moment of the story, in the version as I thought of it, was not so much when the floods begin as when they end. Humanity is not lost: a dove comes with an olive branch as a symbol of peace and of hope and renewal; all will be well.

It could be that I lazily settled on that lens because in the terms of the story itself — of all of the world’s Flood stories — we who hear it are the descendants of the survivors. By definition their story, not the story of those who drown, is our story.

Or perhaps I rewired my original take — I have a vague memory that the first time I heard it, when I was very small indeed, I thought it was mostly tragic — because of a children’s song that I probably learned in first or second grade, during a failed stint with the Girl Scout Brownies.

In that song, the Flood story is wonderfully upbeat:

“The Lord said, to Noah, there’s gonna be a floody-floody. Get those children out of the muddy-muddy!”

Noah does, and the song rousingly exhorts us, the children who are here because of that, to “[r]ise, and shine, and give God your glory-glory! Children of the Lord!”

It’s a great line, that rise and shine one, wonderful to belt out, and to my mind always rang as more humanistic than theistic. (It still rings like that to me.)

But it doesn’t mention that not everyone got onto the ark.

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For a large part of the retelling in A Time For Everything, the Flood story is seen through the eyes of Anna and her family, along with other people in her village and, eventually, refugees from lower-lying parts of their country.

As with some characters in Pather Panchali and Dr. Zhivago, they experience a catastrophic rupture where the rules of the world are changed on them.

In this case, it is the physical rules of the natural world.

The sea rose.

Even on that first evening the water covered the harbor, but everyone thought that it was because of the spring tide, which presumably had caused the tidal wave, and assumed it would recede in a few hours. But when the waves continued to wash over the wall and into the lowest streets next morning, and both harbor and breakwater were under many feet of water, they began to realise that it wasn’t a question of high and low tide. The sea itself had risen several feet. and it was still rising: the evening after, the waves here lapping over the next wall, six feet further up.

— p. 161 in the Kindle version of the Archipelago Books 2009 edition

Anna, as the matriarch, has to make decisions: where to go for higher ground, and whether to welcome and protect farmers and villagers and soon city people from other communities who come to them.

Later, when leaving is no longer a choice, she has to decide whether to try to bring their father, who in his dementia might slow them down, or to leave him behind to drown.

I won’t tell the very ending of the section here, but the question arises of whether the rules of family, which are put to the test when things fall apart they are as in Pather Panchali and Dr. Zhivago, will also be changed on Anna and her children.

It is all told simply, and without drama, but I think that it is the best account of the ending of the world that I have encountered.¹

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From Knausgård let’s move to the final story, Kazuo Ishiguro’s beautifully told, fable-like novel The Buried Giant.

I read it almost by accident, and it remains the only thing of Ishiguro’s that I’ve read, apart from a collection of short stories.

I read the book because he had just won the Nobel Prize for literature, and I was curious. I’d long avoided his more famous The Remains of the Day, along with the movie based on it, but wanted to try something. Vaguely remembering that this novel had been a bit controversial — he had been accused of refusing to acknowledge it as fantasy (which is nuts: I love fantasy, but this is not fantasy) — I downloaded it onto a Kindle and read the entire thing in more or less one sitting, staying up all night as I recall.

The Buried Giant takes place in an early Britain that eventually emerges as Arthurian, or rather as directly post-Arthurian. The main events occur after Arthur’s death, but while most of his generation is still living.

Unlike the other three stories I have discussed here, the novel creates a nearly explicit parallel between relationships within a society and relationships among individuals.

As it looks at questions of memory and forgiveness after unspeakable betrayal and mutual anger, it moves back and forth between the two. There are hatreds within a society that has not fully recovered from civil war, and questions of love and loyalty within a marriage.

When I first read the novel, I took it as fundamentally a story about war crimes and post-conflict. The novel in that view was using the stories of individuals — especially of a gentle, deeply devoted² elderly husband and wife — to illuminate the societal question of whether and how to forgive, and the possible costs of not doing so.

I even imagined how I might include it in a class session on the laws of war, for instance, or on the kinds of truth commissions that are designed to help people come to grips with people who violated the rights of those it was their duty to protect.

On thinking it over later, however, it seemed to me that perhaps the novel’s intention was the opposite: that it was using issues of harm, memory and forgiveness at a societal level to illuminate the deeply personal questions of those things at the most intimate level, within a marriage.

That it’s not clear which of those two levels is meant to be central, or whether both are meant to have equal weight, is I think part of the beauty and subtlety of the storytelling.

I won’t give away the ending, but I will set up what the novel puts at stake there.

Midway through, the elderly couple encounter a ferryman who can row people to a fog-shrouded island, but only one at a time.

Once there, they come to learn, the people he takes spend eternity on the island, in the fog, wandering, safe, untroubled, but utterly alone. Despite his occasional promises that he will bring first one member of a couple, then the other, and that they will then be reunited on the island, the reality is that if they travel alone with him they will be always be alone, with only one exception.

For couples who beg to stay together, he will interrogate them, and only those where neither person has even the faintest whiff of a lack of forgiveness towards the other will be allowed to reunite on the island.

This is a direct parallel with the situation in the country as a whole, where the facts of the conflict that has taken place, and the terrible betrayals of one part of the population by another, raise the question of whether their shared future will hold collective revenge for atrocities, and therefore further atrocities, or not.

Either way, the novel seems to be saying, the stakes for lack of forgiveness can be high, even as the task of forgiving without forgetting might be close to impossible.

For me, as a reader, the novel’s framing of the personal version — perhaps meant to illuminate the societal version, perhaps the other way around — was devastating.

The notion that what can be at risk is not just loss, and death, and aloneness, as in the scenes from Pather Panchali and Dr. Zhivago that we discussed above , but rather an eternity of isolation and aloneness, even after death, brought the same sense of devastation as the stories encountered in childhood, felt in the body and mind as well as purely emotionally.

My own experience is that The Buried Giant, although it did not cause the intensity of the devastation that the stories encountered in childhood did, carried the same kind, and that intellectually it took it to a higher level than any of the other three stories that we have discussed here.

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The discussion of these four stories is meant to illuminate a specific kind of devastation from fiction that I am hoping to define, or at least to delineate.

This isn’t the kind of devastation that feels like manipulated emotion, where the story has been successful primarily because it has caused one to experience grief.

Nor is it the kind of devastation that comes primarily from a transfer of information, where one becomes aware of painful things that are happening or have happened in the real world, even though that matters.

It’s not even only the kind of devastation where one is almost physically affected by something that works, aesthetically, in the storytelling, though it might require a component of that.

And it absolutely isn’t fiction that leaves one feeling a bit proud of oneself for one’s compassion for the characters.

Instead there is something about it that causes one to be a little different in some way.

The kind of devastation I’m talking about means that one feels implicated in the story that one has encountered; one is not merely a witness or a bystander. Encountering the story causes us to think about the world we live in and how we do not want it to be, which we also see something that we ourselves can affect.

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I suspect that the specific content of what makes a work devastating will vary from person to person, based on their own preoccupations.

I tend to home in, emotionally, on exclusion and lack of care, and so works that devastate me tend to address those. Other likely find that works addressing other aspects of humanity are what cause this kind of reaction.

But, I would guess, based on my own experience, generally the storytelling will contain a powerful combination of three aspects: mind — generating thinking about something in a new way; emotion; and beauty in the telling that generates an aesthetic experience heightening the other two aspects.

Also, it seems to me that whatever the specific focus, for a story to create this kind of generative devastation, it needs both the individual element and the societal element, the sense that one is thinking about both at once. The combination is what turns us as readers into participants in the story rather than simply observers with nothing to gain or to lose.

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Coming next: Part IV, “On Imagining the Future.”

This essay is free to read and to share.

“Likes,” comments and shares are welcome, and are deeply heartening.

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1. During the year when the final volumes of My Struggle were still coming out in English, and when the first volume of Rachael Cusk’s Outline trilogy was still appearing in quarterly segments in The Paris Review, I became utterly fascinated by the writerly aspects of both books. It was therefore rather wonderful to happen to get to have a fairly extended conversation with Knausgård around that time (a one-off — I’ve never met him otherwise). I mentioned this opinion about this part of this novel. I gather that his new series, which I haven’t read, has apocalyptic elements, so maybe I said the right words at the right time :)

2. I believe that “devoted” and “gentle” are often used to describe the couple in the novel, so these are not words I can take credit for.